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and all my MD cares about in being page one for liquidation

Wow, talk about setting unrealistic expectations. Your MD needs to understand that you sometimes cannot just set a keyword target and expect to rank for that term. Over 50% of the time, Google thinks the user's intent when searching for 'liquidation' isn't even related to your website, it's related to ecommerce transactions. Why would Google rank your insolvency related liquidation resource when they believe the user is searching for wholesale ecommerce products?

I think you should try and adjust their mindset to understand that not everyone searching for liquidation is looking for the information you've provided.

With that said, if you want to rank for 'liquidation' it is going to take a hell of a lot more than looking at your on-page SEO efforts and pointing to that one article as a resource. You better get ready to start creating tens, if not hundreds, of liquidation related, high quality content resources and point them all to one fantastic page. You may even want to consider a niche liquidation website with a targeted domain, navigation architecture, and link portfolio dedicated just to liquidation related terms.

If he wants front page 'liquidation' exposure that badly, consider AdWords

Hi Bertrand13,

Unfortunately, from Page Authority alone, we cannot determine if a page has been penalized by G. The page could be new, thin content, doesn't have many links pointing to it, hosted on a new domain, ect.

You're on the right track for auditing the PR services. When pages, such as the one you've identified, are found the next step is to do a manual review of the page.

When visited, is the page:

• Very spammy
• Little to no content
• Bombarded with comment spam
• Includes a ton of external links
• Completely unrelated to your niche
• Stuffed with keywords

If so, then I would say you want to disavow that link and ask why/how your PR firm acquired the link.

Is it similar to ranking a website?

Yep, you would go about it the same way you're trying to rank a website. You jsut want to make sure to keep it targeted to your long-tail keyword(s) for that page, get authority backlinks, and do some internal linking to try and get it raised higher in the SERPs.

Honestly, there could be a very real world impact on your SERPs without you understanding it. I suggest not blocking all traffic from foreign countries.

Let's take this scenario as an example:

I have an ecommerce website that only sells to the United States. I really only care about the US traffic, since that is where my sales can come from. However, many of my inbound site links seem to be coming from Outside US traffic. This outside US traffic cannot buy from me, in fact, they cannot buy many of the products I sell because they are not available in their country.

Even so, when investigating my link profile, I notice that some users are getting the products I sell from somewhere and then blogging about how they love the product. They include a link back to my site since they know I sell the product.

Now, it's true that most traffic from that referral source will not convert to paid users. But, the links they provide are helping me in the SERPs, which brings in the qualified traffic that converts to sales.

In regards to the bounce rate =: You're not actually decreasing the bounce rate. Instead, you've identified the accurate segment of users to be measuring bounce rate from. In your Google Analytics, you should filter out the foreign traffic so that you're only measuring the correct segment of traffic that is important to you.

Now you have the best of both worlds - your reports show the accurate target segment and its metrics, as well as, any benefit that comes from the foreign traffic and link building.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^subdomain.domain.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/subfolder/$1 [R=301]

Something like the above rule may be what you're looking for. This would go into your .htaccess file and redirect all the subdomain urls to the new url with the sub folder. Make sure to check with your development team for any special considerations.

The Moz index is usually refreshed once a month, however, it's been longer than that since the last update this time around. Moz has a big index update schedule for the 28th, I believe.

http://moz.com/products/api/updates

Hi Mikedelseo,

Sorry to hear about the drop in rankings, these situations are definitely frustrating.

You were very thorough with your question, but I didn't see any info around the 301 redirects from the old site to the new site. Did you ensure that all of the old, high ranking content was 301'ed to the new URLs? Those 301s are extremely important to preserve rankings.

I'll take a deeper look if so, but lmk that first.

Also, if you've changed the business name/listing, make sure to update all the local listings as needed. Moz Local will help you with that: https://moz.com/local/

there is definitely a 302 redirect - the developers should be able to recognize this and ensure that the site is only using a 301 redirect when appropriate (e.g. non-www version 301'ed to the www version).

I cannot suggest a fix for the .asp / IIS environment, but your developers should be able to recognize the 302 redirect and implement the correct redirect in your htaccess file.

You do want to have a good balance between keyword rich URLs and friendly URLs - shorter is more friendly.

I'm inclined to prefer the first choice. Usually apartment complexes have an 'apartments' in the name - e.g. Lakewood Apartments. You could keep that keyword to the property name itself and keep the more finely tuned structure of the first URL.

Hi AlanJacob,

If your client has physical retail locations, as you've said, then you'll want to get each location listed with Google.

Google provides a bulk location edit tool. You can review the protocol here: https://support.google.com/business/topic/4662257?hl=en&ref_topic=4539578

Hi Lorne - Welcome to the Moz community!

It's great to see you questioning your IA and usability, it is a continual process and there is always improvement to be made. I like to consider the following:

My main navigation should include all highly relevant, top level links. These are usually links to categories and very important pages. Your current nav structure does not include very many links, so I'm not seeing much of a need to adjust it as it stands.

I consider my Footer Navigation to be a secondary navigation. Google does discount links in the footer, they understand that this area is mainly used for supplemental links to pages like contact and company information. If a page/section of your website needs to be within 1 click of the homepage, but not necessarily a core part of your service, then it is a good link to put in the Footer. For example, Moz puts its Affiliate Program links in the footer - it's not a section that deserves much exposure, but should be within 1 click for the user.

I think you could clean up the language of your nav a little bit - what exactly are 'Other Quotes?' I think it is quotes that can't be instantly generated, but maybe other text is more appropriate. 'Humour' also isn't self-explanatory and I suggest considering a different label for that menu item. Finally, I always like to see the use of Semantic HTML and the<nav. tag="" whenever="" possible,="" that="" helps="" search="" engines="" and="" certain="" readers="" understand="" ia="" better.<="" p=""></nav.>

Hi Jeremy,

Welcome to the Moz community!

That's an interesting position to be in. On one hand, Bible verses do not change and you may want to include the verse on your page. However, that copy is most certainly around the web and can easily be identified as duplicate content.

One strategy could be:

• Make each verse its own page, if the verse is length then try to break up the verse between multiple pages

• On each page, expand upon the verse.

• What information from each verse is important to the reader, explain it in plain language

• Include an interpretation of the verse and key components of the verse

• Explain how the verse is applicable through real world examples and experience

You can probably see the theme above - expand upon the non-original content with original content through interpretation and experience. You definitely want to outweigh the duplicate content for each verse.

If you're only trying to create an archive of the verse, then you may want to create a special area of your site that includes the original verse and have that noindexed from the search engines, to prevent any duplicate content penalties.

Can you post your domain? Manually checking the robots.txt file would help.

I've checked many of my GWT accounts and I am not showing a sudden robots.txt error. It could be a false error, but I would take anything with the robots.txt file seriously. You'll want to make sure that it is in fact accessible to all the crawlers desired.

Moz local is a subscription that is billed annually. Yes, I believe that it does auto-renew every year.

Googlebot won't be able to see the full community member profiles, since it is hidden behind a user login wall. However, the duplicate content error is an issue you want to correct.

• https://www.foodbloggerpro.com/community/member/1041/
• https://www.foodbloggerpro.com/community/member/2373/
• https://www.foodbloggerpro.com/community/member/1301/

All of the community member pages produce an error, if viewing logged out. Unfortunately, the URL remains the same and only shows an error, it does not redirect the user to an error page. This results in all of the community member profiles having unique URLs, all with duplicate content.

You should add a noindex tag to community member pages and, if possible, redirect the user to an error page rather than the unique community profile page for those viewing while logged out.

Hi Mike,

Welcome to the Moz community and congratulations on your new website. It's great to see you here and doing your due diligence on link building beforehand, it will surely pay off in the long-term.

Moz has created a very handy and informative link building guide, especially for those in your position. Have you read through it already? If not, I highly suggest starting there.

Moz's link building guide: http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-link-building

That would make me feel more confident of a false error being reported. Time to closely monitor the crawl logs, look at server stats, and keep an eye on GWT for a change in the reporting/indexing. I would also go into the GWT forums and post, see if anyone is reporting a similar error these past couple days.

Hi George,

If you can upload the old pages to a private directory, you can then use Screaming Frog SEO tool to crawl all of the pages and retrieve the meta descriptions. That would allow you to easily export much of the on-page SEO, include your meta information.

Screaming Frog SEO spider is a mus have tool for SEOs - check it out if you haven't already!

As others have mentioned, using a 301 redirect in this situation is not the most efficient use case, especially if you want all versions of your site to be indexed and available to users.

For displaying regional content (e.g. you have the same content, but it is translated to a specific language on different page versions) you would want to use hreflang to tell Google that you have multiple versions and the regions they satisfy. This will allow Google to serve up the regional specific content to users in international Google search engines and Google will index/know which versions are appropriate.

Reference link: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077

Additional reference: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en#2

I recommend allowing Google to crawl those images. Google optimizes its crawl rate and once it has done a complete crawl it will understand how often to crawl certain areas of your site. My main concern would be that you are losing potential rankings and indexing from those images - if they are unique and high quality you definitely want them to index the images, understand the file names, and appropriately index them.

I wouldn't be concerned about Google bot eating up your server resources. If it does become a problem, then you can go back and adjust the bot access through the robots.txt, as you've done already. However, I would let them in first and only react if it becomes a problem.

I have tens of thousands of product images accessed by the google bot and it is no concern to my ecommerce company and the server resources. I'm not saying that it can't be a potential problem, but the benefit outweighs the risk of it being one - I choose a reactive stance in this situation.

Closely monitor your Google Webmaster Tools account, watch the crawl rate and statistics, and if it becomes an issue then decide on which image folders should or shouldn't be indexed.