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The last I heard https support for OSE was planned for Q4 of 2012. Please refer to Adam's responses in these two posts:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/one-giant-leap-for-link-data-announcing-open-site-explorer
https://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/20770156-open-site-explorer-to-crawl-https
If you need to view https data now, you will need to use a different tool. I know AHREFs supports it: http://ahrefs.com
Michael, I like your current thoughts. One to two keywords is optimal. Any more then two dilutes your efforts and you will not be able to rank as well against other web pages who focus on just one key phrase.
How does this site rank so well
A large part of SEO is quite scientific. Google and other search engines have shared how a page should be designed to offer the best value to users. They have also shared how a page should be designed so it is recognized for their ranking factors. This page does very well on SEO measurements, which is why it ranks well.
Can I like report them and have them removed
What exactly would you like to report them for? There are specific processes to report sites which violate existing rules. Which rule is violated, and how?
Some specific responses about this site's ranking for the term "bail bonds":
The keyword phrase is in their domain name. That is a very powerful ranking factor.
The keyword phrase is in their page title. "Bail Bonds Rip Off Report | Avoid Being Scammed!"
The keyword phrase is in their H1 tag: "Bail Bonds Rip Off Report"
The keyword phrase is also in their H2 tag: "Common Bail Bond Scams"
The keyword phrase is in their alt text: "Bail Bonds"
The keyword phrase is used extensively in the site's content.
The site is only 5 pages. An "about us" page, a "contact us" page, and then this article which is paginated over 3 pages. This is a website dedicated to a single article. The site has hundreds of links to this article, PA is 48.
In summary, this website is dedicated to a single keyword phrase. It executes on all the basics of SEO both onpage and offpage. I would fully expect this page to appear on the first page of SERPs.
I can only guess this page is damaging to your business and you would like to not have it on the first page of results. There are steps you can take to knock it off the first page of Google, but it would require time and effort. If this website is creating problems for you, I would recommend hiring a SEO to minimize the damage.
If your site covers a specific topic, then by removing off-topic discussions you can keep your site more relevant to your primary focus which can benefit your search results.
In your case, I believe your approach is not in the best interests of your site. I drew that conclusion based on your last statement "These are pages I would re-enable down the road once overall domain authority is increased."
Based on the little information shared, I am guessing the site you are referring to is http://www.couponcactus.com/. I only took a brief look at your site but the pages all seem to be coupons which are relevant to your site.
You could remove coupons which are no longer valid. Doing such will help users and search engines. It will avoid users coming to your site seeking a deal only to be frustrated to find the offer is not valid and then bouncing off your site. Your metrics such as bounce rate can improve as well which can benefit your ranking.
There are many opportunities for you to improve your DA which provide long term value rather then attempting this temporary change which is unlikely to yield any noticeable benefit. If I was responsible for your site, a few changes to consider would be:
add Google+ to your site
add the ability to use social logins to sign in to your site
add more categories. I recently was looking for a Verisign SSL certificate for a client. I located a 25% off coupon on a site similar to yours. I don't see any category such a coupon would fit into. Perhaps I missed it.
continue to expand your coupon selection. What offers do competitors have that your site does not?
check out every competitors site and upgrade yours until you are confident CouponCactus is the best coupon site on the planet.
once the above is done, let the world know about your site. Any time a forum thread or blog article talks about a product or service which you offer a coupon for, make a helpful reply letting interested people know "hey, if you do like Kim Kardashian items you can get 20% off with the coupon at couponcactus.com."
How many times should one submit the same article to various websites?
Once.
If you submit the same article to multiple sites, you are just spreading duplicate content. Ideally most of your content is published on your own site. The best reason to publish content on another site is to reach audiences you otherwise would not, and for link building.
As a general rule, when a SEO makes a suggestion you feel is in conflict with the user experience I would recommend A/B testing.
Make copies of a few pages with the recommended changes. Have half your users see the original page "A" and the other half will see the modified page "B". Track the results for a period of time and closely monitor all relevant statistics. If the SEO changes do not have a negative impact, then make the change. Otherwise, you would need to weigh the possible SEO benefit (higher ranking/traffic) with the lower user experience. In most cases, what's good for the user is also good for SEO.
For your duplicate content issue, your crawl report has revealed a legitimate issue which needs to be fixed. You need to make a decision as to how you wish your site to be presented. Choose either www.mysite.com or mysite.com. Once you make your choice the next step is to adjust your site to enforce your decision.
1. If you have cpanel access there is a redirect tool which will allow you to make this change. If you have apache hosting you can modify your .htaccess file. If either of these are not familiar to you, the easiest thing is to contact your web host and let them know your decision. If you have managed hosting (most people do) your host will make this change for you at no charge.
2. Some people will advise you to go to Google WMT to set a preferred domain but it is not necessary at all if you properly take care of the issue as described above. If you did wish to make the change in Google WMT, you should make it in Bing WMT as well.
3. Review your site. Every link you have should use the same format. If you decided you prefer the www version of the URL ensure every signature, anchor text, navigation link, etc. always use the www form of the URL.
With respect to your URL issue, you need to be careful here. If you make errors then you can break links so when users try to reach a web page they will receive a 404 error (page not found). Ideally you should have a single URL for each web page. When I first worked with Joomla, I found the process to be confusing as well. It is important you work with someone who understands Joomla URLs to establish a single URL for each page, and then 301 redirect any old URLs to the proper page.
My recommendation is to fix all the issues with your site, then install AceSEF or SH404SEF. Both are SEO extensions which will help resolve many SEO issues.
Hi Jamie.
I agree with Steve's assessment. The issue you are experiencing is common amongst ecommerce sites. You offer a lot of links, a ton of duplicate content and the unique content on the page is very thin.
I picked a random product page on your site: http://www.firstclasswatches.co.uk/police-sphere-12778msu61-p-8083.html. I performed a Google.co.uk search for "police sphere X" and your site shows as the 35th result.
When I view the page there are a relatively few number of unique words on the page. The unique sentences I do find seem like they either come from a product feed and are therefore duplicated on hundreds of other websites, or they seem canned as if they are used throughout the site with the current page's product name substituted in the phrase.
Example 1 - "Buy with confidence
This Police Sphere X 12778MSU/61 comes with the full official Police guarantee against manufacturing defects. As a reputable high street jewellers you can buy from First Class Watches with confidence. We are an official UK authorised dealer for every watch listed on this website."
Example 2 - "Authorised Dealer
This Police Sphere X 12778MSU/61 is an authentic, never worn item, supplied to us directly from Police. It is supplied with the official UK Police box, instructions and Police guarantee, exactly as if it were purchased from a high street jewellers. As a high street jewellers you can buy from First Class Watches with confidence. We are an official UK authorised dealer for every watch listed on this website."
The two examples above are the main pieces of "unique" content on the page. If you were to count every word on the page, what percent of the page is exactly the same on every other page of your site? Count your navigation, footer, sidebar and everything. The main content on your pages comes from a 4-tab block: Why Us, Buy with Confidence, Return Policy, Delivery. That content is identical on each page with the exception of substituting the current brand name.
I like many aspects of your site. Your products appear to be high quality and genuine. You offer a magnifying glass which provides detailed closeups of your products. You have established social engagement, a telephone number, your physical address, etc which helps with authenticity. But frankly, your site appears like you can add another 10k products tomorrow through a product feed and not blink an eye. There is absolutely no warmth, no customization, no sense of quality within the content. It is just another e-commerce site carrying products. This type of site was designed to be penalized by Panda.
Some suggestions:
How does a canonical work? Does the robot read the canonical and immediately go to the canonical URL or does it continue to read past the canonical tag and get to the no index, follow tag if there is one present?
The first thing to understand is the canonical tag is a suggestion, not an order. While a search engine will usually honor the canonical tag, there are instances where Google or other SEs may determine the canonical tag is not being used correctly so they disregard the canonical tag. Based on this understanding, yes the robot will read the entire page regardless of the canonical tag status.
Is it necessary to have both a canonical tag and no index, follow tag in place? Or should the canonical tag be sufficient to avoid duplicate content?
The two tags you mention conflict. You would never use both tags on the same page.
Noindex means you do not wish the page to appear in the search index. The canonical tag means you do wish the content to be included in the search index, but use the canonical URL in the index.
if both a canonical tag and no index, follow tag are in place, should they be in a specific order?
The order of meta tags does not matter. If a page was marked with both a canonical tag and a noindex tag, the noindex tag would take effect and the page would not be indexed, so the canonical tag would not have any effect.
In short, you want to use the canonical tag to resolve duplicate content issues, not the noindex tag.
Hi Carlton.
Congratulations on the new website. Drupal seems like a solid CMS choice.
My first suggestion is to avoid the use of robots.txt as much as possible. When you installed Drupal there was probably a default robots.txt file as part of the installation. Do everything you can not to add additional entries to the file.
Your site has a specific amount of PR. When you block a page with robots.txt, all the PR on that page is wasted as the page cannot be read by crawlers. A much better option is to add the "noindex" tag to pages you wish to keep out of Google's index. This tag would apply to pages such as the dates-rates page. For the pages with user information, I presume the user had to log in to provide their private information? If so, Google will not crawl any pages behind a login. An exception would be if a URL was provided with the username and password included as parameters in the URL, but that method is very uncommon.
You do want to resolve your duplicate title tags and duplicate meta descriptions.
With respect to your 10-20% traffic drop year over year, there are many potential factors. The world economy is not all that great. Is the travel industry as a whole suffering a drop?
Some other possibilities would be any competitor(s) offering promotions or increasing their SEO efforts, tv ads, magazine ads or any other form of marketing. A new website or company could also be competing for your business.
My overall advise would be to continue to focus on building your website and it's SEO. If you really want to pursue the issue of last year's sales drop further, you would need to thoroughly analyze your Google Analytics data. Look at exactly which pages attracted traffic, from which sources, using which keywords, etc. Perform a similar analysis for this year. Determine exactly where you traffic dropped. You would need to determine if your rankings dropped, or perhaps the traffic on your keywords dropped, etc.
EDIT: I noticed when I tried to visit ietravel.com, the page was 302 directed to www.ietravel.com. I strongly recommend changing the redirect to a 301. 99%+ of the time, a 302 should never be used. Review your site to ensure there are no other 302s in place.
Some other suggestions:
add trust symbols to your site. BBB, Verisign, TRUSTe and other symbols have been proven to increase trust and conversion rates.
Move your social engagement symbols out of your footer and to a more visible location on your site.
review each page of your site, especially the pages 1 click from your home page. I looked at your "about-ie" page and noticed you have an anchor text link "Award-Winning Nature Travel" which is a broken link.
To specifically answer your question about the differences between WordTracker and the AdWords keyword tool, I examined the WordTracker site. I performed a keyword search for the phrase "depression and bipolar link". It showed 34 searches. To better understand what that result meant, I searched the site and located the following explanation:
"For the Wordtracker data, the Search count is the number of times each keyword appears in our database of searches over the past 365 days. This constitutes just under 1% of all US search, and the data is gathered from metacrawler.com and dogpile.com."
There are two key differences between AdWords data and WordTracker. AdWords clearly has a much larger data source so it should be more accurate. Also, AdWords data is presented based upon monthly searches, where WordTracker uses yearly searches. The AdWords result for "depression and bipolar link" would be 3 monthly searches. Since the result is less then 100, Google rounds the result to 0.
You are reaching for very long tail phrases. You will capture other keywords and shorter phrases in the process.
For example, while Adwords shows no traffic on "depression and bipolar link" the phrase "depression and bipolar" shows 165k monthly searches with medium competition. If I were to create a page, I would focus the article on "depression and bipolar". If you really wish to keep the focus on "depression and bipolar link", you can do such knowing you will capture traffic from other versions of the phrase.
would this drop have been an automated deal?
In my opinion 99.99% of ranking drops are automated. Google has clearly indicated their desire is for their algorithms to perform all the work automatically. In cases where the Spam Team manually takes action, it only makes sense that they then work with other teams to automate the process of catching the issue.
Google makes approximately 500 changes to their algorithm each year, so it is possible for your rankings to change without making any changes to your site. Based on your situation, it is likely that one or more of the changes you made negatively impacted your site. There is not any way to know which change caused the drop. That is intentional. Google wants you to examine your site and fix any and all issues, not just one.
You mentioned adding several directory links. Links from quality directories such as Yahoo, DMOZ, BOTW, etc. would generally be considered "good' links. On the other hand, most free directory links are low quality and many are "bad" links. Ensure any links you build to your site are of a quality nature. For now, treat your page as if your rankings are valid and work to improve them. I know that is not what you want to hear at all, but it is the best way for you to get your old ranking back.
@TheBackBurner, the algorithm has thresholds. It's like a balloon. You can puff 30 times and it doesn't matter but then that last bit of air and poof.
I have a budget of about $10,000 over the next 2 months and I would like to raise my Domain Authority from 28 to past 50.
The first thought I would like to share is on the DA measurement. If you are using the MOZbar or OSE, the changes you make can take more then 60 days to appear. While your Google search results will benefit from the increased DA much sooner, you should not expect to see the increased DA until two months after a link is established.
While raising your DA from 28 to 50 is a worthy goal, it is a means to an end. I make few guarantees in this life, but I can guarantee the ability to raise your DA from 28 to 50. The problem is with the proposal you made I think you will attract the wrong type of attention. There are a lot of questionable SEO tactics in use, and frankly it is quite easy to manipulate a statistical measurement such as DA. For example, there are tons of blogs and forums in china which are PR7+ sites. Many link builders will visit those sites, paste links to your site and then OSE will simply read the link and increase your DA. The problem is Google usually recognizes those links are worthless and your site receives no benefit from them. The bottom line, you paid to have your DA increased, but you really wanted to increase traffic, sales or conversions.
My recommendation is to share your end goal and work with your SEO to determine how best to achieve it. Improved DA is not of value unless it is real meaning the links are authentic links which Google values. Even if you have good DA, you still need quality content to rank well. With quality content and good DA, you may rank well but page titles, meta descriptions, urls, etc. all impact whether users actually click on your search result. Once you actually receive the traffic on your site, the next step is your on page setup to convert that traffic.
If you can share your URL, we can offer more specific advise. Depending on your current site, some ideas for your budget:
Trust symbols: BBB, Verisign, TRUSTe, etc.
Generating world-class content. Expert articles, infographics, videos, etc. all have potential to drive traffic
creating a widget which links to your site. As an example, if you have a travel site you can create a world time / weather / currency exchange rate widget.
Site improvements. Some sites spend thousands on CSS design and it pays off. If you can make a site that looks so great people talk about how great it looks, you are on to something.
There are a few link directories worthy of joining: Yahoo, BOTW, Business.com
Giveaways and other social promotions
There are tons of additional ideas but these are a few to get started. The question is, which methods provide the biggest bang for the buck, and how flexible are you on raising your DA versus other methods of improving traffic or conversion rates.
Hi Aaron.
Your situation is a bit messy, but actually it's not so bad.
Step 1 - implement a site wide www to non-www redirect (or vice-versa) on your InternetCE.com site.
Step 2 - update your 301 from the original site, www.continuingeducationjournal.com, to ensure the redirect happens in 1 hop.
Step 3 - update your 301 redirect from the blog subdomain (http://blog.internetce.com) to ensure the redirect happens in 1 hop.
Whenever possible all redirects should be a single hop. If a user bounces from your old blog to your subdomain, to your main domain but as www then to your main domain's root that would be 3 hops and a lot of PR would be wasted in the process.
The most popular pages should update within search engines in a couple days, while the least popular pages may take a month.
registering your domain for longer than a year has been proven to actually help.
If you have a site that has no past and you come and register for a year only, google will look at that as a spammy site.
Would you mind sharing the proof? All the "evidence" I have seen has been shoddy and thoroughly debunked. I am not aware of any SEO who has shared any credible evidence on this topic in the past 2 years.
When I began learning SEO I learned a lot of misinformation. Part of why I participate so heavily in SEOmoz Q&A is it constantly leads me to question my knowledge. If you have another quality source of information, I'd love the opportunity to learn more on this topic.
You basically have three options regarding your links:
1. Make administrative changes to limit the links. Take a look at the following URL: http://www.rcnightmare.com/forum/. The page has over 250 links which is too many for SEO optimization. Every forum section has 3 links: the forum section name, the last post and the last poster. 40 sections x 3 links each = 120 links. Additionally some sections such as Electric Monster Trucks has a group of subsections. Add to that the category links, the normal navigation links, the footer links and the sidebar links and you wind up with 251 total links.
A key component of SEO is optimization. Your site is presently designed so all your content is accessible. From a SEO perspective, the more popular/important content should be more accessible, and the less popular content should be less accessible. As the forum owner it is up to you to make some decisions.
2. Make programming changes to limit the links. You could remove the link to the last poster, as an example. That one change would remove 40 links. You could also make changes to the links in your navigation, footer and sidebar. There can be positives and negatives to these changes.
3. Disregard the issue. You can ignore the issue and live with the understanding your forum articles wont rank as well in search engines. You can try to adjust your other site pages to be better optimized.
The disadvantage to keeping a canonical tag on a page which does not require it would be, as a rule, you want to present your web page with the least amount of code possible. Unnecessary code causes extra confusion and adds to the processing time of web pages.
I use the canonical tag on all pages, but not everyone agrees. If you would like further support, SEOmoz uses the tag on all pages as well. If you use any CMS, ecommerce software, forum software or any system which generates pages dynamically then I would highly recommend a canonical tag on every page. At times a system will generate pages which you might not be aware of, but a crawler will find.
Sometimes a page will offer a print version, the ability to sort on ascending/descending, and numerous other changes. You might think you only have one version of your page but have many versions which you do not realize exist. A proper canonical tag ensures the correct version of your URL is always offered for indexing, and you avoid duplicate content issues. With that said, if you have a basic html/css/php site and you are 100% confident in your programmer, then it is not necessary.
EDIT: In your case, it seems the canonical tags are performing a necessary function. From your home page I clicked on your featured item and I landed on the following URL:
http://www.nathosp.com/product/r1212_c
You have the identical page offered under another URL: http://www.nathosp.com/product/r1212_c/hotel_towels.
If you were to remove the canonical, you would have duplicate content issues on your site.
Regarding the site speed, I use Alertra to check site speed from various points throughout the world. Your server responds in about 2.5 seconds in London. The page loads slowly because the site design is horrible. Your PageSpeed score is 20 which is the lowest I have ever seen or even heard of for a live site.
You do not presently rank in the top 50 for "bright tights" in Google.co.uk. Assuming you did not geographically target your site to another country, this would indicate a penalty.
Your home page has 64 validation errors, you have blocked Google from almost all the links on your home page, your page load speed is really bad, etc. There are many issues which need to be addressed in order for this site to rank properly.
The first step I would recommend is to examine the site itself.
Any form of promotion depends on what visitors find when they arrive at the site. No matter how good your site appears, you will retain a percentage of visitors while others will not be happy and move on. You want to retain the highest percent of visitors possible, and convert them towards whatever your site goals are such as sell a product/service, complete a form, register, etc.
Site improvements vary greatly depending on the site. A few possibilities are improved layout, A/B testing, logo or art work, design work, social integration and acquiring trust symbols. Anything change you can make to better connect with visitors and earn their trust would be beneficial.
Once your site is solid, the next step is content. You could generate new content, infographics, images, videos, etc.
Only once you have a well designed site and some solid content which visitors will want to see would I recommend working on promoting the site. Until you reach this point, there is too much leakage (i.e. bounced visitors) to promote most sites.
As an individual I look at your site and think it's beautiful. I have the ability to pick up a camera and take a picture, but I am a horrible photographer. You have the ability to take a camera and capture moments and feelings in a way words cannot express. You are truly gifted in this area and I envy those people who have that artistic ability.
When I look at your site, I see some great pieces of SEO. You offer a flash site BUT you support it with HTML code so those who cannot view flash, such as search engine crawlers, can still view your site. I also noticed you offer social engagement with facebook, twitter and google+. Your site loads very fast as well.
With the above noted, there are many issues with your site which can be improved from a SEO perspective. If you wish to try to fix some of them yourself, the best place to start is with the Beginner's Guide to SEO. Frankly, there is a lot of work involved and you will likely need support from a quality web developer as well.
A few specifics:
the moment I entered your site music began playing. The music may be wonderful, but it is an awful user experience. Some people visiting your site may be in offices or other environments. Any sound at all, even if you set it at a low volume, may offer a very unpleasant surprise to the site's visitor. The first reaction of a percentage of your site's visitors will be to close their internet browser as quickly as possible. Not only is this a bad user experience, it sends negative metrics to search engines. My recommendation would be to disable any audio and allow interested visitors to play it.
The site's URLs are not optimized. A friendly url would be something like joeyvalyphotography.com/wedding-photos. Try performing the following search in Google.com "site:joeyvalyphotography.com". There are 34 pages listed with URLs such as <cite>joeyvalyphotography.com/?pageID=657995. </cite>
your site is duplicated on the internet. Both www.joeyvalyphotography.com and joeyvalyphotography.com are valid internet addresses. This is a problem for SEO.
there is very little text content, and what is offered is not very good. Look at your home page's first sentence: "Considered one of the best Orlando wedding photographers in Florida, JoeyValy Photography team of photagraphers have worked as a team of professional Orlando wedding photographers and photojournalist photographing weddings, and engagements since 2005."
Please forgive me for saying so, but that sentence sounds like it was written by a very poorly paid "SEO" worker from a foreign country.
If you wish to improve your site's SEO performance, start with the things which are under your immediate control. Look at all the content in your site and try to have it read as well as your images appear. If you are unwilling or unable to do such, then it would be best to seek assistance from a qualified SEO.