seo

Posted by Dr-Pete

When you’re faced with the many thousands of potential issues a large site can have, where do you start? This is the question we tried to tackle when we rebuilt Site Crawl. The answer depends almost entirely on your site and can require deep knowledge of its history and goals, but I’d like to outline a process that can help you cut through the noise and get started.

Simplistic can be dangerous

Previously, we at Moz tried to label every issue as either high, medium, or low priority. This simplistic approach can be appealing, even comforting, and you may be wondering why we moved away from it. This was a very conscious decision, and it boils down to a couple of problems.

First, prioritization depends a lot on your intent. Misinterpreting your intent can lead to bad advice that ranges from confusing to outright catastrophic. Let’s say, for example, that we hired a brand-new SEO at Moz and they saw the following issue count pop up:

Almost 35,000 NOINDEX tags?! WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN?!!

If that new SEO then rushed to remove those tags, they’d be doing a lot of damage, not realizing that the vast majority of those directives are intentional. We can make our systems smarter, but they can’t read your mind, so we want to be cautious about false alarms.

Second, bucketing issues by priority doesn’t do much to help you understand the nature of those problems or how to go about fixing them. We now categorize Site Crawl issues into one of five descriptive types:

• Critical Crawler Issues
• Crawler Warnings
• Redirect Issues
• Metadata Issues
• Content Issues

Categorizing by type allows you to be more tactical. The issues in our new “Redirect” category, for example, are going to have much more in common, which means they potentially have common fixes. Ultimately, helping you find problems is just step one. We want to do a better job at helping you fix them.

1. Start with Critical Crawler Issues

That’s not to say everything is subjective. Some problems block crawlers (not just ours, but search engines) from getting to your pages at all. We’ve grouped these “Critical Crawler Issues” into our first category, and they currently include 5XX errors, 4XX errors, and redirects to 4XX. If you have a sudden uptick in 5XX errors, you need to know, and almost no one intentionally redirects to a 404.

You’ll see Critical Crawler Issues highlighted throughout the Site Crawl interface:

Look for the red alert icon to spot critical issues quickly. Address these problems first. If a page can’t be crawled, then every other crawler issue is moot.

2. Balance issues with prevalence

When it comes to solving your technical SEO issues, we also have to balance severity with quantity. Knowing nothing else about your site, I would say that a 404 error is probably worth addressing before duplicate content — but what if you have eleven 404s and 17,843 duplicate pages? Your priorities suddenly look very different.

At the bottom of the Site Crawl home, check out “Moz Recommends Fixing”:

We’ve already done some of the math for you, weighting urgency by how prevalent the issue is. This does require some assumptions about prioritization, but if your time is limited, we hope it at least gives you a quick starting point to solve a couple of critical issues.

3. Solve multi-page issues

There’s another advantage to tackling issues with high counts. In many cases, you might be able to solve issues on hundreds (or even thousands) of pages with a single fix. This is where a more tactical approach can save you a lot of time and money.

Let’s say, for example, that I want to dig into my 916 pages on Moz.com missing meta descriptions. I immediately notice that some of these pages are blog post categories. So, I filter by URL:

I can quickly see that these pages account for 392 of my missing descriptions — a whopping 43% of them. If I’m concerned about this problem, then it’s likely that I could solve it with a fairly simple CMS page, wiping out hundreds of issues with a few lines of code.

In the near future, we hope to do some of this analysis for you, but if filtering isn’t doing the job, you can also export any list of issues to CSV. Then, pivot and filter to your heart’s content.

4. Dive into pages by PA & crawl depth

If you can’t easily spot clear patterns, or if you’ve solved some of those big issues, what next? Fixing thousands of problems one URL at a time is only worthwhile if you know those URLs are important.

Fortunately, you can now sort by Page Authority (PA) and Crawl Depth in Site Crawl. PA is our own internal metric of ranking ability (primarily powered by link equity), and Crawl Depth is the distance of a page from the home-page:

Here, I can see that there’s a redirect chain in one of our MozBar URLs, which is a very high-authority page. That’s probably one worth fixing, even if it isn’t part of an obvious, larger group.

5. Watch for spikes in new issues

Finally, as time goes on, you’ll also want to be alert to new issues, especially if they appear in large numbers. This could indicate a sudden and potentially damaging change. Site Crawl now makes tracking new issues easy, including alert icons, graphs, and a quick summary of new issues by category:

Any crawl is going to uncover some new pages (the content machine never rests), but if you’re suddenly seeing hundreds of new issues of a single type, it’s important to dig in quickly and make sure nothing’s wrong. In a perfect world, the SEO team would always know what changes other people and teams made to the site, but we all know it’s not a perfect world.

I hope this gives you at least a few ideas for how to quickly dive into your site’s technical SEO issues. If you’re an existing customer, you already have access to Moz’s new Site Crawl and all of the features discussed in this post.

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Posted by Dr-Pete

First, the good news — as of today, all Moz Pro customer have access to the new version of Site Crawl, our entirely rebuilt deep site crawler and technical SEO auditing platform. The bad news? There isn’t any. It’s bigger, better, faster, and you won’t pay an extra dime for it.

A moment of humility, though — if you’ve used our existing site crawl, you know it hasn’t always lived up to your expectations. Truth is, it hasn’t lived up to ours, either. Over a year ago, we set out to rebuild the back end crawler, but we realized quickly that what we wanted was an entirely re-imagined crawler, front and back, with the best features we could offer. Today, we launch the first version of that new crawler.

Code name: Aardwolf

The back end is entirely new. Our completely rebuilt “Aardwolf” engine crawls twice as fast, while digging much deeper. For larger accounts, it can support up to ten parallel crawlers, for actual speeds of up to 20X the old crawler. Aardwolf also fully supports SNI sites (including Cloudflare), correcting a major shortcoming of our old crawler.

View/search *all* URLs

One major limitation of our old crawler is that you could only see pages with known issues. Click on “All Crawled Pages” in the new crawler, and you’ll be brought to a list of every URL we crawled on your site during the last crawl cycle:

You can sort this list by status code, total issues, Page Authority (PA), or crawl depth. You can also filter by URL, status codes, or whether or not the page has known issues. For example, let’s say I just wanted to see all of the pages crawled for Moz.com in the “/blog” directory…

I just click the [+], select “URL,” enter “/blog,” and I’m on my way.

Do you prefer to slice and dice the data on your own? You can export your entire crawl to CSV, with additional data including per-page fetch times and redirect targets.

Recrawl your site immediately

Sometimes, you just can’t wait a week for a new crawl. Maybe you relaunched your site or made major changes, and you have to know quickly if those changes are working. No problem, just click “Recrawl my site” from the top of any page in the Site Crawl section, and you’ll be on your way…

Starting at our Medium tier, you’ll get 10 recrawls per month, in addition to your automatic weekly crawls. When the stakes are high or you’re under tight deadlines for client reviews, we understand that waiting just isn’t an option. Recrawl allows you to verify that your fixes were successful and refresh your crawl report.

Ignore individual issues

As many customers have reminded us over the years, technical SEO is not a one-sized-fits-all task, and what’s critical for one site is barely a nuisance for another. For example, let’s say I don’t care about a handful of overly dynamic URLs (for many sites, it’s a minor issue). With the new Site Crawl, I can just select those issues and then “Ignore” them (see the green arrow for location):

If you make a mistake, no worries — you can manage and restore ignored issues. We’ll also keep tracking any new issues that pop up over time. Just because you don’t care about something today doesn’t mean you won’t need to know about it a month from now.

Fix duplicate content

Under “Content Issues,” we’ve launched an entirely new duplicate content detection engine and a better, cleaner UI for navigating that content. Duplicate content is now automatically clustered, and we do our best to consistently detect the “parent” page. Here’s a sample from Moz.com:

You can view duplicates by the total number of affected pages, PA, and crawl depth, and you can filter by URL. Click on the arrow (far-right column) for all of the pages in the cluster (shown in the screenshot). Click anywhere in the current table row to get a full profile, including the source page we found that link on.

Prioritize quickly & tactically

Prioritizing technical SEO problems requires deep knowledge of a site. In the past, in the interest of simplicity, I fear that we’ve misled some of you. We attempted to give every issue a set priority (high, medium, or low), when the difficult reality is that what’s a major problem on one site may be deliberate and useful on another.

With the new Site Crawl, we decided to categorize crawl issues tactically, using five buckets:

• Critical Crawler Issues
• Crawler Warnings
• Redirect Issues
• Metadata Issues
• Content Issues

Hopefully, you can already guess what some of these contain. Critical Crawler Issues still reflect issues that matter first to most sites, such as 5XX errors and redirects to 404s. Crawler Warnings represent issues that might be very important for some sites, but require more context, such as meta NOINDEX.

Prioritization often depends on scope, too. All else being equal, one 500 error may be more important than one duplicate page, but 10,000 duplicate pages is a different matter. Go to the bottom of the Site Crawl Overview Page, and we’ve attempted to balance priority and scope to target your top three issues to fix:

Moving forward, we’re going to be launching more intelligent prioritization, including grouping issues by folder and adding data visualization of your known issues. Prioritization is a difficult task and one we haven’t helped you do as well as we could. We’re going to do our best to change that.

Dive in & tell us what you think!

All existing customers should have access to the new Site Crawl as of earlier this morning. Even better, we’ve been crawling existing campaigns with the Aardwolf engine for a couple of weeks, so you’ll have history available from day one! Stay turned for a blog post tomorrow on effectively prioritizing Site Crawl issues, and a webinar on Friday at 9am Pacific.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Posted by Danielle_Launders

That’s right! We’re bringing back our MozCon contest where you, our community, can submit your creative entries for a chance to come to MozCon 2017 for free! Last year we had so many impressive and deserving entries, it was hard to choose just one… which is why this year there will be three lucky winners. Yes! You read correctly — three lucky people will be able to attend MozCon for free. Moz will not only cover your registration, but you’ll also have reserved VIP front-row seating, and we’ll pick up the bill for accommodations at the Grand Hyatt.

This is your chance to meet Roger, laugh and cry at MozCon Ignite, converse with speakers during lunch, and of course learn all the things! To enter, just send over a unique piece of content telling us why we should send you to MozCon. Make sure your entry is both original and creative!

First up: Create!

Brainstorm and create something new, unique, and compelling. Last year we saw tons of ingenious ideas, including:

• Videos (must be one minute or less)
• Blog posts
• Songs
• Books
• Drawings
• Slide decks
• Anything else you can dream up!

These are just a few examples; there’s plenty of room for you to come up with your own trail-blazing ideas. Perhaps you’ll film your own Whiteboard Friday detailing why you should come, or record a custom-written, sung-from-the-heart tune about why you love MozCon? Get creative and show us what you got!

Secondly: Submit

Once your content has been perfected and is ready to share, tweet us a link @Moz and use the hashtag #mozcon by Sunday, June 18 at 5:00pm PDT. To keep things fair, there will be no exceptions — so make sure to follow instructions and don’t forget to include your contact information (name and email address) somewhere easily visible within your content. We need to be able to connect with you if you’re a winner!

All submissions will be reviewed and voted on by Moz staff. We’ll let the votes of 150 Mozzers decide the top 3 entries.

Let’s break it down:

• Submissions close on Sunday, June 18 at 5:00pm PDT
• Entries will be judged by Mozzers based on creativity and uniqueness of content
• Winners will be announced and the winning entry shared from @Moz via Twitter on Monday, June 26
• You must be able to attend MozCon, July 17–19 2017, in Seattle. Prizes are non-transferrable.
• All submissions must adhere to the MozCon Code of Conduct
• Contest is void where prohibited by law.
• The value of the prize will be reported for tax purposes as required by law; the winner will receive an IRS form 1099 at the end of the calendar year and a copy of such form will be filed with the IRS. The winner is solely responsible for reporting and paying any and all applicable taxes related to the prizes and paying any expenses associated with any prize which are not specifically provided for in the official rules.

What 3 lucky people win:

• A free ticket to MozCon 2017, including optional VIP front-row seating (valued at $1049)
• Accommodations with suite upgrade at the Grand Hyatt from July 16–20, 2017 (valued at $1,300+)

All right, what are you waiting for? Time to start on those submissions. Best of luck to you all!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Posted by Aleyda

It was a few years ago now that Google announced most of its searches occur on mobile devices across many countries, with confirmation last year from Hitwise reporting that almost 60% of US searches were from mobile, as well. With that, understandably, Google is also moving towards a mobile-first index. However, not all SEO tools have the functionality or reports to deliver mobile-focused data and results.

The reality is that due to high mobile usage across certain industries and countries, it’s already critical to take mobile search behavior and optimization into consideration to establish a winning SEO strategy. For example, as can be seen below in data obtained from SimilarWeb, this is especially important in the restaurants & delivery, health, pets, and beauty sectors, as well as many others:

Since I enjoy testing SEO tools — as you might have already guessed from some of my previous posts — to identify better ways to develop my day-to-day work, I began to check specifically which tools include any type of mobile-targeted functionality. Although the offerings are still far from ideal, with the existing ones we can at least answer the most common mobile-focused questions when developing an SEO process.

While testing out these tools, I could see that a few of them offered different types of mobile-focused functionalities. To facilitate their usage I created a “Mobile SEO Stack” graphic — easy to save and share — where I’ve mapped each tool to the most common mobile-focused SEO questions that they can answer. So without further ado, here it is…

The Mobile SEO Stack

View/download a high-resolution version here

You’ll see that some of them have a yellow dot rather than a white one — for example, SEMrush for the “What’s your Mobile Audience Search Behavior?” question. This is because the tool can only partially answer the question due to some type of restriction. In the case of SEMrush, they only provide mobile data for the US at the moment.

Here’s a summary of the questions answered, along with the 28 tools included:

1. What’s your mobile audience search behavior?

Obtain the queries already sending you or your competitors mobile search visibility and/or traffic, the pages earning the existing mobile visibility and traffic, and the mobile search share of these or any other terms you want to assess and potentially target with your mobile web presence.

• SimilarWeb
• Sistrix
• SearchMetrics
• SEMrush (only provides mobile data for the US)
• Google Search Console
• Google Analytics
• Google Keyword Planner

2. What’s your site mobile search visibility & traffic performance?

From third-party mobile ranking sources which are handy when you’re starting out (or to double-check for terms that you might not be directly tracking) to rank trackers that support mobile search results, it’s fundamental to understand your mobile search performance at a ranking and traffic level to identify opportunities. Are you targeting the right terms and ranking with the right pages?

• SimilarWeb
• Sistrix
• SearchMetrics
• SEMrush
• Google Search Console
• Google Analytics
• OnPage.org
• Moz
• SEOmonitor
• SERPWoo
• AccuRanker
• Stat

3. What’s your competition’s mobile web search visibility?

It’s important to give context to your mobile visibility. Remember that just because you’re not getting a high share of mobile visibility, traffic, and conversions it doesn’t mean there’s no opportunity; analyze what your competitors are doing to use alongside your mobile search behavior analysis to establish your own mobile SEO strategy.

• SimilarWeb
• Sistrix
• SearchMetrics
• SEMrush (only provides mobile data for the US)

4. Does your site have a mobile web version?

From page-level mobile emulators and validators to bulk ones that facilitate the process, it’s critical to verify whether all of your ranking site pages offer a responsive, dynamic-serving, or independent mobile web version:

• Google Search Console
• Chrome DevTools (here’s how to use it for SEO)
• Google Mobile-Friendly Validator
• URLProfiler
• TechnicalSEO.com
• MobileMoxie Device Emulator

5. How do mobile search crawlers access your site?

Using historical Google crawling data, some SEO crawlers will offer the option to emulate the smartphone version of Googlebot. There are also log analyzers that allow you to check the actual behavior of mobile search crawlers accessing your site. Are they going where they should and seeing what they’re meant to?

• Sistrix
• SEMrush
• Google Search Console
• ScreamingFrog
• OnPage.org
• Botify
• OnCrawl
• DeepCrawl
• Sitebulb

6. What’s your mobile site speed?

Obtain your site’s page speed information (as seen by the mobile search bots as well as mobile users) at a site and page level, and directly obtain recommendations to improve if necessary.

• Google Analytics
• Chrome DevTools
• PageSpeed Insights
• URLProfiler
• ScreamingFrog
• OnPage.org
• Botify
• OnCrawl
• DeepCrawl
• Sitebulb

7. Is your mobile web content effectively rendered?

Verify how your mobile web content is being rendered by Google itself at a page level or emulate it at a site level. Are you showing an intrusive interstitial that never finishes loading, or your actual content?

• Google Search Console
• Chrome DevTools
• ScreamingFrog
• Sitebulb
• TechnicalSEO.com

8. Are the different areas of your mobile web content optimized?

Sometimes SEO fundamentals are forgotten when using independent or dynamic-serving mobile sites. Are the titles, meta descriptions, headings, etc. correctly set and targeting the relevant queries?

• Sistrix
• SEMrush
• Chrome DevTools
• ScreamingFrog
• OnPage.org
• Botify
• OnCrawl
• DeepCrawl
• Sitebulb

9. Is AMP effectively implemented?

Verify whether you’re correctly tagging both your site pages referring to the AMP versions & vice-versa, and if they feature the required tags without critical errors that would keep them from appearing in mobile search results.

• SEMrush
• Google Search Console
• Chrome DevTools
• AMP Validator
• AMP Test
• AMP by Example Playground
• ScreamingFrog
• OnPage.org
• Botify
• OnCrawl
• DeepCrawl
• Sitebulb
• TechnicalSEO.com

10. How do your ranked pages look in mobile SERPs?

Check out how your ranking pages are shown in Google’s mobile search results. Is the title being truncated? Are you losing visibility over your competition’s featured snippet? Use these to identify potential reasons for lower CTR.

• Chrome DevTools
• SEOmonitor
• AccuRanker
• Stat
• SERPChecker
• MobileMoxie Search Simulator

11. What’s the AMP impact on mobile visibility & traffic?

Identify which queries your AMP pages are being shown for in both rich and non-rich results, and their performance for those queries. What share of additional organic traffic are they bringing to your site?

• Google Search Console
• Google Analytics
• SEOmonitor
• Stat

12. What’s your mobile visibility’s impact on conversions?

Are your mobile SEO efforts paying off? Explore how your mobile search rankings are translating into conversions.

• Google Analytics
• SEOmonitor

I hope “The Mobile SEO Stack” is useful for your mobile SEO analyses and processes!

This is only the first version, so if you know of any other tools that have mobile-focused functionality or data, please let me know in the comments — I’ll be happy to test and include them.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Posted by MiriamEllis

“How do I delete a Google listing?” is an FAQ on local SEO forums — and it represents an oversimplification of a complicated and multifaceted issue. The truth is, simple deletion is seldom the answer. Rather, most events that arise in the course of doing business require knowing which steps to take to properly manage GMB listings so that they’re helping your business instead of harming it.

When it comes to managing unwanted or problematic Google My Business listings, it’s a case of horses for courses. There isn’t a single set of instructions you can reliably follow, because your particular scenario defines which steps you should take. The following table should help you identify common situations and choose the one that most closely matches yours. From there, you’ll learn which actions are available to you, and which ones, unfortunately, can’t be accomplished.

Because management of problem GMB listings usually requires either being in control of them or unverifying them, our chart begins with three verification scenarios, and then moves on to cover other typical business events.

Whew! Eleven common Google My Business listing management scenarios, each requiring its own set of steps. It’s my hope that this chart will not only help explain why few cases really come down to deleting GMB listings, and also, that it will serve as a handy reference for you when particular situations arise in your workday.

Helpful links

1. If you’re not sure if you have problem listings, do a free lookup with the Moz Check Listing tool.
2. If you’re a Moz Pro member, you have access to our Q&A forum. Please feel free to ask our community questions if you’re unsure about whether a GMB listing is problematic.
3. The Google My Business Forum can be a good bet for getting advice from volunteer Top Contributors (and sometimes Google staffers) about problem GMB listings. Be prepared to share all of the details of your scenario if you post there.
4. If you find yourself dealing with difficult Google My Business listing issues on a regular basis, I recommend reading the work of Joy Hawkins, who is one of the best technical local SEOs in the industry.
5. Sometimes, the only thing you can do is to contact Google directly to try to get help with a tricky problem. Here is their main Contact page. If you’re a Google Adwords customer, you can phone 1-866-2Google and select the option for Google My Business support. Another way to seek help (and this is sometimes the fastest route) is to tweet to Google’s GMB Twitter account. Be advised that not every Google rep has had the benefits of complete training. Some interactions may be more satisfactory than others. And, if you are a digital marketer, do be prepared to set correct client expectations that not all problems can be resolved. Sometimes, even your best efforts may not yield the desired results, due to the limitations of Google’s local product.

Why it’s worth the effort to work to resolve problematic Google listings

Cumulatively speaking, inaccurate and duplicative listings can misinform and misdirect consumers while also sapping your ranking strength. Local business listings are a form of customer service, and when this element of your overall marketing plan is neglected, it can lead to significant loss of traffic and revenue. It can also negatively impact reputation in the form of negative reviews citing wrong online driving directions or scenarios in which customers end up at the old location of a business that has moved.

Taken altogether, these unwanted outcomes speak to the need for an active location data management strategy that monitors all business listings for problems and takes appropriate actions to remedy them. Verifying listings and managing duplicates isn’t glamorous work, but when you consider what’s at stake for the business, it’s not only necessary work, but even heroic. So, skill up and be prepared to tackle the thorniest situations. The successes can be truly rewarding!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!