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We recently found our site had 65,000 tags (yes 65K). In an effort to consolidate these we've started deleting them. MOZ is now reporting a heap of 404 errors for tag pages. These tag pages should not have links to them so not sure how come they're being crawled. Any suggestions from experience in this area would be useful.

Hi Moz,

We are currently doing SEO for a hand therapy company called the Hand Therapy Group. They rank well, however, one competitor, Sydney Hand Therapy, is ranking higher than them for the term "hand therapy Sydney" (which is one of our highly focused keywords) with three different URLs (their home page, contact page and about page) despite the latter two pages have no backlinks.

I understand why Google might see their homepage as being more relevant because their name is Sydney Hand Therapy (even though the Hand Therapy Group have more backlinks) but why do the other two URLs rank so well?

Any help/info/advice would be brilliant!

Cheers!

What are people calling proposals, pitches & presentations these days?

When someone requests a proposal from us (often for a website & digital strategy) we send 2 documents: A proposal, which is the nuts and bolts - and an accompanying presentation - which goes over our process in a more general manner: our approach to web design, our approach to SEO, digital marketing etc... basically our slick schtick...

What are the terms people use for this type of document or document combo - the proposal and the presentation?

Hello Mozzers

So generally its said that when a site receives a penalty from Google - it's obvious - you can't miss it...

But does google apply minor penalties (say dropping 5-10 places for one not so great link)

One particular campaign we've been working pretty hard - really great stuff - all white hat techniques - but there were a couple of links I wasn't 100% sure on - but got them any way as I guessed that the effect of them, if not positive, would be neutral at worse... (The sites wen't obvious spam sites but just seemed 'not great')

Recently after, we dropped around 8 place for our main keyword ranking. It's not a very competitive space. Is this likely just standard inexplicable fluctuation, or is there such thing as minor penalties or restrictions?

Cheeers

Hi,

That would primarily depend on the goals of the sites / sub-domains.

Hey Mozzers

Hoping to get some opinions on SEO at a small business level.

We're engaged in SEO for a number of clients which are small businesses (small budgets). We stick to strictly white hat techniques - producing decent content (and promoting it) and link building (as much as is possible without dodgy techniques/paying huge sums).

For some clients we seem to have hit a ceiling about with rankings anywhere between roughly position #5 - #15 in Google.

In the majority of cases - the higher ranking clients don't appear to be engaged in any kind of content marketing - often have much worse designed websites - and not particularly spectacular link profiles (In other words they're not hugely competitive - apart from sometimes on the AdWords front - but that's another story)

The only difference seems to be links on agency link farms - you know the kind? Agency buys expired domains with an existing PR - then just builds simple site with multiple blog posts that link back to their clients sites. (Also links that are simply paid for)

Obviously these sites serve no purpose other than links - but I guess it's harder for Google to recognize that than with obvious SEO directories etc?...

It seems to me that at this level of SEO for small businesses (limited budgets, limited time) the standard approach for SEO is the "expired domains agency link sites" described above - and simply paying bloggers for links.

Are the above techniques considered black hat? Or are they more grey-hat? - Are they risky? - Or is this kind of thing all in the game for SEO at the small business level (by that I mean businesses that don't have the budget to employ a full time SEO and have to rely on engaging agencies for low level - low resource  SEO campaigns)

Look forward to your always wise council...

Hey Mozers,

This is an old and often criticized method of SERP however we have a client who has requested we create suburb specific pages for their site.

PLASTIC PLANTS "SUBURB" NEED PLASTIC PLANTS IN "SUBURB"

They have shown us a competitor who is ranking for hundreds maybe thousands of suburbs in Australia using this method.

Any thoughts or experience in this area would be appreciated.

So that sort of thing is actually going on?

Hey!

We have a site that is fairly well ranking in a niche of the medical profession.

It has a good link profile with great .gov links etc.

OSE doesn't show most of the links, however all the ones it does show are all good.

We noticed an across the board drop in rankings recently, and checked on AHREFS.

What we found, was hundreds of backlinks to a variety of pages on the site from a wide range of spam/porn/Russian/irrelevant sites.

Even stranger is that some of the links have anchor text like "continue shopping" but they link to a page on our site about a type of limb fracture.

Has anyone come across this before? How is this possible?

Thanks

Anyone had experience with this?

We've found (and I'd love someone else to verify this) that there is some invisible meta data in JPEGs when they are first created. The name of the JPEG before it's placed in a site seems to have a significant effect on rankings in some cases. Have a play with some meta data editors and see if that makes a difference

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_metadata_editors

Thanks Oleg, are you saying that a piece with an article that goes into 3 breaks article/1 and article/2 and article/3 only counts as one visit if someone clicks through to all 3 pages?

Hey guys,

A client has asked us to install a page break function on their Wordpress site in the hope of increasing page count.

It's a very common practice but have never used it as part of a strategy. Any thoughts, pros or cons?

Hi,

We have been optimising and re-sharing old blogs posts from our feed. If we were to change the date of publishing on the posts in order to bring them to the top of our feed, would this have any negative impacts on the posts' metadata?

Thanks!

Hey,

There are few websites such as http://bestthenews.com/ which regularly copy and paste articles from one of our sites onto theirs - along with all the links back to our site.

The sites don't have a high spam score - but I cant imagine these sites serve any purpose (ie genuine readership) other than trying to boost their traffic.

At the moment we haven't done anything about these, as they are backlinks after all - but could these sites have a negative impact and should we be asking them to remove?

We have even had our content copied and pasted by AGDA (Australian Graphic Design Association) - which is OK as the site has great authority so the links are good, however it's still strange that a large reputable organization would just copy and paste articles without notifying us.

Curious to here other experience / opinions on the matter.

Cheers!

Hey guys,

Just wanted to put the question out there about guest blogging opportunities that are paid for. It's not something we ever go for but a client has the resources to get a few quality paid backlinks. What are people's general thoughts on guest blogging - for a nominal fee - to do so? Pros and cons of the whole process?

Cheers!

yep that's right you can get data on links to your facebook page

Looking forward to seeing those changes and improvements Rand

How long have you been using it Scott?

Howdy folks,

Into our 3rd year of using MOZ and OSE and well not sure about you guys but I think OSE is reporting less and less accurately. Has anyone seen a drop in it's accuracy or ability to delivery what it claims to?

I know many of you also use AHREFS and others but why not get this tool right MOZ?