Hi!
Could you give any details about the page or key terms? How competitive are the main terms? Can you disclose the site?
Any messages in Google Webmaster Console?
How is your traffic in your analytics? Has it dropped, or is it doing OK still?
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Hi!
Could you give any details about the page or key terms? How competitive are the main terms? Can you disclose the site?
Any messages in Google Webmaster Console?
How is your traffic in your analytics? Has it dropped, or is it doing OK still?
How about focusing on the keywords and products that make you money?
My husband sells kits for model warships that shoot and sink each other. A high-volume keyword would be battleship, but that doesn't get us any sales. A low volume keyword would be uss iowa 1:144 scale turret cover, but that's a low-priced item that's not going to help us too much. For us, a different keyword makes much more sense.
You might want to check out my profile links. My husband was just down in Houston in July for a national battle, but I don't see any more battles planned down that way for the rest of the year.
That's a bit of a broad question, and requires knowledge of the client, their competitive landscape, etc. Some of our guides at http://moz.com/learn/seo are a good place to start to get some ideas of where to go with your client.
Moz doesn't have this, but there are a number of tools you can use for this purpose. Xenu Link Sleuth and Screaming Frog both will help you in this process.
I think you're saying you have
mainwebsitethatsellsstuff.com
securesubdomainof.mainwebsitethatsellsstuff.com
and that you want to keep the main domain, and remove the subdomain, and that it's not a case of http vs https with the URL otherwise being the same, right?
You can verify a subdomain in Google Webmaster Tools and remove the entire subdomain. I've had to do this for a dev subdomain that accidentally got indexed. I was able to keep the main domain, and remove the subdomain. The key is to verify that subdomain, and leave the main domain alone, provided I'm understanding your question correctly.
Just to make sure there's not a technical issue, the page isn't noindexed, or you don't have an images directory blocked in robots.txt, correct?
Hi! I do know why things have dropped. We released a new index last week, and it was a little bit smaller than the previous index. A smaller index means seeing fewer links, and thus less domain authority. It's nothing to worry about, since everyone went down about the same amount.
It's happening to staff too, so we're all well aware of the problem. I'll contact that team when I'm in the office today (on the bus at the moment) and see if I can get an update for when this might be fixed.
If you pull out dotbot from your exclusions, you should be fine.
Is your website on Wordpress or another CMS? If so, is there any caching plugin you can use? Can you strip out any extra images temporarily until your traffic dies down, to help reduce your bandwidth being used?
The search engine crawlers don't always get to all of the pages on your site at the exact time. The one page may get crawled more frequently than the other, so the other one may take a bit before it shows the updates. Google crawls the homepage of Amazon and eBay much more frequently than they would some obscure interior page, for example.
Have you made any changes to your website? Could it be that perhaps the analytics code was removed from a few pages?
Your title says Google is no longer promoting your website. Has your traffic from Bing or Yahoo changed? Has direct traffic changed?
This post from Stephanie Chang on How Should You Handle Expired Content may be helpful.
The campaigns can take a few hours to a couple of days to migrate. If you're still not seeing them there in a couple of days, please email [email protected] and we'll investigate for you.
The Mozscape index currently updates about once a month. It can take 1-2 updates for your links to show up. We don't have as deep as an index as Google, so we may not see all of the links. Do also verify your site in Google Webmaster Tools and check there for your links.
In case it is WordPress, here are a couple of posts about how to optimize the site for heavy traffic. Can you then go to your host and say that you've reduced the file sizes on images, are loading fewer items, etc. and then turn the website back on?
http://codex.wordpress.org/High_Traffic_Tips_For_WordPress
http://wpengine.com/2012/02/22/how-to-prepare-wordpress-for-an-onslaught-of-traffic/
http://speed.wpengine.com/ (for when the site is enabled)
Barry at Search Engine Roundtable has written about Google choosing their own page titles for your site, and I've seen reports of it here as well, so you're certainly not alone. Here's what Barry has written:
http://www.seroundtable.com/google-title-selection-12989.html
It's less accurate than what a teenager tells their parents is going to happen on prom night. It's not accurate at all, and Google has said this for years. Rand actually wrote about it four years ago at http://moz.com/blog/google-link-command-busting-the-myths.
Thanks for letting us know. I have no idea if there is a problem with this or not, but I've passed it along to our legal team.
It's broken. I'm sending out an alert and we'll be on it as soon as we can. It may be a little bit, as it's about 3:30 in the morning in Seattle right now. Thanks for your patience!
Hi! Are you looking for places you can join and offer your services, or are you looking for places that can help you with your website? Is there any specific specialty you're looking for?
I can't speak for the search engines, but users take the value of good grammar seriously. If you're writing about a subject, proper spelling and grammar make a huge difference in having people trust you and be willing to buy from you or sign up for your services.
They are extreme examples, but Adobe Reader ranks for "click here" because of all of the links pointing to it with "click here" to download adobe acrobat since the beginning of (web) time. Same with Disney and Yahoo ranking for "click here to exit", as adult/liquor sites often have a click to enter if you're over 18, and click to exit if you don't want to visit that site, and they'll link to Disney or Yahoo.
Have you read Dr. Pete's post at http://moz.com/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many yet?
It looks like the site was just registered in January, which means it's fairly new. Moz updates their index about once a month, so it takes a little while to crawl and display the links. In addition, Moz isn't able to crawl the entire web (though their index is getting a lot bigger), so they may miss some of your links.
My personal opinion is not to worry about it, but I'll ask around here for a second opinion from someone with a little more experience in this space.
You can also help make sure that your ad shows for the most relevant search terms by using negative keywords. An absurd example, but if you are advertising for furniture you want to show up for "night stand" but want to be sure to have a negative for "one night stand". They can't click if your ad doesn't show.
I'd verify your site in Google and Bing webmaster tools and see if there are any messages there.
I'd also look and take serious stock of your content. I see other sites having the same content -- I don't know who the original source is, but I wasn't able to find any content that was unique to just your site.
Often times, Google views the meta description as more of a suggestion than a command. They'll show a different snippet depending on your search query, and there's really nothing you can do about it. Same for the title tag, they'll even change what shows in the SERPs for huge companies like Apple.
The Google on/off tag is only good for their search appliance, which you use to run internal searches on your own site, and doesn't affect Google's main index.
To see if you did it correctly, put in the non-www domain into a server header checker like http://www.seoconsultants.com/tools/check-server-headers-tool/ and see if it uses a 301 redirect to redirect to the www domain (or vice versa, if you set it to remove the www).
If that didn't work, we're happy to help walk you through doing this! What we'll need from you is a little more information about your server. Specifically, if you're using IIS or Apache, and if you're using a content management system. That will help us give you the right info if you still need help.
Being a Moz employee, I'm just a tad bit biased here, but I would recommend this Q&A forum as well. There's a higher barrier to entry here (you need to be a Pro member or have 500 Moz Points to ask and answer questions), and it's moderated by several paid employees and associates. Rand himself often stops in to answer questions, as well as a variety of industry experts.
Though try 'free drug' and 'drug free'. Word order does matter a tad for that one.
It will show up as N/A in the toolbar until the next time Google updates what it displays to the user in the toolbar. This can be several months behind what the true PageRank is, and can be inaccurate. Google has admitted that the PR displayed on the toolbar is not always accurate, and has been that way for years.
This has been a feature for several years, though I believe it's one that Google chooses whether to enable for you. There's a post about when it first came out at http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/search-within-site-tale-of.html.
LunaMetrics is a respected company. I worked for a non-profit in the San Francisco Bay Area that received some consulting from them, and saw them give a couple of hours of training in Pittsburgh when I attended a non-profit conference there. I've actually linked to their blog often in the Q&A section. They just worked with Raven Tools (Taylor Pratt used to work for LunaMetrics) to put together the GA configuration site that was released yesterday.
Jeff, it's actually a different situation here. A couple of weeks ago, a large number of links stopped showing for many people in GWT, but their rankings stayed the same. In this poster's case, the actual rankings are changing.
Roger is very reluctant to delete questions, and feels that it most cases, it's not TAGFEE to do so. Usually by the time the original poster wants to delete a question, there are multiple responses, and deleting the questions would also remove the effort the other community members have put in to answer the question, and remove the opportunity for other people to learn from the experience.
You don't want a copy of your website out there. Ask your developers to block that demo server in robots.txt, and consider putting a password on it as well just for extra security.
We're aiming to have it out next week!
I just have to hope EGOL never gets interested in selling model warships, otherwise I'm going to have to really up my game on my website!
Do you have any conversion events or conversion tracking in place? Any way to look in your analytics or paid advertising and show the boss that "hey, people coming in that searched for 'liquidation' have fewer page views, lower conversion, and higher bounce rate than those who come in for '[specific term] liquidation"? Because you'll get people who are searching for information for physics class, people who are searching for sales happening at a local mall, etc.
Egol echoes what I was going to write. Would you trust someone else with a major portion of your website?
What immediately came to mind was this MySpace incident with John McCain in 2007. http://techcrunch.com/2007/03/27/john-mccains-myspace-page-hacked/
See what MythBusters and Dirty Jobs have done regarding these subjects and see if that offers inspiration. MythBusters has at least once done an episode on exploding water heaters. Enough people like how Mike Rowe can clean a dump truck and recycle toilets that he (and Discovery) can make a nice living. Here are a bunch of his episodes http://www.dirtyjobsmikerowe.com/dvds/. Maybe see how he treats topics in your subject area for ideas?
Take a look at http://www.seobythesea.com/ for nitty-gritty about patents and how they might affect search. I also read http://searchengineland.com/ for their detailed articles and http://www.seroundtable.com/ for breaking news about what people in the forums (especially webmaster help forums) are saying and new features the search engines are implementing.
I've only found one other question in Q&A that mentions Treepodia, from someone who has used it before. You might contact the author of http://www.seomoz.org/q/video-seo-youtube-vs-3rd-party-hosting-with-video-sitemap to see how it worked for them.
With a bounce rate that low, do you by chance have multiple GA tracking scripts, or something that's triggering an event even if no one goes to another page? Look at the source code when you're in incognito mode, in case your CMS suppresses one of the GA codes when you're logged in as admin.
[voice of experience and learning the hard way here!]