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Suppose you have a weekly blog article and sometimes your articles earn social shares (e.g. 23 +1's on Google Plus on one article but normally 3-5 social shares). One out of 10 earns an organic link from a random blog. Would you continue publishing these blog posts?
They shared some insights of their production process here: "Behind the scenes of SEOmoz's Whiteboard Friday" http://wistia.com/blog/behind-the-scenes-of-seomoz-whiteboard-friday
Awesome. Thanks so much for the help Rand and Lesley.
I was listening to an interview with Rand Fishkin on the Eventual Millionaire: http://eventualmillionaire.com/rand-fishkin/
Rand said that Google says that having an author photo increases click through rate by 15% on average.
I am trying to find the original source of this information. Has anyone know the source of this stat?
Suppose that you want to rank for two keyword phrases that mean the same thing but are slightly different in spelling.
When should you put both keyword phrases on one page versus two pages? What are the pros and cons?
Moz has their own list of recommended SEO providers who they vouch for which can be found at: http://moz.com/community/recommended. You can also look for Moz Associates, like Dan Shure of Evolving SEO, who Moz trusts to provide expert advice on the Q&A forum.
I like the idea of 301 redirecting to a new URL, especially if you are planning to drop one of the products. I think that the domains are a tossup. From my experience, EMD are still very effective in many verticals.
I agree that you should look into possible causes for the penalty. Try the Panguin Tool (http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/) to see if your traffic drop aligns with a specific penalty. Did you receive any Unnatural Link Warnings in your Google Webmaster Tools? (if yes read this http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/06/backlinks-and-reconsideration-requests.html) If you know that you have some questionable links, try to have them removed or consider the Disavow Tool.
If you are using the Facebook social plugin on your site like ThinkGeek does for comments:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/ed6b/
Are there any positive social signals from people leaving comments that could impact the SEO of the page?
I searched the text of some comments in quotations in Google and it appears that the first few comments are indexed but most are not.
That's a good point. The two-way street prevents people from faking the authorship of pages on your site. Thanks!
The only issue is whether the expert would want to say they are a contributor to our site if they only have contributed one page (the interview). It may help to suggest that it would give them more authority in their subject area from Google's point of view.
We have several interviews with industry experts on our site. How do we get the benefits from Author Rank?
If I link to the interviewee's Google Plus profile, will Google recognize that they contributed to the site. Or do I need to get them to add our site to their contributor section on their Google Plus profile to receive any Author Rank benefits? (I know Author Rank is not believed to be affecting rankings yet).
Thanks!
Suppose your press release got picked up by high authority sites like Yahoo, Morningstar, PaidContent.org, etc. But they republished the press release and kept the links. Do these links pass any value since the sites are just republishing the press release?
The data that the Google Adwords tool is not very accurate, it is more of a rough estimate. If you wanted to better data you might consider buying Adwords Ads for those keywords for a limited time like a month. Then you could look at the number of impressions for your ads to get a better sense of how many people are searching for those keyword phrases.
Why would disavowing them hurt? They aren't extremely spammy but all they do is republish press releases and have very low Page Authority/Domain Authority (usually 10 or less).
Suppose a company did a press release and linked to you in it. The press release was republished on some high quality sites but also over 50 low quality press release syndication sites from all over the world. Suppose that they used a money keyword anchor text to link to you.
Would this be harmful to your site? What action would you take? Should we disavow these 50 links?
Actually, it is well documented that it does pass link juice similar to a 301 redirect.
You can't 301 redirect Blogspot blogs because you don't have access to the server files.
I received a link removal request from a site who said that they were penalized. I confirmed that they were #1 for the competitive keyword phrase that is also their domain name and now they are #10.
Here are some things I noticed about the site:
Overall their site's links were engineered but using tactics that most would consider "white hat." I don't think they violated any Google Webmaster Guidelines. Why were they penalized?
What do you think?
Does anyone know how to implement a rel canonical tag on a Blogspot blog?
I am trying to pass link juice from an old Blogspot blog to a self-hosted website.
Is 100 total links for every linking domain too high? I suppose I could also look at ratios of sites that are doing well in the rankings.
I would look at two things. I would look in Google Analytics at a daily graph of overall organic traffic to the site over time and add date markers for known Google updates to see if there are any changes that align with updates. I would also look in Google Webmaster Tools at the average ranking for the top 20-100 keywords before and after the date of a known Google update.
If you are answering common questions about your industry, should you create a separate page or place it on a existing page that is related.
On one hand it may be seen as thin content on those pages. On the other hand it may be a poor user experience if someone lands on your page and has to scroll down to find the answer.
Suppose that Google made a change and all of a sudden a certain type of keyword phrase doesn't show any commercial sites on the first page of SERPs.
Have you ever had this experience? What would you do in this scenario? Would you give up on those keyword phrases and target a different keyword phrase?
Suppose you write a guest post for an authoritative site, is it beneficial to claim authorship of the article by linking to your Google Plus profile and adding the site to your account as a site you contribute to? If yes, would you do this for dozens of sites? (since your contributor list could get really long).
Google wants to keep natural results and paid results separate and does not consider SEO factors when calculating your Adwords quality score to the best of my knowledge.
They could identify if there is a higher than average number of anchor text links with specific keyword phrases. If your distribution of anchor text is very different than the average site in that niche it would be detectable.
I don't think it will hurt rankings for your other important keywords, it will just increase the number of keywords that attract traffic. Links from development sites should help your overall keyword rankings. To me, it makes sense that developers would naturally link to a site that has created a web application.
SEOMoz appears to have taken the approach you suggested with their development blog: http://devblog.seomoz.org/
Other examples:
https://developer.apple.com/news/
https://developers.facebook.com/blog/
https://developer.amazon.com/blog/index.html
You could find opportunities for local linkbuilding like blogs that cover local activities. You could offer local bloggers a press pass to check out the camp for free which would encourage them to write about their experience.
Local newspaper sites often have a local event section where they highlight local events. If the camp is held on specific days you could submit it as an event for their event calendar.
If you hold the camp at a local address you can submit the business to local business directories like Yelp or CitySearch.
You could look at non-profits in your area and donate to them to be featured on their sponsors page. You could also donate a free pass for a non-profit auction in return for a link.
You can pay to be added to the directory of your local business organization. In the U.S., this is typically a local branch of the Chamber of Commerce.
There is a similar article on SEOMoz with some good resources: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/running-giveaway-competitions-for-links-and-seo
As long as the low quality links are relatively low then I wouldn't worry about it. It is natural to have some spammy sites that link to you. Google probably ignores these sites. These spammy sites probably wouldn't respond to a link removal request anyways.
In the case of sites that are not adding the no-follow to advertisements, the most likely scenario according to Matt Cutts videos I have seen is that Google would disable or reduce that site's ability to pass Page Rank. The links therefore wouldn't help you but shouldn't hurt you either.
If you are seeking links from blogs in a niche that is known for having a lot of commercial links from reviews or sponsored posts what precautions should you take? Should you avoid any blog with sponsored posts or that reviews products?
You also need to attract/build links to your site. If other sites are covering the same topics as you are and they have higher link authority they will push you down the search results. Also make sure that the topics that you are covering are not super competitive, otherwise you have little chance of showing up on the first page of search results without building sufficient link authority. If you have the Mozbar installed, you can enable the SERP overlay and see if sites ahead of you in the SERPs have greater link authority (PA and DA).
Many people assume that .org means it is a non-profit but many people use .org TLDs for commercial purposes.
Google's Matt Cutts has said that the TLD (top level domain) doesn't affect rankings.
Here is a quote from Matt Cutts on May 14, 2012:
"Sorry, but that’s just not true, and as an engineer in the search quality team at Google, I feel the need to debunk this misconception. Google has a lot of experience in returning relevant web pages, regardless of the top-level domain (TLD). Google will attempt to rank new TLDs appropriately, but I don’t expect a new TLD to get any kind of initial preference over .com, and I wouldn’t bet on that happening in the long-term either. If you want to register an entirely new TLD for other reasons, that’s your choice, but you shouldn’t register a TLD in the mistaken belief that you’ll get some sort of boost in search engine rankings."
Another thing to consider is that when you move your website to a different domain, you can lose rankings and authority.
Mike Arneson has an excellent Mozinar where he shares some helpful Author Rank tactics. What specific tactics are you doing to boost the Author Rank of your site?
I like this approach and it is something we have tried recently with the goal of being the best page available on the Internet.
There is also data that suggests longer pages tend to rank better, although it isn't clear to me if this is causation or correlation.
I recommend the article "How Content Length Affects Rankings and Conversions" if you haven't seen it on Quicksprout. There may be some good data that you can show your client to support why you should create the long guide.
If your competitor has a page that is optimized for a keyword (title tag, URL, content) and you target the keyword halfway down a page with an H2 and a short paragraph about the keyword, are you at a strong disadvantage?
The toolbar PageRank doesn't update very frequently so if you moved your content to a new page it makes sense that you don't see any toolbar PageRank right away. It may reappear when Google makes their next update. However, the pages probably do have actual PageRank since the 301 redirect should transfer the authority from the old pages to the new pages. It just doesn't register yet for the toolbar PageRank that you can see.
When you search for the keyword in Google it will show a list of related keywords at the bottom under "Searches related to vacant land." Enter these suggestions to get more related searches until you have built a sufficient list.
You may have to look at alternatives where you can increase search visibility such as targeting keyword phrases that are not triggering local search results. Instead of focusing on popular keywords you may want to focus on longer tail keywords using Ubersuggest or Google's "Related Searches." You could answer a lot of frequently asked questions about the industry. In my experience most questions do not trigger the local search results unless they involve an element of location in the question.
I recently heard someone say that if your site is on a lot of link lists (example "Useful Links" pages) this can hurt you.
How likely is a Google penalty if your site is listed on tons of .edu link lists?
What if someone leaves your company and removes your site from their Google Plus profile (under "Contributor To"). Does that kill all the rel=author on the pages written by this former employee? (Should you use the email verification with employees to avoid this scenario? Email verification is a big hassle for us.)
I think a BBB link should be a great link for SEO purposes if you can afford it whether or not it is showing up in OSE. Since the price is prohibitive for smaller businesses, it is a good signal that you are a quality site (spam sites rarely have a link from the BBB).
The other benefit is that visitors are more likely to trust your site if you have a BBB badge since it is a trusted brand that has approved your business. This can lead to higher conversion rates because people are more likely to buy from sites that they trust.
I recently launched a trial of a retargeting campaign but after a month I have only 100 impressions and 0 clickthroughs.
I am working in a competitive space but I placed a relatively low bid because I read that retargeting campaign banner ads should cost less. The number of people who have been added to the retargeting list by visiting the site is under 10,000.
What do you think is most likely to be the problem causing a low number of impressions and clickthroughs? Can a retargeting campaign be successful with a small audience size?
I have heard that a good source of keyword suggestions is looking at what pops up as suggestions when you start typing into Google.
My question is how do you know if it is worth your time to create content around those suggestions? If you enter these suggestions into Google's Keyword Tool, often there is no data on search volume.
What are your considerations when deciding whether to create a brand new page versus adding content to an existing page when targeting a new keyword phrase on your site?
My thought is that if it is mildly competitive, a new page would make more sense since you can optimize the title tags and URL. But if it is long tail and low competition, you would be better off to add a paragraph to an existing page to minimize diluting your website by adding more pages.
If you want to target long tail traffic from commonly asked questions what is the best way to publish answers to these questions? A really long FAQ page, a new page for each question in a /faq/ subfolder, adding them to relevant product pages that already exist?
Is creating a new page for each question a problem because the answer might be a paragraph and Google doesn't like thin content?
Has this ever happened to you?
You create an amazing piece of content to rank for a keyword phrase that you are targeting. The content is way better than your competitor's page but they are outranking you.
You have a higher domain authority.
Your page has a higher page authority.
Your page and site has higher toolbar Page Rank.
Your page has more inbound links.
Your page has higher quality links.
You have more Twitter, Facebook, and Google plus shares.
etc., etc.
But still you are being unranked and you can't find a single factor where your competitor is better. What can you do?
If you use a link building tactic for long enough, you can estimate the average cost for each link that is acquired through that tactic.
For instance if you typically get 10 links from an infographic that costs $1,000 to create and promote, your average cost per link is about $100.
What range do you target for your average cost per link? What average cost would you take all day long if you could scale it?
On some of our website's pages, Google displays the date of the last update in the search results.
We want to remove this because it cuts off our meta description and it can make our page look outdated.
Are there any negative consequences that you can think of when removing the date rich snippet.
If you send out a lot of email outreach (manually not automated), are there ways to avoid getting labeled as spam and having your emails filtered to the spam box by the major email providers? (or are you pretty safe if you personalizing each email manually and getting a decent number of replies).
If you run an Adwords banner campaign with retargeting, how is the cost per click determined? My hunch is that it would be different than text ads in search result pages.