Questions
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Buy exact match domain and 301 worth it?
Hello there, There are benefits to taking this route - you will generate some link juice for your website (less than it currently has obviously due to the 301). You will have to make sure that your hosting is set up separately so you are not risking any kind of algorithmic/manual penalty. Keep in mind that a redirect will also impact the UX since you don't know whether that traffic is through search visitors, return visitors, or if there are hacking issues leading to ghost visitors. If this traffic is made up of the latter 2 options, you may face branding issues when they are not finding the website/brand they expect when they look it up. There are many variables, but the biggest I see are these: What is the cost? You need to know what you're spending and whether the investment will be worth the link juice/traffic you get out of it. What market are you targeting? If this business is locally-focused, you need to look into the local side/map pack listings and whether this will benefit you. If it is more broadly-situated, this is less of a factor. Are the benefits worth the costs? 17 TF/23 CF are not terrific metrics if there is a significant cost to the website. I would say that this is a buyer beware scenario. Do you have a way of knowing whether the metrics will stay the same after purchase? Anyone can buy or re-direct links for temporary rankings and remove them after purchase. Again - buyer beware. I would say you are probably better off generating your own content and building up your site (and link profile) yourself - that way you know what you have and what has gone into the site to generate your own rankings. There are a lot of risks to take for the path you are suggesting and while there are benefits, the likelihood of success would be low enough to make me cautious. Hope this helps! Rob
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Toddfoster0 -
Do links going to HTTP benefit HTTPS domain authority?
I have had few clients move 100% to HTTPS and nothing bad happen as in going backwards and I won't lie I haven't seen great gain from it either. I haven't heard of anyone getting great gains from it but not moving the whole site to it is most likely doing more bad than good. Also if you have gone backwards after moving to HTTPS there could be errors. too. I would do the following: Move the whole site to HTTPS Check that HTTPS is setup right. Can do this at http://www.webconfs.com/http-header-check.php Review any errors in webmaster tools or use a tool like semrush to check for errors. Insure all 301 from http to https is setup right and leave it for a month and see what happens.
Technical SEO Issues | | aarongray0 -
Ranking Loss Riddle after subdomain>subfolder>https move
John: Did you see TorontoV's most recent response? TorontoV: Thanks for your question, and congrats!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Christy-Correll0 -
Was hit with panda in 2012, what to do now?
Thanks for the mention Rebecca. I wanted to point out that link removal is likely not as important to Google when it comes to Penguin rather than a manual penalty. I wrote more about this here: http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2374406/penguin-recovery-should-you-be-removing-links-or-just-disavowing Also, the comments in your disavow file are not read by Google. The file is processed automatically so lines starting with "#" are just skipped. They're mostly for your own records. It's confusing because the documentation Google gives makes it look like you should be including info about whether or not you've tried to remove a link in your disavow file. But really, this is only information that is necessary in a reconsideration request which would be for a manual penalty.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MarieHaynes0 -
Moving to https and back to http, would it it hurt?
Matt has summed it up, but my question is..why don't you get a wildcard certificate? It will make it much easier and if you ever move your website to a CDN network, an HTTPS website with a wildcard certificate makes the process smooth!
Search Engine Trends | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
INTERESTING CASE: Migrated blog onto HTTPS in subfolder from http on subdomain (and blogger to wordpress). Anyone know why our rankings nosedived?
Hi Dana, 1. We did not notice anything directly. The product pages shot up in ranking and the blog gradually faded. our traffic dropped by more than half and continues downward. So in that regard we did not notice any overall drop. 2- no. should we and why? 3- no, we are not that advanced to be honest. I occasionally check crawl frequency etc on webmaster tools. 4- we installed a new script to track the "new blog" seperately. 5- analytics and moz. the subfolder is showing less in SERPs than the subdomain before and the decrease is a far more than the increase in SERP for the store domain. So the blog lost traffic and the pages of the ecommerce store ranked better, as intended, but we did not gain as much as we lost.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TVape0 -
Does this setup meet the ratings rich snippet guidelines?
Hi there Don't forget you have Schema testing capabilities: Structured Data Testing Tool Structured data validator Search Console will also monitor your structured data markup and notify you of issues they find. From my standpoint, this looks fine, but don't forget that you have opportunities around descriptions, offers, authors of the reviews, what they said, dates, etc. There's a lot you can do there. Inflow has a pretty interesting read around reviews and markup, with examples of other companies and how they do it, if you're ever interested. You can read there here. Hope this helps! Good luck!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PatrickDelehanty0 -
Is adwords data in organic ranking relevant?
Martijn is completely correct. Organic & Paid in no way assist in the other's performance. The piece of information you are lacking in this is what keywords are people coming to your site for. Your brand, of course. but there are other nuances to organic that keeps your time on site up than from PPC. You might not want to be using your home page for your PPC Brand traffic either. It might be too broad for the fast clickers who tend to click on ads. Making sure that you're sending them to a landing page on your site that answers pertinent questions most users are looking for will liekly help with your time on site. Also, make sure that your PPC account isn't broad matching to your brand name. You will want to make sure you're using a modified broad match on your brand and keeping your PPC account in good shape or else it will pull in irrelevent traffic and not perform as well as it should.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JasmineA0 -
ECommerce Expansion and duplicate content
Hi, For situations like this, God invented hreflang... Basically with hreflang you tell search engines that duplicates of the content exist that target other countries/languages. The exact definition can be found here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en There is a great article on hreflang here on Moz (and more important) a tool that you can use to generate them): https://moz.com/blog/using-the-correct-hreflang-tag-a-new-generator-tool - once implemented you can test it here: http://flang.dejanseo.com.au/ Hreflang needs to be implemented on all the pages on your site which have equivalents on the other sites. It's not necessary to change the content or the images. Hope this helps, Dirk
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DirkC0 -
Blog Redirects & SEO
Facebook shares/likes, Google +1, Tweet counts, etc... All will stay the same, all social signals do follow 301 properly... As long as you keep the same (old) url in the social plugins. If you trade the old url with the new one you will have split count. As for google algo, it's not open source yet, so no one knows what it is doing with these social signs exactly. Since google is pretty good at managing redirects my guess is they know what it means for social signs too.
Social Media | | max.favilli1 -
Drastic Monthly Fluctuations in Page Link Metrics
Hi Nima Google will always show more links than our crawler as they are a much larger company and have multiple seeds to crawl more pages. You should use multiple tools to obtain a full link profile which is something I've seen recommended many times in our community. The 68 links we found mean those links meet the criteria we are measuring to discover them. This also means the 158 other links may not be considered as high ranking sites or your links are too deep for us to crawl or they have been crawled and are just waiting to appear in a future index update. No single index will be the same as each company crawls differently. As I mentioned earlier: We grab the most recent index We take the top 10 billion URLs with the highest MozRank (with a fixed limit on some of the larger domains). We start crawling from the top down until we've crawled 90,000,000,000 pages (which is about 35% the amount in Google's index). Therefore, if the site is not linked to by one of these seed URLs (or one of the URLs linked to by them in the next update) then it won't show up in our index. Google does not crawl this way. This and our metrics are proprietary to Moz so it isn't that our data is unreliable or is being crawled incorrectly. The domain authority is effected by a lot of things. It is hard to pin point it without being a SEO consultant or the specific web designer on your website. Domain and Page Authority scores are both calculated using Moz's Ranking Models work. In essence, we take a lot of rankings data from the search engines (by running queries) and then try to build a predictive scoring system using our own on-page analyses and Mozscape link data to construct an algorithm that will effectively reproduce the search engines' results. Our current accuracy hovers in the 70% range, but over time, we expect to improve. Once we have a ranking model (which we internally call "uber"), we can create scores that best approximate the combinations of all our page-specific link metrics or domain-specific link metrics (removing the keyword-specific features like anchor text, on-page keyword usage, etc). These scores represent the model's query-independent or non-keyword-based ranking inputs. In simple terms, Domain Authority is our best prediction about how content would perform in search engine rankings on one site vs. another. Page Authority answers the same question for an individual page. Both are amalgamations of all the link metrics (number of links, linking root domains, mozRank, mozTrust, etc.) we have into a single, predictive score. It's important to note that both Domain Authority and Page Authority are on a 100-point, logarithmic scale. Thus, it's much more difficult to grow your score from 70 to 80 than it would be to grow from 20 to 30. Here's some places to really delve into what is going on: http://moz.com/blog/whiteboard-friday-domain-trust-authority http://moz.com/blog/googles-algorithm-pretty-charts-math-stuff http://moz.com/blog/whiteboard-friday-domain-authority-page-authority-metrics Here are some good resources to help you take a look at the factors. http://moz.com/blog/whiteboard-friday-domain-authority-page-authority-metrics http://apiwiki.seomoz.org/w/page/20902104/Domain Authority http://moz.com/blog/whiteboard-friday-domain-trust-authority I would recommend starting a new thread on the forum to seek advice from other marketers as I am only able to explain how our tools work from the technical side. Hope this helps!
Link Explorer | | DavidLee0 -
Naming a brand & domain
Yes but i would strongly suggest just having one website and then 301 redirecting the other. I got caught a year ago with 4 different websites all with the same content and links between them and that is straight negative SEO. Brand that baby, and then light it up with SEOmoz tactics : )
Branding / Brand Awareness | | jonnyholt0 -
Expand your google plus circle
Hi TorontoV, I'm not sure why you say one cannot promote posts on Google+. Are you talking about paid promotion like in FB? Or are you talking about promoting your Blog posts in G+? Adding to what Matt said, which is great advice: In G+, you can promote anything you wish to from your home page or profile. Write the comment, include your link to your post and make it Public and also choose whatever Circles you want it to reach. I find it naturally reaches way more users than FB. As far as self-promotion inside Communities goes, make sure you check the guidelines of the Community before promoting your own posts. In some Communities, it's frowned upon. You can also write a post specifically asking the modorators what the policy is. Some may delete your post and/or ban you from the Community if they feel you've done it too often. It's important to respect the guidelines if you want to build relationships. What I have found is that if you participate in Communities in good faith and do your promotions publicly, your fellow Community folks will see your post, know who you are and will more likely click through because you've spent time engaging within the Community. And as you build your Circles, more and more people will see what you post, click through and comment on it. Also, make sure to comment on posts at your Home page level so you are getting to know people you wouldn't ordinarily. Just keep at it. It takes time, but I have found it to be much more fruitful than FB overall. Hope this is helpful and not just a bunch of early morning talkativeness.
Social Media | | gfiedel0 -
Blogger vs wordpress from SEO perspective
Great answers from the other guys there, I will just say that googles approach while crawling will only ever be about content and mark up, not about brand. Wordpress and blogger is only as good as the markup you put on it, bad themes, bad markup, but SERPS.
Social Media | | jeremycbray0 -
Hosted vs self hosted ecommerce
I don’t really think it will be simple enough to rank better with a website that contains all the images on some other server. It might help you with site load time but if the CDN is not SEO friendly probably you will see a dramatic fluctuation in rankings. I would highly advice you to use self hosting ecommerce website and then properly optimize it according to the SEO standards in order to rank better in SERPs.
Web Design | | MoosaHemani0