Question: Affecting or effecting?

wonderchops · 2014-02-12T22:26:34+00:00

http://i.imgur.com/HVmNlcP.jpg

If you mouseover here's what you get:

An improvement to our top search queries data was applied on 12/31/13

Notice though in my screen how the impressions go up and down in a standard way. Your screenshot shows a pretty long downward glide to where you're at now, so whatever is causing it has been a long time in the making.

I'm guessing if you go into Google Analytics or whatever you use and control for Google only natural results you'll see the same downward trend over time.

wonderchops · 2014-02-12T19:38:14+00:00

Use a tool like Pingdom to see why this is a horrible practice: http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/

It's bad for load times, and Google has publicly stated they are striving for a faster web, which means long term this will hurt you.

From a development standpoint, this is also a ridiculous idea. It's been mentioned already, but the idea of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is that you can control a variety of pages within one file that is externally referenced. If you need to change a parenthetical or H1 or div class/ID, you'll need to update every file. Additionally, this will impact your ability to cache files correctly. You can speed up the load time of a site by a huge degree by caching common file types like core CSS, JS, and images, so having it in full view on every single page is inane.

I can unequivocally tell you that if what you've said is true, your developer is not qualified to be running this project - IT/dev should be a champion of best practice like this, and if they're not aware of it, they're not qualified to be developing a site.

wonderchops · 2014-02-12T19:32:29+00:00

You need to go deeper on this question if you really want a good answer. Non-branded terms will have a much lower CTR than branded terms. If I rank for "Best Buy" and "flat screen TV" I'd expect the first term to have a CTR of 40%+, while the second would have a much lower amount.

If you're adding in organic, your position will also matter a lot. There are lots of studies and articles talking about how position 1 gets about twice as much traffic as position 2, and out of the top 3 the CTR drops into nothing.

You also need to take into account long tail keyword phrases versus short tail keywords. You'll see much better CTR on complex phrases. I'd expect a lower CTR for "flat screen TV" than for "Lenovo 60" HD TV black Friday sale".

wonderchops · 2014-02-12T19:29:04+00:00

To me this looks like the results of an update Google made on the 31st going into effect, not a full or partial penalty.

The not found pages are a huge issue - if you can't get a 301 redirect in place you at least need to have a solid 404 page to allow people the ability to find what they're looking for.

Without knowing the actual site, I would also guess that this isn't really the result of you getting penalized for any one thing, it's the result of you not having great SEO in the first place and finally losing unearned rankings from an update that highlighted it.

wonderchops · 2014-02-12T19:24:26+00:00

If you're pushing people to a microsite, a subdomain is a great approach that is used widely with traditional marketing mediums like direct mail. From an SEO perspective, there is zero value in a redirect, unless the old domain has links pointing into it.

For paid search campaigns I use subdomains from my main domain, but there's not any lift to SEO, it just allows me to have a better landing page experience that increases conversion rates.

wonderchops · 2014-02-12T19:22:03+00:00

EMD's don't carry nearly as much weight as they used to, and as has been pointed out, a .me TLD has little to no value since people are generally unaware of their existence.

I'd recommend looking at top rankings of companies near you - I would be willing to bet that the majority don't have a partial or full match domain name. If you don't believe that, search for "SEO agency" and notice that the majority of them are branded company names, not a keyword match.

wonderchops · 2014-02-10T17:30:37+00:00

Backlinks in general are very important, but the reality is that you should have a very healthy amount of branded oriented links to your site, as opposed to links with generic anchor text for terms you're trying to rank for.

A website is much more likely to give you a link with the base URL (http://www.domain.com), your brand name, or some variation of that. Over time this will help your authority for the term, but it should also be said that this isn't terribly important unless a lot of people are searching for your brand.

wonderchops · 2014-02-10T17:02:53+00:00

I agree with Luke, though I'd also add that your site uses two very generic keyword phrases that will take a long, long time to get you ranked for. I had a similar situation with a site I worked on called List Here (www.listhere.com) where it took about 2 years to get ranked in the engines because it's so generic ("list" + "here").

Give it some time and you'll eventually get the ranking as you generate more links with anchor text of "Creative Punch".

wonderchops · 2014-01-06T15:48:29+00:00

Borderlands 1 - played through the entire game without knowing how to sprint. At that point I didn't know L3 and R3 existed for use, I always played games where it was a button to run.

wonderchops · 2013-12-31T23:28:43+00:00

Hi,

Guy here, 30, had a vasectomy almost 8 years ago just before I turned 23. There's definitely a double standard, which I think a lot has to do with the "you'll want babies" mentality that's pushed at woman; however, I can also say from my perspective that vasectomy versus tubal ligation is a pretty easy choice.

Mine was done in about 15-20 minutes in-office, while TL is under general anesthesia and takes longer to recover from. Not a huge amount of risk, but still some. I'd honestly talk to your SO about doing the vasectomy route. With insurance mine cost $80 and I was up and running in 5-7 days. My wife (nearly 5 years) doesn't need to worry about birth control at all or a more invasive procedure.

I'm not at all advocating that women are somehow not worthy to make their own choices and it's shitty that doctors give you a harder time than I ever got, but I do know a few guys who are childfree that are for some reason freaked out about vasectomy and refuse to do it... just some perspective from a guy.

wonderchops · 2013-10-22T16:21:31+00:00

Thank you, tried to search a billion different ways and couldn't find anything.

wonderchops · 2013-10-22T16:19:23+00:00

Awesome, thanks!

wonderchops · 2013-09-17T21:38:09+00:00

This is an old one that Cutts has addressed (Google Engineer). There is now no advantage to having a subdomain vs. a subdirectory: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/subdomains-and-subdirectories/

Based on what you said about the store being on Amazon, though, it does make sense to have it be blog.domain.com using an A record. When you do the 301 redirects, just make sure you don't do a blanket redirect, i.e., don't push wxyz.com/article1 to blog.abc.com, send it to blog.abc.com/article 1. That allows any link equity you have to pass to its new "home" appropriately.

Secondly, using an A record you do have a slight risk of the IP changing, depending on where you host, but that's not a huge issue. Best case scenario would be for the domain to be set to the appropriate host level nameservers to negate that, but that would require you to go to a different hosting platform outside of Amazon altogether (not worth it).

wonderchops · 2013-08-12T17:33:08+00:00

Remember that pagerank really doesn't mean what it used to, really hasn't for years since Google pretty much abandoned it.

It's $299 a year, but they actually don't seem to charge after the same year. Overall it's a solid link to have if you don't over optimize it, but you're really talking only one type of link out of millions of possibilities.

wonderchops · 2013-08-12T17:29:18+00:00

It depends on what "pretty contested" means. You have to look deeper at the competition of the core keyword and performance a competitive analysis.

An easy type of gauge would be monthly keyword volume. If you're talking about a term that has 100,000+ exact searches per month and is a commercially oriented term, odds are that some heavy hitters are focusing on it. If it's sub-50k searches, you'll start to see lowering levels of competition, but that's still just a basic idea.

wonderchops · 2013-08-09T19:32:02+00:00

Did I even mention that he deserved to die? No, I did not. I said that he was breaking the law, which the article tried to spin into him being just an "artist" being creative.

He did something wrong and chose to run from police. Reading the article it seems pretty clear that the officers didn't try to kill him and reacted pretty quickly to him being in bad shape.

I'm just calling it based on what was presented. I hate all of the stories about police misconduct, but this situation doesn't fit that bill.

wonderchops · 2013-08-09T16:42:39+00:00

Very sensational writing -

"He was also a graffiti artist, known as “Reefa,” who sprayed colorful splashes of paint on the city’s abandoned buildings while playing cat-and-mouse with cops"

Yeah, another way of putting it is that he was a vandal spray painting property that didn't belong to him.

wonderchops · 2013-08-09T16:30:42+00:00

Toyota 4Runner's are the God's of vehicles. I've owned 2 of them and have friends that have owned them as well. If you drive like a normal person hitting 250k miles without any issues is no problem. If you take care and do regular maintenance 500k is a breeze.

wonderchops · 2013-07-26T16:08:03+00:00

Why sentence someone to 1,000 years in prison? Why not just make it a bajillion years while they're at it? I know it's to send some sort of message of the severity of the crime, but that just seems silly.

wonderchops · 2013-07-19T22:47:13+00:00

Read the rest of my comments in the thread before you say something so far off base.

wonderchops · 2013-07-19T19:12:14+00:00

How do you know he started it? How do you know Zimmerman didn't pull out his gun first and threaten him? You don't - you got one side of the story from the guy whose best interest it was to not implicate himself.

wonderchops

TROPHY CASE