Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Damn. I have been proven wrong. Apologies!

In Analytics (Audience/Mobile/Overview) it shows 3 Device Categories: Desktops, Mobile (phones) and Tablets. This is true but when you look at Audience/Mobile/Devices, the column Mobile Device Info shows all tablets and mobile phones grouped together (!)

Also in Adwords - when you write an ad copy for mobile (devices) it will be shown on both mobile phones and tablets, ad copy for desktops will be shown on desktops and laptops.

WMT doesn't distinguish between tablets and mobile phones at all, they are all mobile devices.

This is what I meant by grouping them together, not that you can turn on reporting for each device category separately. You could turn on reporting for pretty much anything you want in Analytics so this is really not an argument.

I'm pretty certain (99.9%) this is the case Andy and you should make sure both mobile phone and tablet versions of your site are prepared before 21st April.

Monica tablets ARE mobile devices! Tablets and mobile phones use the same mobile operating systems and mobile versions of browsers. Also all their tools including Adwords, Analytics and WMT put tablets and mobile phones in the same group - mobile devices so I can't see any reason why they would treat them differently (and have different sets of search results for each?? perhaps I'm wrong but it makes no sense to me!).

I admit I also believe this update will affect desktop search results to some degree but Google certainly claims otherwise. We will just have to wait and see.

Tablets and mobile phones are both mobile devices and this update will affect them both. What Rand and Barry are discussing on Twitter is whether it will also affect desktop results, so nothing to do with tablets.

It's because both your homepage and that particular category page are targetting the same keywords and are competing with each other in search results. It's rather rare that category outranks the homepage but it's not impossible. This category page has a lot more text content but also images to sub categories etc Google obviously sees it as more relevant to the search queery/keyword.

I would suggest looking at the homepage if it could be reoptimised for other maybe broader keywords to gain some extra benefits.

Well something is running search queries from your machine or network. Moz does not operate from your computer/network but from their own servers in the US and it will never affect your machine, its physically impossible. You need to find the issue on your machine, and I would start with investigating the browser environment first - plugins, addons, running fresh instances of the browser as Ryan explained above and if it doesn't help moving on to other software you have installed on this machine. You will find it eventually... Good luck

If I was a betting man I would bet £10 you haven't set the campaign correctly. Anyway rather than asking questions here, you should contact the support directly starting here: https://moz.com/help/contact

Max I think you are confusing a lot of things, let me clarify...

1. Moz is a tool that scans internet to give you weekly rankings for the keywords you are interested in. It also gives you valuable tips on how to better optimise your pages according to guidelines. Nothing more!
How these pages will rank is down to a large number of factors and quality of your competition.

2. You have to come up with plans and ideas on how to make the most out of the information provided by Moz to your benefit, or hire an SEO specialist to do it for you, because it is nearly always unique to company/niche/industry.

Now to answer some of your questions:

Does is matter how many keywords I am doing research for? No

Does is matter how many keywords I try to optimise for each webpage? Yes. 1 subject per page (but that can and should mean a variation of keywords related to that subject)

Are the amount of branded keywords I am researching skewing my results? As they are all ranked #1, but nearly all of the non branded keywords are much further down the list... Your researching has nothing to do with their rankings.

Once I have decided what keywords are worth trying to ranking for for each page, are the techniques to actually rank more highly for them - Title, H1 Tag, Description, Meta Data, Fresh Content and using the keywords on the page? Or are there more techniques I haven't heard of? There is on page optimisation and there are other seo techniques like link building, you need to read about it.

Under Keyword Rankings - I noticded that some of my keywords are directing to specific pages, like "Cavity Waxes" is directing to the URL ending in .com/cavity-waxes - How do you assign the keywords im researching to specific URLs? - Or does Moz do it automatically? As most of my keywords seem to be unassigned to any URL, is that because they are not ranking highly enough? Moz only shows you what pages are ranking in the first 5 pages of results in Google for each of your keywords

Yes you do. If there are spammy links built to your site, you are likely to get a Penguin penalty at some point and that is a pain to recover from, so you want to be pro-active and minimise the risk of it happening by disavowing these links and also by removing them altogether if possible.

This is a video where Matt Cutts answers your question - http://youtu.be/eFJZXpnsRsc

using doorway pages to spam the search results and gain higher rankings is certainly against the rules and google shouldn't have any problems finding it and punishing them.

if you want to take matters in your own hands however, you can report them here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreportform?hl=en

Jason,

You seem to understand the concepts very well so as Kevin has said, just keep plugin along... use that 5k, or part of it, on your own marketing ideas and eventually you will get there...

You can still promote that video you know? It's a bit depressing for my liking but I see people sharing similar content on social media sites nearly every day.

The spammy example you gave is technically not spammy - it's a website for content publishing, article is in relevant section, fairly well written and is linking to relevant websites (even though it's 3 different businesses) using no-follow links. It certainly isn't spammy but I can see why you would expect more for your 5k.

Good luck!

Without doing a serious analysis of your site, links, stats etc. its like drawing circles on water, but...

Google Page Rank 0 while domain authority is pretty high (38), suggests you have an algorithmic penalty, so:

a) your content is not unique or pages are too similar

b) majority of your links are spammy (and since you have 100k links pointing to your site I would suggest this is the most probable scenario)

c) both a and b are true

To answer your question - gaming the system never really works in the long run Jason.

Also I find it hard to believe a large, well-known agency would be involved in spammy techniques, any examples please?

Moz does not specialise in link scanning and they only display a fraction of your actual links in Open Site Explorer. If you want a complete list of your backlinks use your WMT or Ahrefs.

Domain Authority score has actually been invented by Moz so I believe they know how to count that value properly! You might be confusing domain authority with Google's Page Rank which are two entirely different things, although their values are very often similar or the same.

Check this link on how domain authority works and is measured - http://moz.com/learn/seo/domain-authority

for up to 2000 pages this is probably the best free online generator out there - https://xmlsitemapgenerator.org/

useful settings for session ids, images, filters and it does html, rss and xml at the same time

is your blog only available on mobile devices? if so, then there is probably not much point posting anything before fixing the usability, but if its normally accessible on desktops then it will get credit in desktop search results

This is pretty disturbing news actually and it doesn't make any sense to me. If Google wants to promote pages with more and better quality content above the fold but also clean pages that users like - the read more buttons were the only functionality to marry both concepts.

At the moment all my pages are still fully indexed but if I see this change come into life I will have to re-think the content and layout of many pages...

Hi George,

Thanks for this, It's very interesting... the urls do appear in search results but their descriptions are blocked(!)

Did you try configuring URL parameters in WMT as a solution?

George,

I went to check with Google to make sure I am correct and I am!

"While Google won't crawl or index the content blocked by robots.txt, we might still find and index information about disallowed URLs from other places on the web." Source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6062608?hl=en

Yes, he can fix these problems on page but disallowing it in robots will work fine too!

There is no golden rule but generally yes, the page higher in a structure would be considered slightly more important, especially if your sitemap indicates page importance automatically, but a proper structure has far more benefits.

As long as you don' overcomplicate your structure it wouldn't make much difference whether your roses are at:

domain.com/roses

or

domain.com/anniversary-flowers/roses

as for no 4 - could it be that roses would fit many of the categories and therefore have been taken out of the structure to avoid duplicate content issues?

I often see pages deeper in the category tree ranking just as high if not higher than top categories for their respective keywords. At the end of the day Pete, it's the content that will rank your page not the url.

Using common sense, do you think Google would promote a model of websites where all pages and categories are always in the root? Would you use a library where all books are stuffed into 1 section? I don't think so.

Add this line to your robots.txt to prevent google from indexing these pages:

Disallow: /*login?