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A client of ours has used a 3rd party company who charged them $300 to "speed up" their website. He is wondering if this is legitimate? In a very short period (one day), the site speed has improved from about 20 to 86 on desktop and 100 on mobile. This is on a Shopify site. As far as I can see from looking at the back end of the site, all that has been done is that a new theme has been uploaded. Nothing else has been done, eg all images look to be the same size, etc. When I asked how the work had been done so quickly, I was told "It was done by a highly professional team of Shopify web designers and developers." Has anyone come across this type of speed optimisation and can you tell me anything about it?

I have a client who sells highly technical products and has lots and lots (a couple of hundred) pdf datasheets that can be downloaded from their website. But in order to download a datasheet, a user has to register on the site. Once they are registered, they can download whatever they want (I know this isn't a good idea but this wasn't set up by us and is historical). On doing a Moz crawl of the site, it came up with a couple of hundred 401 errors. When I investigated, they are all pages where there is a button to click through to get one of these downloads. The Moz error report calls the error "Bot verification".

My questions are:
Are these really errors?
If so, what can I do to fix them?
If not, can I just tell Moz to ignore them or will this cause bigger problems?

From looking at one of our clients’ GA stats, we’ve discovered that they have signed up with a site called Internet Traffic Club (or they have asked someone to do it on their behalf). Their hits on one day went from a fairly standard low number to a few thousand. The hits came from cities all over the world, yet this client is a local UK solicitor offering a local town service. We feel doing this - if they do it regularly - would be harmful rather than beneficial to their rankings. Has anyone here any experience of using these traffic buying services and how Google views these hits? Of course it is also nonsensical to pay to buy traffic from Nigeria if you’re a local solicitor, but I want to explain to them the evidence behind the harmful effect it could have on their rankings.

Hi Miriam

Thank you for your very full reply, I appreciate your help. I agree with you it is a low priority and I have pointed this out to the client! The suggestion that Shannon made has already started to produce results and I agree with you that the website needs to have more links and a higher domain authority. We have recently taken over the website and are busy adding content to it as it was quite meagre in its content. Earning backlinks is our next objective.

Question: does Moz Local now work for UK businesses? A couple of years ago I used it for a client and when it came up for renewal I was told by Moz that it no longer supported UK businesses. So Moz gave me a refund as it had accepted online payment for the renewal. I had assumed it still didn't support UK businesses, but if you're saying it does, that's a whole other ball game! Please could you advise on this as I have several clients that would benefit from Moz Local.

Thanks again for all your help.

best regards, Maureen

Hi Colemckeon, thanks very much for your suggestions. I will look for a directory service in the UK as I think those you mentioned might just be for the USA.

Although the part I don't understand is how does Google get confused between 2 companies on the basis of a phone number which does not appear on the other company's website anyway?

Thanks Shannon,  those are all great suggestions, I will try them out. Many thanks

If I search for my client's phone number on Google, without gaps, ie 02036315541,  another company comes up at the top of the list. This company has a similar name to ours, but it is in a different town and it does different things. My company name is Energy Contract Renewals https://www.energycontractrenewals.co.uk/ and their company is https://energyrenewals.co.uk. As far as I can see, the other company does not mention our phone number anywhere on their site or on their GMB page so I don't know why they are coming up.  We do not come up at all for this search.

However,  if I put our phone number in like this: 020 3631 5541, our company does come up and the other company does not.

Anyone know how I can correct this or if it is even possible to do something about it?

For the past 7 months we have been managing a website for a client cvdwellbeing.com. For the first 6 months, the client has always had been 30 and 40 keywords ranking on page 1 of Google. This month I log into Moz to prepare a report for February and they now only have 7 keywords ranking on page 1. How could this happen so quickly? Is it to do with the Moz DA changes? Nothing has happened to the site apart from adding a couple of blogs and landing pages and there are no errors reported on Moz or Search Console. It is very depressing. Also their DA has dropped relative to their competitors since last month, again no idea why. If the Moz DA updates are so great, why aren't DAs going up instead of down. This is difficult to explain to clients who associate downward trends with bad news. Please don't refer me to the slide set as none of my clients have the attention span to try and understand this, they just want their rankings to get better, not worse.

Couldn't you have implemented a change to the DA that meant my client's sites went UP instead of down! British manufacturer of hospital furniture dropped from 35 to 21 overnight. The only saving grace is that their competitors have dropped in the same ratio.

Thanks for your answer Egol, I was thinking that there must be something I was missing, but your answer tells me our team is doing the right stuff for this website - I guess I need to set a client's expectations better as well so that he doesn't look at this drop and start asking "what's gone wrong?" as the answer is probably "nothing". Bit of an education job to do there I think as clients tend to think that a drop in numbers is a bad thing and they usually only notice when the number falls but never when the number goes up!

Thanks Shannon,  those are all great suggestions, I will try them out. Many thanks

Couldn't you have implemented a change to the DA that meant my client's sites went UP instead of down! British manufacturer of hospital furniture dropped from 35 to 21 overnight. The only saving grace is that their competitors have dropped in the same ratio.

Thanks for those urls Thomas, I wasn't aware of the serps.com one, it looks very useful.

From looking at one of our clients’ GA stats, we’ve discovered that they have signed up with a site called Internet Traffic Club (or they have asked someone to do it on their behalf). Their hits on one day went from a fairly standard low number to a few thousand. The hits came from cities all over the world, yet this client is a local UK solicitor offering a local town service. We feel doing this - if they do it regularly - would be harmful rather than beneficial to their rankings. Has anyone here any experience of using these traffic buying services and how Google views these hits? Of course it is also nonsensical to pay to buy traffic from Nigeria if you’re a local solicitor, but I want to explain to them the evidence behind the harmful effect it could have on their rankings.

For the past 7 months we have been managing a website for a client cvdwellbeing.com. For the first 6 months, the client has always had been 30 and 40 keywords ranking on page 1 of Google. This month I log into Moz to prepare a report for February and they now only have 7 keywords ranking on page 1. How could this happen so quickly? Is it to do with the Moz DA changes? Nothing has happened to the site apart from adding a couple of blogs and landing pages and there are no errors reported on Moz or Search Console. It is very depressing. Also their DA has dropped relative to their competitors since last month, again no idea why. If the Moz DA updates are so great, why aren't DAs going up instead of down. This is difficult to explain to clients who associate downward trends with bad news. Please don't refer me to the slide set as none of my clients have the attention span to try and understand this, they just want their rankings to get better, not worse.

SEOMoz has just done a crawl of my site, and found 600 pages with missing meta title errors. When I have checked the list of these pages, they are all jpegs and not pages. Why is SEOMoz reporting that this .jpg files have missing meta titles on my site, which is www.webmakercms.com?  SEOMoz has run several crawls of my site and this is the first time it has brought up this list of jpegs as errors and I don't understand why?

Thank you so much, Anders, I am getting the client to change this immediately. Brilliant answer!

At the moment I see that the Data Highlighter supports a few schemas such as Events, Products, Articles, Restaurants etc. My client has a training division and runs regular training courses so we want to highlight those using the tool as "Training Courses," but this is not an option. Does anyone know why the tool doesn't support more categories and if there are plans to expand what it supports?

I realise it would be better to use actual HTML markup onto the client site but their website is administered by their corporate parent in another country and they are not prepared to add in a Wordpress plugin to allow this. But the UK division, that we work for, wants to use it. We have restricted access to the Wordpress site so we don't have the access rights to add in plugins ourselves otherwise it would be no problem to do this.

Hi Miriam

Thank you for your very full reply, I appreciate your help. I agree with you it is a low priority and I have pointed this out to the client! The suggestion that Shannon made has already started to produce results and I agree with you that the website needs to have more links and a higher domain authority. We have recently taken over the website and are busy adding content to it as it was quite meagre in its content. Earning backlinks is our next objective.

Question: does Moz Local now work for UK businesses? A couple of years ago I used it for a client and when it came up for renewal I was told by Moz that it no longer supported UK businesses. So Moz gave me a refund as it had accepted online payment for the renewal. I had assumed it still didn't support UK businesses, but if you're saying it does, that's a whole other ball game! Please could you advise on this as I have several clients that would benefit from Moz Local.

Thanks again for all your help.

best regards, Maureen