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Thanks for that tip. I was also using the old bookmark to SEOmoz, so I deleted it and bookmarked Moz. However, that did not do the trick for me. But, at least I have the correct bookmark now

We just signed on a new client and are gaining access to their Analytics, GWT, etc... In GWT, we quickly went to "Manual Actions" as the client stated they've been slipping in rankings the past couple months from 1 to 4 to 8 and have been staying at around 7/8 for 15 of their main keywords.

Without getting into the specifics of their keyword rankings, I'm curious to know when they may have received the Partial Matches Manual Action from Google. I checked Messages and saw nothing about the Manual Actions update. Can anyone lend some advice as we are most likely going to have to put together a Disavow text file and begin sending requests to take down links.

Thank you in advance. Hope this was clear enough, but let me know if you need more info.

• Patrick

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Keri, I was able to check GWT and yes, my Moz and YouTube links are showing as being indexed. I appreciate you providing that tip.

Since Moz has it's own PA/DA algo, is not having my Moz and YouTube links a part of our link profile putting us at a disadvantage in regards to those figures/statistics to potentially help our PA/DA? Or let me know if this is just a "timing" thing whereby Moz hasn't crawled all the pages and found our links? Thanks. Sorry for being a pain. - Patrick

Thanks for the follow up, Keri. I am a Pro Member with 300+ points, so I know my DF link began appearing over a month ago, but doesn't show in our link profile. I see some other members who have less than 200 and shows their NF link. It's odd as we never saw our NF link either from Moz.

Per the G+ and YouTube, I ask about this because when viewing our competitors and our clients competitors, we do see OSE index YouTube pages with their NF links, but again, our YouTube page is not indexed. I don't think I have seen any G+ links yet, though or Twitter, so not too concerned with those as I understand your budget constraints. Could something be hindering that?

I hope that is a little more helpful since I am a Moz Pro 300+ point member so a DF link should appear in the link profile and we do have a YouTube page with a link to our site, which should also appear in the link analysis? I guess, I curious to know if because they are not showing in OSE, is our DA/PA adversely affected?

Thanks again for your reply and let me know what you think. - Patrick

I'm curious to know why Moz, YouTube, G+ and some other links are not showing the OSE link profile as NOFOLLOW or DOFOLLOW for our website whiteboardcreations.com? When doing analysis, we see a lot of companies YouTube pages with their NF link and G+ page links and even see a lot of the Moz community members with their Profile pages showing the NF link or the DF links.

I'm confused as to why OSE is not picking up any of our links from those respective sites. Any thoughts?

Thank you in advance. - Patrick

A few weeks ago I started seeing instances of OSE not showing all the information when it was showing I was logged in while using Google Chrome. It would work, then not work and kept showing me the button to sign up for Moz Analytics even though I was logged in. I'm a Pro Member, which is confusing. Then I noticed that while logged in, I would be logged out somehow when trying to contribute to the Q&A's and it would bounce me back to the Moz Home page or show me the white Login button in the upper right. Again, in Chrome only.

I was told by support to clean my cookies/cache and that works for maybe a few hours, but then would resort back to logging me out. It has become very annoying, and now can only work logged in from FireFox. Not a huge issue, but everything else I do all day is in Chrome.

Is anyone else having this same issues? Any recommendations? Thanks in advance. - Patrick

Hey Ron,

This is a great question as it has to come into play for designing a site. I think it could be a useful tool, however, it may be an instance of 'shooting yourself in the foot' if you designed the site and important components aren't showing in the top fold.

I personally wouldn't use this tool, nor share with a client for a couple reasons.

1. We can't control a users' screen resolution. I personally use a laptop with 2 23in wide screen HD monitors split from it. 3 screens in total. I say this because my 15in laptop top fold is MUCH less than the 23in monitors top fold as all are set to the same screen resolution, by preference. I have had clients call and ask about why their site looks so big or so small when designing and we'd have to do the dance of working with their screens and monitor to get it to the settings which majority of computers users have... you guessed it, factory default. Then the client(s) were pleased and understood. Unfortunately, we wouldn't be able to that for any site visitors. We work to cater to the 80+% out there for design. Which, takes me to my next reason for not using this tool...
2. With the recent developing responsive design and parallax design styles, a lot of websites are becoming more visual works of art with pages that do run on in scrolling up/down. To many we talk with, they think it's "pretty cool" both visually and that you can display information and content more effectively across the Home page and inner pages. We still do strongly recommend having all the important components in the top fold always, logo, phone numbers, page headings, breadcrumbs, links to online forms, and navigation bars.

Again, this is just my personal opinion after seeing the tool, then reliving experiences in working with clients on their designs and them asking this question about "top fold" display. Nonetheless, thanks for sharing as I'm sure others in the Moz community may find use in it and bookmark it for their bag of tricks also

Cheers! - Patrick

Hey Sarah,I can't speak for everyone, but I know and am hearing a lot of frustrations in using the new Google Keyword Planner. It's arduous and doesn't seem as flexible compared to the old Keyword Tool you mention, and we're all become so used to. Per Bings Keyword Tool, we have used it before, but I agree with Peter and his comments in that search is now going to be continuing this new direction of "relevance" for personalized search. Yes, keywords are still very important, but the data being provided these days is creating more headaches than solutions.

We look at Google Keyword Planner (still getting used to it) and Bing as well. We haven't used WordTracker in over a year, so per how they are working these days is a bit beyond me. They have been around a long time, so as long as they can update their platform to support the new Google search shifts, then keep with them. If they are not, then that is an issue and the data then becomes tainted. Google will be our go-to keyword research tool unless something else emerges.

Cheers! - Patrick

PS - We've been trying out a new approach where we are comparing sites' anchor text link profile for the competitors of the clients we work for. This somewhat helps us understand what they are wanting to rank for and then we go from there.

Hi LuaMarketing! Great question and we get asked this a lot from clients/potential clients who have multi-locations. We are actually in the process of rolling out pages to target surrounding cities within a 15 min drive to try to rank for their less competitive markets.

To break apart my response, let's approach this from PPC and SEO.

For PPC efforts, creating landing pages is super effective for your user to get the info specifically what they were searching for, immediately (this stands true for SEO, but I'll get to that). PPC landing pages are generally less text heavy and more focused on CTA's, forms, phone numbers and the like, so having them not indexed in your meta data is helpful and recommended. As noted above, tons of companies large and small do this.

For SEO efforts, always keep in mind not to over-optimize the page as well as making sure it is a part of some internal link so the spiders can find it, crawl it, index it for the SE to rank it. Your content needs to be 100% original, readable to the visitor (Google is basically becoming more and more like a human reader) and relevant to what the searcher entered to make that page display as a result. The other critical component will be to build links to those pages through ethical, non-spammy link building tactics. There are plenty of websites which do not have all of their inner pages listed in the main navigation, nav bar drop downs, footer section... rather, they are embedded appropriately within the inner pages body content or within blog article content. It is certainly doable, however, if you think what you are implementing may be spammy, you just may be right. Follow the best SEO guidelines and practices and keep asking great questions like this and you will get the community behind you to help you grow your sites.

Hope this was helpful! Cheers - Patrick

Ian, the use of bold and italic text within pages or articles is so minute to the SEO ranking factors that your best focusing on what really matters for getting ranked. This article can help you see that bold and italic text doesn't even make the list http://moz.com/search-ranking-factors. Even the H1 tag is 3/4 the way down the list.

Per using bold and italic text for your readers, absolutely! Use it appropriately as it seems you have been doing. Also, consider breaking up content with bullet points or using call out sections in the page (if using WordPress, they have plugins and widgets for these call outs to highlight important content snips).

I'd stray away from bolding singular keywords or italicizing a keyword as those are old, out-dated SEO tactics which were never proven to have any affect, positively or negatively. Keep doing what you're doing and always keep your readers' best interests in mind for them to have a nice experience on your site(s)... Google will see this in the Analytics as they remain on the site/pages longer.

Hope this was helpful. - Patrick

Vince,

Go with the Disavow for that link and any links which could be misconstrued as spammy. Even though GWT is telling you not to take action, you should do it anyways as it can't hurt to have that link removed from your profile.

Alternatively, you could message/email the specific site owners or managers to request the link to be taken down. It may take a while for this though for them to respond and schedule that task. Keep that in mind also.

Hope this helps! - Patrick

Great question, David.

Yes, feed your website's blog with content. We fell off for a long time on ours, but just yesterday I have put into place to have 2-4 articles posted to our blog per month and hired a great freelance writer to help with that. So, pumping more content to our site for Google to index. That is great and all, however, we are taking the approach of 'topical' vs 'keyword' driven articles due to all the latest Google updates. In doing this, we are writing for our viewers or people searching for solutions for the services we provide AND targeting some keywords and phrases along the way. 2 birds with 1 stone so to speak.

Per outsourcing your content, there are a number of sites out there, but like vzPro states, be weary of who you hire. If you are giving them full range to develop the content, then be sure to read through each sentence for grammar or spelling. For example: some writers use "optimisation" vs "optimization" and so on. We have used scripted.com before and it worked really well. I know some people use spinner software and such, but I wouldn't recommend that route at all. It looks spammy even though they promise it isn't.

Per coming up with content, have someone do your research and find all the articles and websites they can about the subjects pertaining to your client's products and services and industry. Then, from there, structure your blog topics, create your titles and begin writing.

vzPro, I like your idea a lot for some cheaper articles from iwriter.com, which you then rewrite and input your own verbiage, experiences and insight! May have to try that tactic

Patrick

pbhatt,

We are working with a software called WebMeUp.com. If you sign up using the promo code LINKASSIST you will get 99% off your first 2 months. The rank tracker is very accurate for Google, Yahoo and Bing. You can also setup how you want your subscription to be as well, so you can track 100 keywords or 1500 keywords. You pick!

Hope this was a good answer and you should definitely check them out as it's web based software, so you won't need to worry about IP blocks from the search engines. We love it so far and been very happy with how easy it is to setup initially and then add different client sites.

Cheers! - Patrick

_PS - We also use Moz from their Pro Plan  _

Christopher,

I was having the same issues the past several days with being logged in and out while trying to get into the QA sections. It kept redirecting me to the Moz Home page and logging me out. I emailed support and they told me it may be a cookies issue on my Chrome browser. I cleared cookies a few hours ago and haven't had the issue arise, so far.

Hope your situation turns up, but understand your frustrations! - Patrick

In my opinion, keywords will forever be able to be ranked as not everyone asks Google specific questions. Someone may just enter "general dentist in City"  to find out where a dentist is to make an appointment. That would be a keyword and not so much a topic.

In terms of potentially getting more exposure for what people are searching, you could adopt the strategy of quality topical content as well, so you are working to target both individual keywords and topics together.

We are getting more and more of this same question from marketers and consultants who "heard" about Hummingbird a couple weeks ago and I agree 100% with Dan and Kevin. I may add...

As we are learning to adapt as well, since we work with smaller businesses focusing on typically 1 location in 1 major city or a couple towns, our conversations are a bit different than most larger SEO companies. We still do talk about keywords, however, we are now including more information about content. For example, instead of just talking about "cosmetic dentists City A" as the keyword which is very broad, we may look at more of what people are "asking" Google , like "how to fix a broken tooth" or "getting teeth whitening" or "benefits of dental veneers" and so much more. They may not be exact questions, but they are proving they are wanting a more specific answer. In comes content served up on a web page and blog articles. The more topical content you can push out there addressing these questions from searchers, the more chance you have in the future to be found.

• Patrick

Hey Shaun,

I wouldn't be so concerned with the length of the URL (see this Moz page outlining that URL length is second from the bottom in search ranking factors http://moz.com/search-ranking-factors according to 120 leading search marketers who participated) as you could put more efforts and time towards some of the other On-Page SEO items from the list to implement.

Just make sure your Categories, Archives and Tags from the blog are marked off as NoIndex/NoFollow. If you are using the All In One SEO plugin for WordPress (which I recommend), then you just have to check a couple boxes on the Settings page to accomplish this task to make the blog more SEO/search engine friendly.

Hope this was helpful! - Patrick

I'm enjoying the simplistic look of the new G+ page. The top image, where we were forced to scroll up to view it was just a horrible experience for all users. That scrolling really never served any purpose than to frustrate people with the "teaser" effect.

Now, it's all right there as it should be. Removing the thinking, confusion and frustrations and going back to what Google says they strive for, improving our experience using their products. In my opinion, this new page stylization has done that for me.

Patrick

Meghan,

The main focus should be around having as much original content in the sites as possible. If you create future content, don't duplicate that content too, be creative and unique when writing about the same topic. Put different ideas into it, make one 5 Tips and other 9 Tips so to speak or How To and Things to Know twists. Applying a lot of what Jeff mentioned above will be beneficial as well. Those were all great points! All the best in your launches!

Patrick

Federico is exactly correct. G+ and the Website/Blog need to be tied together through the reciprocal links. G+ needs the website's link in the "Contributor" field in the Links section of the profile. This link should be the www.domainname.com/author/yourname link to be more specific. Then, on the website the G+ profile URL needs to be "rel=author". If using WordPress, AuthorSure is a great plugin we like using, but there are others to test around with.

Patrick McCoy