Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Matt, thanks so much for the reply. Its not me personally doing it, I am looking into the seo side of this/possible implications. I understand it is being used to track clicks. Whilst I agree that Google analytics might be better for this, would the bit.ly links be doing any harm to the website for seo? it seems fairly unnatural to have an internal link going to bit.ly to go straight to our site again, how would google see this on mass?

Much appreciate your advice and opinion.

Hi guys, what are your thoughts using bit.ly links as internal links on blog posts of a website? Some posts have 4/5 bit.ly links going to other pages of our website (noindexed pages).

I have nofollowed them so no seo value is lost, also the links are going to noindexed pages so no need to pass seo value directly. However what are your thoughts on how Google will see internal links which have essential become re-direct links? They are bit.ly links going to result pages basically.

Am I also to assume the tracking for internal links would also be better using google analytics functionality? is bit.ly accurate for tracking clicks?

Any advice much appreciated, I just wanted to double check this.

I cannot strip out brand data on the 'not provided' keywords in Google analytics. Is this not possible anymore? I understand we cannot get specific keywords but can we no longer strip out brand on organic traffic in Google analytics for keywords that are 'not provided' ?

Hello, i am using the free mozscape api to get the domain and page authority of urls. i am batching the url as shown in the sample code however i have over 500 URL i need to check and when running the request i get the following:

stdClass Object
(
    [status] => 413
    [error_message] => Too many urls in batch. Batches must be less than or equal to 200 urls.
)

When i change it to 200 urls the request works fine, now is there a way to enable me to batch all 500 urls at once? i did read that the beta api is capable of batching urls in one request : http://moz.com/blog/400-higher-throughput-mozscape-api-now-in-beta-and-seeking-testers

Has this been implemented yet into the current api?

Thanks

Did you look for a warning in webmaster tools under search traffic - > manual actions.

If you see something in there, a button called 'request a review' is there to submit a request.

Do you think the longer it takes the better sign it is that it might be removed?

I have a theory that it might go through stages of auditing?

Hi there, recently I have been getting failed reconsideration requests back within 7 days. The last one i submitted (third) is now 2 weeks and no message back. Does this mean do you think it's gone to the next stage of auditing? is it a good sign?

Typically when failed I have always has that response within 7 days. I also noticed a slight improvement in rankings but no message back in webmaster tools.

Does anyone have experience with this? if so does this sound about right? thanks guys.

Hi guys thanks for the reply.

So basically to clarify there are pages indexed which are merely lists of products from a search query url. Somehow Google has picked up the search query url and indexed it. Its simply a list of products with the price on say page 3 of 10 for example. This happens a lot. The worry is will it look duplicate and be seen as poor quality with the panda update?

Thanks, any help much appreciated as always.

So some agency did horrendous article submissions on mass in 08/09.

Since I have been tidying this up by manually getting the domains removed in our back-link profile. Some however i just cannot get rid of. Recent penguin update obviously penalised me for this, so i disavowed the rest i could not remove and did a reconsideration request.

The reply from Google was still that it violates guidelines and it used 3 blogspot domains (which no crawler i used had previously found) as examples. Now there is NOONE at Google to contact about this and the sites are abandoned, so they just sit there doing damage. I will ofcourse add these to the disavow but can i disavow the whole of blogspot.com ?

What if all are in the disavow but they still use it against us in the reconsideration request and i cannot remove them as noone to contact at Google?

Really appreciate the help, thanks,  2 years of hell tidying up bad agency work!

Hi there, is is bad practice in seo to have search results for products indexed?

For example a search result of holidays to Ibiza, with lots of deals coming up? its a search query url that would be indexed, with just an image and price per product on the page, with about 10 per page?

Any advice appreciated.

Ok so I have this message in manual actions (with no examples of links):

Manual Actions
Site-wide matches None
Partial matches Some manual actions apply to specific pages, sections, or links
    Reason    Affects
    Unnatural links to your site—impacts links
Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. Some links may be outside of the webmaster’s control, so for this incident we are taking targeted action on the unnatural links instead of on the site’s ranking as a whole. Learn more.

I am not surprised by this as an agency a few years ago did mass aritcle submissions for the same anchor text, I have manually removed 119 or so domains in the last year and a half and 4 weeks ago i disavowed the last 40ish domains left. Obviously the back-link profile can be seen to have an unnatural anchor-text distribution still but not as bad.

In terms of rankings we lost some core terms on the homepage, not completely but most have gone from say page one to page 2/3/4 etc We are still getting good traffic to internal pages, so i am assuming action was taken to the homepage - where the mass of those links are pointing to.

Where do you guys recommend I go from here, shall i go ahead and click the reconsideration request? or wait longer for the disavow. I am still also trying to remove bad links.

Any advice much appreciated.

Hi guys, so we are on feefo and noticed links coming in per review for different anchor text, this will be done on mass due to the amount of reviews we will get - this is all natural but in SEO site-wide links are typically not.

How if at all do you think Google will react to this?

Many thanks all for your responses and advice.

I am going to give it another 2 weeks, but i believe a reconsideration request is in order.

I have already removed 119 domains manually and kept records, theres about 40 left i just cant move. I have kept a record of all of this and i like the idea on your site to upload the details of this to google docs to include on the reconsideration request - thank you for advice.

So basically I feel we got hit because a bad seo agency did article submissions on mass for the same anchor text which got ditributed over and over again, giving us a non-brand term with huge amounts of referring links. I have been working hard to sort that and stop replications from awful scraper type sites also.

I just do not know what is for the best here, i have disavowed 3 weeks ago, perhaps i should give it until end of August and if no luck on rankings I will do a reconsideration request explaining all of this and hope they value us once again.

Hi guys, so recently Google released the 'manual actions' tab under 'search traffic' in Google webmaster tools.

Recently hit by panda i checked this and got:

"

Unnatural links to your site—impacts links

Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. Some links may be outside of the webmaster’s control, so for this incident we are taking targeted action on the unnatural links instead of on the site’s ranking as a whole."

However was this not the message before saying it was not a complete manual ban, just affecting a few bad links?

I was hit badly in the rankings but still have some good terms and traffic is not that bad still from organic non-brand.

I have fixed many of the bad links (horrible articles submissions that went out of control in 2009) - do i do a reconsideratikn request? i have disavowed the bad links that are left 3 weeks ago? so do i wait to see if disavow works or do a reconsideration request?I was sure this was like the message sent out before which meant it wasn't that bad for your site, just a few links ignored?

Any advice much appreciated, thank you.

That gives me some hope, thank you. Did Google send you any special message to say it had be done?

The issue for us is in 2009 someone did mass distribution of content to poor quality sites for the same anchor text, i've manually removed 110 domains roughly but left with 40. So have had to disvow them, i dont know whether to do a reconsideration request, were just not moving.

Is it wise to keep building links at this time which are quality and generally branded? I feel we are stuck currently.

If i submit links via Google webmaster tools disvow tools - do i get any kind of confirmation it worked or not from Google?

I have a standard message saying 'disvow links updated' as soon as i submitted it.

Also how long roughly does this take to work, does it work much? I removed as many links as i could and the remaining ones submitted to this tool in the correct format.

Any info much appreciated as usual people.

I hope your right David, I hope this doesn't screw organic ctr%

I would like to think people who click the drop down bar would have clicked the pla anyway before it was there.

I just wonder how many will now click the drop down menu?

After reading there will be a drop down arrow on product listing adverts, which will push organic results down to display 16 products:

http://searchengineland.com/google-testing-pla-expansion-to-show-16-product-listing-ads-166942?utm_source=twbutton&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=tweet

I wondered how badly this is going to affect anyone in organic e-commerce? is this going to be rolled out for every term and have a drop down arrow for each one?

Is organic going to die with e-commerce now?

Thoughts much appreciated.

Hi thanks for the reply.

Unfortunalye cannot add keywords and theres no pattern in the url to only grab ones i want.

It would be good if analytics from Google allowed you to make groups of content to only monitor rather then all of it.

Hi guys, is there any way to group specific pages together in analytics and just see how they have peroformed visit wise, etc?

I need to group some resort guides all with different names, it's tedious going through each one manually.

Help much appreciated as always!

My frustration with Google currently has led me to try bing out more. I don't rank as good in bing as Google, so I was wondering if anyone had any great tips of what bing looks for to rank website well?

So far I can see they seem to favour keyword domains, take 'cheap holidays' for example.

Always reading about what Google want but what do bing want?

Any advice much appreciated.

About a week, the url will appear in the search results when you type it in but does not have a cache screenshot when doing the cache: command.

Hi there, we uploaded a page but unfortunately didn't realise it had noindex,nofollow in the meta tags.

Google had cached it then decached it (i guess thats possible) it seems? now it will not cache even though the correct meta tags have been put in and we have sent links to it internally and externally.

Anyone know why this page isn't being cached, the internal link to it is on the homepage and that gets cached almost every day.

I even submitted it to webmaster tools to index.

Hi there, due to so much traffic coming through to our e-commerce site our host is going to do an apache re-direct for over flow traffic from www.mywebsite.com to a ww2.mywebsite.com

canonical tags will be in, but if there is a re-direct this is surely bad for seo, telling on onccasions the page has moved?

Any advice on this and the best way to re-direct users when there is too much traffic please let me know.

Thanks guys.

Hi guys, what is the difference between a manual penalty in the results and an algorithm?

If its algorithm its usually a couple of pages but a manual do you get deindexed or put say 10 pages back?

Any advice on how to best determin if a push back in results is manual or algorithm would be great. This will best help me judge how long it will take to get back to where I was with one of my sites once i have cleaned up some of my back-link profile.

Thanks.

What would cause something to disappear off auto complete? seems very strange it was there for ages and had great volume.

Yes auto complete drop down, or when you type a keyword a drop down below suggests an add on to the keyword. What decides what keywords go in there, do Google look at ctr%?

Hi guys, i received traffic off a yearly based term, this year for '2013' i noticed it is nowhere near what the yearly term was for the year before.

I believe that Google has stopped the yearly term appearing in a drop-down menu from a big volume related term, my question is how do they determine what goes in the drop down menu for related/relevant searches?

Thanks guys, good stuff

Here's my issue I have the same page twice for content but on different url for the country, for example:

www.example.com/gb/page/

and

www.example.com/us/page

So one for USA and one for Great Britain. Or it could be a subdomain gb. or us. etc.

Now is it duplicate content is US version indexes the page and UK indexes other page (same content different url), the UK search engine will only see the UK page and the US the us page, different urls but same content.

Is this bad for the panda update? or does this get away with it? People suggest it is ok and good for localised search for an international website - im not so sure.

Really appreciate advice.

Ah ours are 69 lol, this makes sense. Though it happened today and i saw competitors have it today.

Hi Martin its non brand terms, and ive noticed some competitors today get it also.

Hi guys and gals, i noticed in the results today Google has been changing my title tags so that brand: is in the front of it all.

This is not in the code but my title tag structure site-wide is keywords and then always | brand on the end.

Why has this happened does anyone know? does it affect my first keyword in the title tag, i guess Google might do it as it recognises the brand and wants users to know it?

I heard they will give the ranking of the content to the more powerful site? not sure if thats correct. If they thought you had copied it then perhaps no ranking at all?

Could it be that the big sites quoting some of your text are seen as the orgininal source as they are very high domain authority websites?

This is an interesting debate. There doesn't seem to be any 100% confident answers, perhaps they dont want brands being the author of their content.

Its crazy we have to ask these questions, some clarification would be fantastic.

I think Google need to come out more and decide what recommendations there will be for content written by a business. Currently its all so vague, not good. Thanks for your thoughts Andy much appreciated.

Hi Andy cheers for that.

The issue is why would i assign content written by my business to an individual, surely it makes sense got google to allow a brnad page to be the author of content.

I've got all this great content and i feel i might miss out on rankings/benefits from not assigning an author - but i dont want to assign any specific individual, it was written by the business as such. Any recommendations? perhaps google will let brand pages be the author of business content in the future?

Hi guys i have a big e-commerce website, we have put rel=publisher on our homepage and linked it up with our google + profile.

We sell holidays and have a big resort guide full of quality content, do i need to put rel=publisher on those too?

It doesn't seem right to put a personal author with a personal google + page on content as the author. Do i simply as a business page use rel=publisher instead?

Any advice much appreciated, i find this confusing in all honesty on what benefits the most.

I have 4 keywords bolded on my homepage all with the same term in them.

Would panda penalise this? i recently saw that one keyword drop in rankings.

Hiya, well i saw it go from 12th to 20th - this is a very competitive keyword. The landing page is my homepage. I didn't see any other target keywords go though.

I saw this happen about 8pm Friday last week (gmt).

I might also add, i bolded the keyword on the page once, but other keywords are bolded that feature that keyword - this happens about 4 times - is it seen spammy by panda thus taking me down rankings?

Hi there, on the panda update a few weeks ago i noticed i dropped 8 places for a very competitive keyword.

All my content in the site is unique and quality. Its also not published elsewhere.

I think the update did knock this one keyword down for me - no others got hti though. Perhaps the landing page got it? too many mentions of the keyword? however i didn't think i spammed it on the page, perhaps jsut mentioned once or twice - any ideas?

Any help aprpeciated

Say i auth with an individual employee on google+ and get gains from it when the algo takes it into consideration - what happens if they start letting company profiles auth with content? will i have messed the pages up, or do you think i could have reverted?

Surely Google will let you eventually auth a company google+ profile with content it has written, it makes sense as a company should write trusted and quality content.

I want to tell users that our business wrote the content, doesn't seem to be a way to do that yet which is disappointing.

Hi Matthew thanks for the advice so far. I am a little confused now. we have rel=publisher and rel=author.

I understand schema, so far on our business site we have verified our google+ page with our website by adding some code.

I have no rel=publisher and no rel=author on any pages. I have some fantastic holiday guides however. Can i benefit from using this rel=author feature or rel-publisher?

Publisher i am assuming is used for business pages?

As far as im aware you cannot link up with your business profile on g+ - just the personal one to auth a page content?