Hello Miriam,

Yes, the firm name conflicts with same term for B.Sc. I am readying a document where I suggest we change the business name and at first I thought, "we could just go to a different URL," but then I realized that doesn't change all the content with BSC in it.

I agree the key is searcher intent and that is what validates at least having a discussion about changing the company name.

Thanks as always for your great insight.

Robert

I am currently perplexed over a client's search results. They are an established company and well known in their field. (Unfortunately, I am not comfortable providing a link or their name.) The company is a consulting firm and let's assume it is an accounting firm, which it is not. When you search on BSC Accounting the results give them the first result but the next 18 results are around education - BSc Accounting. Consider the DA on the site is 34 and the PA for homepage is 39.

Is there a chance that when someone is searching on accounting firms that having the BSC in the name skews what they are able to rank for? Forget about searches for their exact name, I am more interested in thoughts as to how the BSC effects general searches for their specialties.

OK Fine. You are right and I hate it. 
As I started to read, I went duhhhh. Yesterday I blocked third party cookies when I was testing something and forgot to change it.

Thanks for the assist and double thumbs up to you!

Anyone having issues with the Moz bar? Lately no matter how many times I log in, getting data is difficult as it keeps asking me to create an acct. or log in. Even logged into Moz and on Q&A it is asking me to log in.

THanks

I was doing some KW research for a client and noticed something interesting with regard to Yelp and Justia. For a search on DWI Attorneys, they each had over 300 character meta descriptions showing on the SERP without truncating. Everyone else was either truncated or within limit of roughly 160 characters. Obviously if there is a way to get something other than a list to show that way you can own some real estate. Would love to hear from some of you Mozzers on this. Here are two images that should assist.

Best

Edit: I found one that was not a directory site and it appears it is Google doing it. The site has no meta description for the home page and this is what is being pulled by Google. There are 327 characters here! The truncation marks are showing it being pulled from different parts of the page. Image is Killeen DWI Attorney.

NOTE None of these are clients, etc. I also changed the cities so this is a general search.

zAQpA qZ9KI 06p7U

Assuming it makes navigational sense, I don't think there is a problem. If you have other healthcare solutions beyond just identity, it would make sense.

Hope that helps,

Based solely on how you have written this, it is hard to believe it is algo change or any type of penalty. If you are ranking in the same places and CTR is same, it would seem that overall traffic for those terms is down. I realize it is not yet a month but have you checked the terms in Adwords to see if traffic is off this month?

Best,

I would be shocked if it were an issue based on what you have here. I think you are fine.

Robert

Yes and No,

You said to the same website so are the urls redirecting to pages that are similar to the ones that they are directed to? Multiple must be defined, but let's say it is 30 and they are going to similar pages on the site; there is no problem.

If you simply got a bunch of sites that had lost their domain and they all have disparate content, then you could be setting yourself up for a problem. Could be is the operative term though. We took over a client who had roughly 100 "micro-sites." They were all for the same service and were not strong sites. For most we redirected only the home pages and let the other pages 404. For a few sites we let them die and for a couple the client refused to let us take them down (even though they had no traffic!).

I hope that helps a bit.

Rosemary,

People have a hard time with these questions because there can be more than one answer.

--The answer is rough but I hope it makes sense.--

I'd say it should be removed, although the best way to use that markup might be to mark up the actual html that is displayed rather than duplicating all of the "main content" inside of a JSON schema tag.

Does it make sense for the JSON to look like below when you have the content already present on the page and could mark it up in the traditional tag format?

|

<scripttype="application ld+json"=""></scripttype="application>

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| |

{

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| |

"@context": "http://schema.org",

|
| |

"@type": "WebSite",

|
| |

"url": "https://www.example.com/",

|
| |

"name" : "Example Group",

|
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"alternateName" : "Example Enviro Group",

|
| |

"potentialAction": {

|
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"@type": "SearchAction",

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| |

"target": "https://www.example.com/?s={search_term_string}",

|
| |

"query-input": "required name=search_term_string"

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| |

}

"mainContentOfPage":"

Lorem ipsum metus ullamcorper viverra. Aliquam

Curabitur at lacus et quam scelerisque consequat. Vestibulum semper et ex quis commodo. Vestibulum lacinia ultricies neque et facilisis. Pellentesque feugiat luctus diam, et mollis elit posuere posuere. Nulla mattis libero lectus, at consequat sapien semper non. Duis lacinia mollis eros, in pulvinar enim interdum ac."

|
| |

}

|
| | |

Let me know if that helps... or not! Sorry for the layout issues, I think you will still get it.

Robert

I am going to start putting the wrong keywords in. So on a physician site for lipo, my keywords will be: Saw 2, barbequed ribs, Halloween 3, Dexter, cannibals, etc.

Can't wait to see that competitor rank now!

Thanks EGOL!

Well,

Sorry, your understanding is incorrect. Domain authority is just that, an overall value for the domain. So, if you go to a site where the links all come to a home page or the vast majority do, you are going to see a high PA for the home page PA. If that same site has 50 pages with few links you are going to see a lot of PA=1.

So, while the home page is important it does not outweigh the fact that overall the site is not that highly trafficked. This is a reason sites have trouble with conversions of inner pages sometimes.  All the value is placed on the home page and someone then has 500 internal links from that page so it does not even help the inner pages.

Remember this in the search engine world pages are ranked and not sites. So, PA is more important from that point of view.

Hope this clarifies,

Best

AWCthreads

I hate these kinds of discussions ... because I just have to respond. Its as if I have the angel on one side and the devil on the other - move on dude, no, no, say something (you know you have a perfect opinion)... etc.

But, what I find interesting about the post of VC is that it is only meant for one thing: to sell him and his stuff. The "I only did this because my 0 page rank two page sites were outranking my ..." etc.

When he talks about the 6 clients he has with 50 websites, and he says to people like me:  "I’m a huge fan, but what Rand recently advocated on his blog is just…totally misguided the total opposite to what is really working right now." and

"While I can understand that preaching “build good content, focus on growing your brand’ sounds great and it’s what people want to hear, for a HUGE percentage of search phrases, this is just no longer relevant. I just can’t take anyone seriously who mentions these things anymore in 2013"

Really? You can't? What do you take seriously? I have copywriters on staff so you can guess where I fall in the content debate (I did not realize there was one). At the end of the day, any site, any page is subject to one thing that rules the day no matter how super clever you are with SEO: If you answer a query in the meta description and then you give the person who clicked on it exactly what they wanted, you are going to do just fine with ranking at some point and probably some point soon. 
People make statements like this guy does to drive traffic. That is what he is doing. He mentions not using Rand's surname as if he is a stand up guy, but do a non personalized search on Rand and tell me what you come up with. Then do Rand, SEO and tell me. There are so many Rand's in the world...not.

So, let the guy have his few seconds to sell him and his knowledge. The easiest way to sell knowledge is to tear down others. Someone will always listen. So, quit listening to the dummies who say things from the Franklin mint will not appreciate, go by that coin set they just made - you are gonna be rich!!!!

Best

My personal opinion is that you can do either, but I would go with the hyphen.com. The reason for me is simple it is easier to read. That said, you will shortly have other opinions and they will revolve around being spammy. There is no increase or decrease in SEO value and I have yet to see any quantification of the spammy factor and any effect on CTR or conversions. But, I don't think the hyphen will out perform the non hyphen.net. I think all things being equal, they will be equal.

Best

It is really quite a simple answer. In WMT, Google gives you the answers for targeting a specific country. Frankly, Google did not require your server to be in the country you were targeting in 2012... Remember, Google is not saying any of these is the end all or be all of geo targeting. They state clearly each is a signal and each signal has a given weight.

The first indicator if you base it off of what Google says (and your question seems to be anchored by the search behemoth)... ccTLD is the first indicator they mention. Google further states it is a STRONG signal. Next is geo targeting. The fact that there is an option to tell them where you want to target and that it is second would seem to indicate that server location was less relevant than you waving a flag and screaming: Hey Google! Hook me up in Russia please! 
The third (But not last) signal is... server location, but they are very clear about this being not as strong a signal when they state, "Some websites use distributed content delivery networks (CDNs) or are hosted in a country with better webserver infrastructure, so it is not a definitive signal."

And, finally, there are other on page signals that Google can use to determine where you are targeting like phone and addresses on the pages, language, etc. (If your server is in the US, your site is a generic TLD, you have not geo targeted in WMT, and the entire site is written in Urdu, it is likely not going to rank well in Lithuania, but would have the ability to rank in Pakistan or Bangladesh).

Now the winner is ... sorry, YOUR PARTNER. Please by him a nice 5 button, 2000 vintage, Tokaji as a compliment to his SEO prowess...this time.

Best,

Robert

Typically, our SEO questions are around "how to's" and etc. So, to change it up I will ask a business question: What is your biggest selling point when presenting your SEO services to a new client?

In a spirit of transparency, I will tell you mine ahead of time. With PPC, TV, Radio, and Print at some point in time that ad comes to an end. When it ends, that is it. There is no residual from that advertisement - or very minimal at best. With SEO, once you are ranked well and well optimized you continue to get clients for a much longer period of time.

With clients who TV and print, this rings especially true and is easily provable. I can't wait to hear yours.

Luis,

I am going to suggest you find other ways of getting links. Your first line is a major redflag: I am looking for a community eager to exchange links. I believe the folks at Google would see your effort as a scheme to build pagerank... 

Given that I have gone to your site and see you have some decent links and PA/DA, why risk it with taking the easy way out?

Good Luck,

Robert

Assuming it makes navigational sense, I don't think there is a problem. If you have other healthcare solutions beyond just identity, it would make sense.

Hope that helps,

Immanuel

It appears you did not 301 your urls from the old site to the new when you were in Development. Now, you literally have the same url twice. I followed the sitelink for Coffee by Segafredo and landed on Segafredo.com.au/coffee/ see screenshot with Segafredo from sitelink. Then, in a new window, I went to the domain link you provided and added /coffee/ and got the second image.

When you design a new site you need to insure you take care of the url's from the previous so as to maintain the link juice from each. I believe the one with the beans actually has a PA of 36. the new one has a PA of 1. You need this link juice or you will lose all your rankings. EDIT TO ADD EMPHASIS - Do not wait, you need to act now.

You are using IIS and you need to follow the how to's for 301's on an IIS server. You can still fix this. Where is the other site hosted? Do you still have it, the FTP files, etc.?

Let me know and I will give you some direction.

Best, Robert

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Prestashop,

While I appreciate the response, I never find name calling or creating derogative terms for people, companies, etc. to provide the clarity that we all need. (Calling them scummy or saying they should be damaged -sued- doesn't help things.)

I have clients who do have success with them and in most instances, when there has been an issue, I have found them to be mid range helpful. Certainly, if there is an erroneous review about a client company and you have the proof, they have removed them. My concern came when I was investigating an issue of my own and saw several people complaining about their reviews being removed.

I have been a regular Yelp contributor for a while and had a very serious $30K issue with the company who I was going to review. After I posted the review in several of their locations, the company began trying to resolve the issue for the first time. (It is still not fully resolved at all.) But, I just found Yelp had removed the bad reviews and I am positive they are valid as I wrote them and have the proof to all I wrote. But, just like the customers without my resources to fight back, my reviews were removed too.

I have written Yelp and requested a response from them. I am simply wanting to know if others have experienced the same or similar.

Thanks