Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Carlos.

Thanks for the quick response. We've certainly told our clients historically that, while bounce rate is something to bear in mind, it doesn't impact rankings and on certain pages is the only real outcome (depending on what the page is aiming to achieve).

But the more I read, the more it implies it is a stat that can have an impact following the various Google quality algorithms - and I see this video is from 2010, so I'm guessing the situation may have changed by now?

As for the link to the tutorial on spamming, very useful, I'll look into where they're coming from.

Assuming there's no impact on either organic or PPC, I'll set up a filter and leave it at that - but it would still be useful to have a best practice way to send this traffic, if it's real, to the proper geographic site.

Nick.

Hi fellow Mozzers!

We're handling the digital marketing for a UK-based franchise of a Canadian SaaS company, and I've noticed that a large proportion of their traffic has been coming from the US (not the majority, but enough to skew the figures).

The Canadian arm of the business deals with the US market, but the majority, if not all, is direct traffic which seems to suggest they've seen the web address somewhere (not sure where though). Is there a search-friendly way to move this traffic back to the Canadian site? I know I can set up a filter for US traffic so it stops distorting the stats we're seeing (which I have now done), but my worry is this is causing a high bounce rate that may be impacting Google's perception of the site quality. The traffic has a 100% bounce rate (not surprisingly), so if we could find a best practice way of sending them to the Canadian site, that would be great.

My first thought was a screen that appears for US traffic prompting them to the Canadian site, but presumably this would still count as a bounce as they're only on one page?

Any help much appreciated!

Cheers guys,
Nick

Hey fellow Mozzers!

We're in the middle of working on CRO for a client of ours and we were going to try out Google Experiments for the first time.

Following the click path described on the Google help page should take me to an option that says 'Create Experiment', but this isn't coming up - do we need to create the various URLs before it will let us set up an experiment, or has the system changed now? I've found in the past Google has a habit of updating its interfaces but not the advice on using the affected tools, so wondering if I'm looking at old information?

Secondly, does the Experiment show a user the same variation of the page throughout their journey? What I mean by that is: their site currently has a real mish-mash of page styles, and I think a large part of boosting their conversions is probably down to ensuring consistency across the site as it currently seems like you're bouncing around different sites. But will this issue be made worse by running Experiments - ie, will I enter the site on Variation A, click a link and be shown the next page in Variation B and so on?

If so, are we better off running the experiment on one page at a time and using what we've learnt to impact the next page?

Thank for any help you can give!

Nick.

Hi Jane,

Yeah, a number of our clients are in the leisure and hospitality industries which means many travel bloggers naturally link to them in reviews, lists of places to stay in certain areas etc. Occasionally we need to think up clever ways of encouraging that, but it's a field where those who are pleased with the offering tend to give you, at the least, a mention.

This particular client, however, doesn't really fit that bill, but they are in an industry where there's plenty of scope for expert advice, FAQs, guides and so on, so I'm sure we can find good content-led solutions.

The content side I'm fine with, but it was more the tech aspect of harnessing cloud-based software. Thanks for your help with this - happy just knowing I'm not missing anything on that front!

Kind regards,

Nick

Hi Jane,

Thanks for responding!

Well that was my thoughts - that the 'powered by' route in and of itself is a no-go for that very reason, but I was sounding out any possible alternatives.

Reading my initial question, I'm not sure it's the clearest way I could have worded it - and in fact I'm still not sure what a clearer way would be. Basically, they have a reasonable client base using their software, but the software sits, as far I understand, external to the client's site.

So I think in hindsight I was seeing whether there was any way of harnessing the client base, but I suppose without knowing where the tool actually sits this is impossible to answer?

Hello fellow Mozzers!

We've recently rewritten the content for a cloud-based project management tool, they then asked about what they could do to rank higher.

As well as suggesting the usual content creation methods to help build links (which it looks like they'll need a LOT of - the field is either made up of terms that have no searches, or are extremely competitive), I wondered if there was any way of harnessing the fact they provide a cloud-based SaaS - a 'Powered by...' notice or somesuch? The only thing is they provide a project budget management tool, so I'm guessing the site itself wouldn't actually be coming into contact with the tool?

Does anyone have any experience / advice working on a similar scenario where you've managed to leverage the tool for links where it's cloud-based?

Thanks in advance for any help!

Nick.

Thanks guys. I thought that may be the case as all the ones I've seen have been cut. Is there even a set character count, as I could potentially write one that would at least look neat if cut early? Or does it depend from search to search?

As you say, this seems like something they maybe should look at, because while you would undoubtedly lose real estate by cutting all meta descs, you also lose a chunk by having your call to action cut, often in nonsensical or messy ways (I'm aware that this can happen anyway, but anything we can do to minimise this is always welcome!)

Thanks again!

Hey Mozzers!

Something occurred to me the other day was that, while we can write title tags and meta descriptions to be within the character count and therefore appear nice and neatly in the SERPs, when Google et al decide to pull subpages out as further site links, it seems to still pull the normal meta description but with a far lower character count. As this looks untidy and could potentially impact CTR, is there a way I can amend the preferred text for the shortened version, via Webmaster Tools, for example?

Thanks in advance for your help!

Nick.

Hi Mike,

Thanks for your response. Definitely some good food for thought here - especially about ensuring the pdfs are optimised.

It may be that we can put all the content on the site as HTML, but just not have it as part of the navigation (which we are doing with certain pages, like FAQs.

Unfortunately, when they say light on content they mean just that. As we are a design agency, the designers tend to think people are only picture led and the words distract from that. I tend to think that, while people will decide if we are the agency or them based on previous work, they also like to see stats on results, client feedback and so on.

So I'll try to persuade them to go the HTML route, but at least you've pointed out some things to bear in mind if going the PDF avenue.

Thanks!

Nick

Hi fellow Mozzers,

We're just in the middle of relaunching our website (a design agency), and I had a few questions re: SEO of our service keywords.

The designers want the site to seem light on content, despite my advice that this would reduce the terms we can rank for. With that in mind, I was going to include advice pages that can be found via the site map, site search or text links but aren't promoted via the top level or second level nav. Another alternative I was going to explore was using pdfs for design case studies, so the site would feature a light case study, but with a more in-depth pdf available if wanted.

I have located numerous articles highlighting how best to optimise pdfs, but I have a few queries aside from the technical standpoint.

So:

• is this the best way to getting round the issue of keeping the site 'light' on content?

• are there stats that show CTRs on pdf pages over HTML?

• as well as optimising the pdf content and promoting them on our social media channel, is there a benefit from including them on the likes of Scribd, Edocr and so on (from either an SEO or simply from a promotional viewpoint, or both)

Hopefully that's all clear!

Nick

Hi Jason,

It's a shame that there's not really anything out there, but that's a good idea about looking at the industry specific sites - the only thing with that is that the checklist was supposed to help others if I was off on holiday or whatever, a nice, easy list of URLs that someone else in the office could send stuff to, but I have enough other sites for this not to matter too much.

Thanks for your help!

Hi Jason,

Sites that will talk about it in a news format. We're pretty well covered for the design gallery angle, but it seems these gallery sites are the only ones that come up in searches when trying to find sites with a more 'newsy' angle.

Hey Mozzers - happy 2013 to one and all, I hope everyone had a great festive season!

Now we're all back into the swing of things, we're in the process of getting our new website up and running. We're a web and graphic design agency, and I'm putting together checklists to ensure we get new projects some coverage where deserved.

There will be a different checklist for the different disciplines - brand design, packaging, web design and so on.

For many of these disciplines, there are multiple news sites that we can reach out to when we have relevant stories - Dieline for packaging, for example.

But for web design, any searches I do either show up CSS Galleries / portfolios (which I already have on the checklist under another section) or web tutorial sites. I don't seem to be able to find decent, trustworthy sites that exclusively feature web news.

I'm sure they exist and it's just a case of 'can't see for looking', but does anyone know of decent sites that carry news stories about new websites going live?

Obviously we know not every new site will be newsworthy - and indeed we wouldn't try to submit every new site we have go live for that very reason - but it would be good to have a clutch of high authority, well visited sites to turn to when we do have something of note.

Any help is much appreciated! Thanks Mozzers!

Hi fellow Mozzers!

I am just in the process of adding various reviews to our site (a design agency), but I wanted to use the ratings in different ways depending on the page.

So for the home page and the services (branding, POS, direct mail etc) I wanted to aggregate relevant reviews (giving us an average of all reviews for the home page, an average of ratings from all brand projects and so on).

Then, I wanted to put specific reviews on our portfolio pages, so the review relates specifically to that project. This is the easiest to do as the hReview generator is geared up for reviews that come from one source, but I can't find a way of aggregating the star ratings to make an average rating rich snippet.

Anyone know where I can get the coding for this?

Thanks in advance!

Nick.

Hi Chris,

Thanks for your response. I have used both Xenu and Screaming Frog before, and they are great for searching a whole site within your niche where every broken link / missing resource is an opportunity. This is probably an easier thing to explain using an example:

We do work for a chain of care homes. If I go to, say www.carehomes.co.uk and check for missing links, I know that all the results will be an opportunity to make contact and build a relationship with a webmaster in the care home niche. So there's no need to filter these, but rather just to work my way through the list trying to build as many valuable new contacts as possible.

But if I run a missing links search on the BBC, it may bring back hundreds or thousands of results, but only one or two will be related to the care homes industry and therefore present an opportunity to reach out. So that's the aspect I'm enquiring about - going to a site that covers a range of topics and quickly finding opportunities within that relate to my niche.

Hi Jon,

Thanks for getting involved - having read your great blog, it's cool to get your take. Love the idea about then building relationships with all the others who link to that missing URL.

But my question remains the same - while I understand that there's more to it than the initial link, and there are greater opportunities when it comes to relationship building as well as link building, I am keen to get a handle on the best way to find missing resources, broken links etc within a certain niche; so I know how to use search modifiers to look up various sites, resources etc within our niche, I'm less clear on how to go to larger sites (BBC, wikis, Mashable etc) that cover many topics and find out whether opportunities are available within my niche.

Also, is there a Firefox friendly tool that's similar to DHP?

Thanks for any extra help you can give!

Hi Chris,

Thanks for your reply. I had stumbled across that site earlier and found it to be very useful. And yes, I agree that the tactic is a great way to outreach and relationship build as well as a simple like for like - although the issue of quickly finding such sites within a certain niche still applies.

It seems that Domain Hunter Plus gets some of the way there, but I'm running Firefox rather than Chrome, so any alternatives would be cool.

Hi fellow mozzers!

In an effort to ensure we're exploring every avenue when launching our new website, I was hoping to find some useful broken links / resources that we could incorporate into our link building.

We have used the standard tools for this (W3C, Xenu etc), but they all seem to have the same issue in that they reveal all the missing links on a site (although some don't actually tell you the page they are on), but you still have to sort them to see if the links/ resource is related to your theme.

When you're on a niche site, this obviously isn't an issue, but on a site like Mashable (to use the example given in a recent SEOmoz blog) it could result in wading through hundreds of links to find one relevant one right at the end.

Is there a tool that allows you to specify what theme links you are looking for from a site, or better yet one that allows you to check multiple sites for multiple missing themed links in one go?

Or is the best way to export the list and just search the document for certain keywords?

Cheers Ryan,

That's kind of what I suspected - most of the best practice things that also affect SEO in some way (alt tags etc) we're already doing, and we were going to put together a press release highlighting the extra accessibility lengths we've gone to that will hopefully get a bit of attention. So as long as I'm not missing anything, that's cool!

Thanks for those links Ryan. the W3C is what we us for checking DDA compliance, but I guess it's good to have other sources as a sanity check. My question, however, largely relates to the Google Accessibility search and the SEO benefits of ensuring we're compliant? As I said, I could only find old posts on the subject so I didn't know if it had gone the way of other Google initiatives from days gone by?

Thanks for that, looks very thorough. I should probably have pointed out that all our sites are DDA compliant anyway, but given this company runs care homes it seems more important - especially if it gives us a rankings edge over the competition.

Hello there,

One of the sites we do work for is a chain of care homes. We are in the process of adding a page reader so any visitors they have who are visually impaired will find it easier to access the info they need.

We're doing this from a usability point of view more than anything (given their target audience), but while looking to see if there were any accessibility news sites /directories we could leverage for some links I came across mentions of the old Google Accessibility search. It seems to have been before my time as an SEO, so I wondered:

• is this still relevant, or has it just been assimilated into the regular algorithm (the only mentions I could find were very dated)

• if relevant and separate from the main search, are there many who use it

• what other things should we take into account when trying to optimise for this (assuming it's still relevant, of course)

Cheers guys!

Hi Dan,

I had been looking into both of these tools, but UBL seemed to have prompted a fair few people to say they'd paid the listing fee but had never seen their citations appear, so I'd put that on the backburner.

As for the Express Update USA, we're based in the UK - do you know of an equivalent?

Cheers!

Hi fellow mozzers!

We are currently relaunching our website and are in the process of ensuring all our local citations are up to date and consistent. In doing so, I've noticed that there are still countless listings under our old address, which probably isn't doing our local rankings a whole world of good!

I have been hunting these down by searching "company name" "old address" to bring up any references, but I wondered if there was a tool to find these quicker, in the same way Whitespark finds citation sources to begin with? Similarly, is there a tool that flags up listings that have the correct NAP info, but that has maybe been formatted differently enough so as to cause consistency probs?

Thanks all!

Hello fellow Mozzers!

I just wondered if there was any way of finding out what terms / videos people are searching YouTube for in the same way as getting rough traffic numbers using the AdWords Keyword Suggestion tool? Or even a trends-type tool to give rough indicators as to which terms are currently more popular than others.

And what people's opinions are on whether to go after terms that people are frequently putting into YouTube, or terms that are popular in general and hope your video appears in the universal search?

Cheers guys,

Nick.

Hi Barry,

Thanks for your swift response on this. The pages certainly seem to be getting cached correctly, and when we initially took over the SEO and made wholesale changes to the site, there were huge improvements, so it looks for all the world like the main pages at least are being looked at.

But I think you make a good point about getting it solved anyway so we can identify any problems that may be occurring / will occur later.

Hello all!

While doing some routine health checks on a few of our client sites, I spotted that a new client of ours - who's website was not designed built by us - is returning a 500 internal server error when I try to look at the robots.txt file.

As we don't host / maintain their site, I would have to go through their head office to get this changed, which isn't a problem but I just wanted to check whether this error will actually be having a negative effect on their site / whether there's a benefit to getting this changed?

Thanks in advance!

Hi there. We've been approached by a company called AdInsight, selling their Clarity product for tracking phone calls. It seems to offer a great solution in terms of knowing what keywords are actually effective, and would be particularly useful for a number of our clients whose websites have traditionally low conversion rates on the sites themselves, but which (anecdotally, at least) seem to drive business.

I read up on the kinds of software these products usually use, and found numerous concerns on the negative effects on local search (which is why I looked it up to begin with). Their rep, who talked me through the system, said part of the set up involves setting a default number for people without Javascript, and that each number is used once so is unlikely to be indexed.

I then asked if this counted as cloaking, and he assured me that numerous SEO companies use this product, as do major websites with large internal web teams, and that they would not do anything to compromise their sites. My question is two-fold:

1. Has anyone used this product, and if so did it have negative effects on the local search side of things.

2. Would this count as cloaking, or is it an accepted method of tracking web conversions?

Thanks in advance

Another thing that has occurred to me with this - it's not so much whether the links are passing value / negative value, but more that the anchor text is telling the search engines that our site may be a place to buy viagra, vicodin etc - and surely that's never a good thing?

Thanks for your response. We are obviously about to start on the white hat link building side of things - that was how I stumbled upon all the spammy links. According to OSE, they are actually passing quite a lot of benefit, but I would think this is only for a limited period of time.

Unfortunately they do seem to point to the homepage in about 99% of cases, so the 404 is not an option. Also, I can't really see what these other sites are getting out of the set up - they are linking to us with terms implying we sell viagra, vicodin etc, when we're a five star hotel. Seems very odd?

Hi there. We have recently taken over the SEO for a five-star hotel who rank very well already for a lot of their main terms, largely down to the fact they have decent off-site strength (as yet very little on-page optimisation has been done, so they aren't appearing for some quite key terms). This off-page strength includes around 2000 links, giving the home page an authority of 63 in the OSE tool. However, upon looking at the links to check they were pointing to the most relevant page etc, I notice they have A LOT of spammy links, pointing to their site with anchor text like 'cheap cialis' or 'buy valium'.

Clearly these aren't the kinds of links that should be pointing to a five-star hotel, but should I expect to see much of a drop by attempting to remove these links? We obviously want to clean their link portfolio up, but I'm not sure they would be too happy if all their top rankings disappeared - even if only temporarily, and even if done with the best intentions.

I ask as none of the other sites we handle SEO for have had such a proliferation of these links, so I've not seen the ramifications in full.

Any help would be much appreciated, along with advice on the best way to remove these links.

That's very odd then. When I get a mo, I'll do a screen grab so you can see what I'm seeing, but that may not be until Monday.

What if you paste this into the address bar?

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&hs=9W5&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&channel=s&biw=938&bih=816&q=hotels+near+henley&aq=f&aqi=g6g-v4&aql=&oq=

Hi Ryan,

The option comes up when I search for 'hotels near henley', but I also didn't get it when looking for London hotels, which probably implies it's tied to certain searches that are more specific than just having hotel in them, which seems odd. You'd think if there was a use they for them, they would be in all travel-based enquiries?

I have just noticed, while checking where our hotel clients rank for certain keywords, and noticed a panel on the left hand side called Travel dates. There was a check in and check out option which could be populated manually or by using a drop down calendar. But there's no submit button or anything like that. What is this panel for, and can any benefit be had from it, because from what I can see it doesn't actually do anything (unless it's not displaying properly on my computer?

Hello fellow mozzers,

Our in-house CMS - which is usually good for SEO purposes as it allows all the control over directories, filenames, browser titles etc that prevent unwieldy / meaningless URLs and generic title tags - seems to have got itself into a bit of a tiz when it comes to one of our clients.

We have tried solving the problem to no avail, so I thought I'd throw it open and see if anyone has a soultion, or whether it's just a fault in our CMS.

Basically, the SEs are indexing two identical pages, one ending with a / and the other ending /index.php, for one of our sites (www.signature-care-homes.co.uk).

We have gone through the site and made sure the links all point to just one of these, and have done the same for off-site links, but there is still the duplicate content issue of both versions getting indexed.

We also set up an htaccess file to redirect to the chosen version, but to no avail, and we're not sure canonical will work for this issue as / pages should redirect to /index.php anyway - and that's we can't work out. We have set the access file to point to index.php, and that should be what should be happening anyway, but it isn't.

Is there an alternative way of telling the SE's to only look at one of these two versions?

Also, we are currently rewriting the content and changing the structure - will this change the situation we find ourselves in?

Thanks for your prompt reply - it pretty much confirmed what I thought. As far as the footprint goes, that's not too much of an issue - we have all the clients listed on our site anyway, so it's no huge drama for people to find this out. Also, we don't work with anyone we would be happy to shout about.

Something on the About Us, or possibly the news page for new sites, could be doable. I guess the only thing that caused confusion was the paragraph in the book that implied the authors' experiments showed differing location pages and anchor text throughout the site was treated somewhat nearer linear instead of being ignored.

Hi there. I'm just re-reading The Art of SEO to ensure we have everything in place for our own website relaunch, and there was something that left me slightly confused with regards to sitewide links.

As a web design company, a lot of our links come from sitewides on client websites, currently in the pages' footer region.

Would these count as sitewide links, and would varying the target page and/or anchor text make these links count for more and be less of a red flag?

Alternatively, is there a way we can get credit from the sites we have designed without running the risk of having our links marked down or ignored altogether by the search engines?

(As an aside, it doesn't seem to have affected us so far, although it is obvious that only a small percentage of the inbound links are passing any real value - again, is this something we can rectify somehow?)