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If you want to test this, identify a section of your site that you can disallow via robots.txt and then measure the corresponding changes. Proceed section by section based on results. There are so many variables at play that I don't think you'll get an answer that's anywhere as precise as testing your specific situation.
Hi Andrew. That would be Rank Tracker: https://moz.com/researchtools/rank-tracker. It's also incorporated into Moz Analytics if you host campaigns here. Cheers!
Right. I'd avoid using a temproary section (special offers) as a canonical in any case. It'd be better to have a temporary design element on the other hammer pages that indicate it's on sale or tag it through the shopping art so that the special offer is applied. In general, canonical should point to the page that is least likely to change and most likely to rank for the targeted search. Cheers!
This behavior can be triggered by several things, for example query deserves freshness showing a blog or news post from the site, localized search playing a factor with out the localized term, personalization like you mention, etc...
The biggest give away is that the ranking + keyword doesn't deliver anywhere near the amount of visits you'd expect for ranking consistently on the broadly seen results. It's better to think of it not as the rankings changing dramatically day to day--you'd be getting big bursts of traffic when ranking across Google for "furniture" if that were the case--instead someone that was pretty highly personalized via means outside of just there search term, used "furniture" as a search and clicked through to the site.
Hi Karl. Your points are separate from your Moz Pro account status so you'll still be able to keep those and ask/answer questions here. Cheers!
It's partly due to the sources where they're pulling information, so for the Garrison Wyn profile, since he has an IMDB listing, it gets added in. Brian on the other hand seems to be getting his data scraped from Wikipedia.
Dr. Pete recently wrote a great article on the process he took in working with one of these and detailed it all in a blog post here: http://moz.com/blog/how-we-fixed-the-internet . Since he had access to the source material it became a little easier for him to alter, but it still took a while for the changes to take place. Further on he provides other examples.
In short, it's not an easy or rapid process at times, but if you address the source material to get the facts straight it should eventually get picked up. Cheers!
My hunch is that Moz is going to be going after this as well since it is such a large scale change...
In the meantime you can get an idea on your mobile rankings by looking at Analytics results segmented out by mobile and organic search referrals. If the percentages align with your desktop rankings you've got a very basic correlation. You could even segment further by bringing in comparisons of top performing pages or regions that tend to deliver more mobile.
Within GWT you can also filter by mobile within the Search Traffic >> Search Queries report. Expect some changes here after the 21st as well. Cheers!
I think so in terms of whether or not it helps people engage with your site or spend more time on your site. If a difficult to navigate site is what first greets a user trying to find something specific based on the search result, the bounce back to the search results is going to drive down ranking. It will also lower the likelihood of sharing.
From a technical perspective, if a site's navigation prevents a crawler from adequately indexing a site, that could cause indexation issues which would in turn make fewer pages available for ranking. So yes, it is an element in ranking and site performance overall. Cheers!
Understood. Go to the link on Local search ranking factors to help you prioritize as that will give you the best idea of what your client is doing well, missing, or doing poorly. I'd work on all the things that are more important than localization in the URL first as improving those should gain ground the quickest.
Hello Laruen! You'll want to look at your direct pages and see if they're getting legitimate traffic in your referrals report: Acquisition >> All Traffic >> Referrals
From there you should be able to get an idea about what recent news or articles that have gone live that have been influencing your traffic. You can also use the Fresh Web Explorer here to see what pages might be mentioning you and sending larger amounts of traffic as well as various tools in Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools).
I'm not seeing spikes across clientele so your situation is likely unique to you in that some of your pages have been recently referenced on high traffic sites or has popped into the news cycle. Cheers!
As a ranking factor it's not a huge boost, but it could help with click through rates depending on the presentation of the search results. Richard Baxter did a nice study on this a couple of years back here: http://builtvisible.com/review-snippet-over-saturation-in-google-search-results/, and concluded it was a little over-played in some searches; however, beneficial in others. To better tackle this perhaps do what Richard did and look at results for some of the clients top performing words, then address the page as a whole, so instead of saying, "Hey you're number 2 for this keyword," present the page with a break down of where they appear and what happens if someone clicks on a result that's not them, but a review about them, whether or not review stars look to be a differentiating quality, if they could get into image results that would have an impact, and so on. Cheers!
Are you trying to get in the local listings? If that's the case just get the address on the page and start submitting through Google Local. If it's a chain submit the bulk listings and/or service areas. Pages like this: http://www.mrswitch.com.au/location are going to hurt you as the engines will see it as a keyword stuffing attempt to manipulate results around any Sydney suburb + "Electrician". I'd recommend getting rid of the location page in its current format and replace it with a few of your actual locations. Use your keywords sparingly, and use the tools Google provides, especially mapping and reviews.
Hi Kelly. Temporary redirects for things like adding items to a cart, changing languages, and the like are acceptable and shouldn't be viewed as an error per se. You could possibly put your cart in its own directory and then have that directory be ignored by Moz to clean them up, but in your use case it's not an issue. Cheers!
Hi Frank. Here are a couple posts on this: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2014/11/25/guide-to-using-call-tracking-for-local-search/, an update of: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2013/05/14/a-guide-to-call-tracking-and-local/. That should clarify it for you. There are pros and cons obviously, but that should give you the full scope.
Thanks for the clarification Lauren. Have you been able to determine if the organic results are news based? Based on the landing pages are you aware of any rankings that might have jumped up recently? If you can get any insights from Google's Search Console you might get tipped off to some new rankings that are accounting for the spike.
This would make a great split test from a UX perspective but also be a good way to slowly introduce the new content.
Just from search, If the page changes dramatically it might bounce out of the rankings briefly, but if the content topic and contextual relevance is mostly the same it should reappear. You could try introducing parts or all of the new content as an update to the top fold of the page as well, monitor rankings, then remove the parts you don't like. Several ways to test it out... cheers!
Outside of redirection you might be able to accomplish this via redesign and branding. Still, I'd ask questions like these moving forward...
Ultimately it looks like the answer is going to be The Medical Group. As such, redirecting the old individual sites to the corresponding section of the new medical group site is the likely conclusion, so individualdoctor.com >> 301 >> medicalgroup.org/individualdoctor.
To ease this transition it'd help you to have a thorough list of all the benefits the new site is going to bring, while also addressing how they can integrate their old work (social media profiles, localized listings, reviews, so on) into the new site. Any other information that you can provide that shows how The Medical Group has helped promote doctors in the past (if it existed prior) would be good as well.
Here's Moz' own list to help get you started: https://moz.com/rand/recommended-list-seo-consultants/ If you'd like I can also run your site through a check list that I give to clients as a starting point. Just DM if interested. Cheers!
Great update Miriam. There are a lot of things site owners can add to these types of pages to help with unique content: drive time to the nearest branch from City / Neightborhood X; mobile service schedules in City / Neighborhood X; Images of service radius; highly localized testimonials, etc. Will be interesting to see the impact with franchisees..