Latest Questions

How valuable is content "hidden" behind a JavaScript dropdown really?

I've come across a method implemented by some SEO agencies to fill up pages with somehow relevant text and hide it behind a javascript dropdown. Does Google fall for such cheap tricks? You can see this method used on these pages for example (just scroll down to the bottom) - it's all in German, but you get the idea I guess: http://www.insider-boersenbrief.de/ http://www.deko-und-kerzenshop.de/ How is you experience with this way of adding content to a site? Do you think it is valuable or will it get penalised?

Technical SEO | | jfkorn

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No Content on home page + rankings

If a home page has no content will it hurt the sites ability to rank? The interior pages will have content but not the home page. (See attached image) My client does not want content on the home page as he feels it will take away from the look and feel he wants to achieve. This website is actually 10 sites or locations in one as we intend to market each location (a total of 10) separately. In reality the home page is a doorway page to each separate location. I'd like feedback if possible as to the necessity or not, of content on the Home Page of this or any website. Will the lack of content hurt on the Homer Page hurt with SEO? Thanks
Gary Downey bobby-vans.jpg

On-Page Optimization | | fun52dig

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Handling duplicate content in Blogs

Many wordpress themes like mine have a homepage where the last 3 to 4 posts are displayed on the frontpage. Each post also has its own url where the post are shown seperately. How do I avoid beeing seen as duplicate content by Google?

Content Development | | wellnesswooz

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Employing Pinterest for SEO gain.

Hi I wanted to see if the SEO team have had any feedback from members who have started to use Pinterest. I've had it for a month or so now and I've been adding pins every day since - (quite addictive actually). What is interesting is the gender element to the people who are following and repinning my pins and boards i.e. female. It would be interesting to understand why this the case, why is it so popular with female users. Ultimately I'm tyring to guage the benefits of employing Pinterest for SEO purposes and whether its worth keeping it in my arsenal of social tools. Any insights welcome. http://pinterest.com/visualizations Best David

Social Media | | David-E-Carey

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Changing a URL structure within a site

Im moving a page over from www.domain.com/page to www.domain/category/page currently www.domain.com/page is ranking in google. Would a 301 do the job? is there anything else needed to help keep SE positions?

Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODinosaur

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Will same language different region (US/UK) geotargeting via subdirectory (& GWT) cause dupe content or other issues ?

If a UK hosted site on a .com, needs to target US now too but for keywords that are spelt differently in US is creating duplicate version of uk hosted .com site and putting it on a subdirectory .com/us/ and geotargeting via webmaster tools (to usa) ok ? I take it in this scenario no dupe content issues (or other issues) so long as is geotargeted via GWT ? Or are there ? Comments from anyone with experience doing similar (same language, different region geo-targeting dupe content with kw spelling being only difference, via a subdirectory or other route) much appreciated ? Many Thanks 🙂

Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence

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Need more Guestposting sources.

Hello, I currently have taken on another content writer, and my team are creating content quicker than I can distribute it, any suggestions? Im currently using... My Blog Guest & Blogger Link Up Any more decent ones?

Link Building | | Prestige-SEO

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Do links in the nav bar help SEO?

If I am building a Nav bar should I use my keywords or make it easier for the user to find what they are looking for. IMO one should ALWAYS make a site based on user experience. If it Google and other SEs do count Nav links, would it be best to place more important keys first?

Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODinosaur

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Advice needed

Hi Guys, We are trying to increase our rankings for the term "natural beauty products" for our home page.... I have created an article all about natural beauty products with the url as... domain/natural-beauty-products.html what I am worried about is this... because this page has more information all about the key word phrase & the url is the keyword phrase, will it out do my root domain ranking? I created the page to try and give the home page some weight for that key phrase, now I am wondering if I should have had the url as something like "why we love natural beauty products" then in that page included the keyword phrase link back to the home page! Hope this makes sense. Thanks Daniel

Link Building | | LushDuck

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Link Pages/Directory

Hello, What is best practise for dealing with alot of links. I was thinking of breaking them download to alphabet pages i.e. all A on one page etc... BUT should I then make the links clickable on this list OR that they load to a sub company page which has a clickable link to there website.

Web Design | | JohnW-UK

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Need help with some duplicate content.

I have some duplicate content issues on my blog I'm trying to fix. I've read lots of different opinions online about the best way to correct it, but they all contradict each other. I was hoping I could ask this community and see what the consensus was. It looks like my category and page numbers are showing duplicate content. For instance when I run the report I see things like this: http://noahsdad.com/resources/ http://noahsdad.com/resources/page/2/ http://noahsdad.com/therapy/page/2/ I'm assuming that is just the categories that are being duplicated, since the page numbers only show on the report at the end of a category. What is the best way to correct this? I don't use tags at all on my blog, using categories instead. I also use the Yoast SEO plug in. I have a check mark in the box that disables tags. However it says, "If you're using categories as your only way of structure on your site, you would probably be better off when you prevent your tags from being indexed." There is a box that allows you to disable categories also, but the description above makes it seem like I don't want to block both tags and categories. Any ideas what I should do? Thanks.

Algorithm Updates | | NoahsDad

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Open site explorer result discrepancy

Hi all, I'm a little confused - when using open sites explorer to view of link stats on one of our competitors site I get conflicting results. For example - Page Specific Metircs shows the url www.xyz.com has 265 external links. But Root Domain Metrics show they have 22,687 links Yet the total links at the top of the report says Total links 999 Can someone explain why www.xyz.com has 265 external links and the rot domain (which is the same) has 22687 links? I've also run the report on xyz.com rather than www.xyz.com which yielded no results. Thanks in advance

Moz Pro | | EclipseLegal

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Branding exact match keyword domain

We have a keyword domain name that we'd like to show up in Google stores or brand suggestion. We used this exact keyword domain name for years to sell our products but now want to take it one step further and have the domain name show up in Google suggested brands or stores. We just filed for a TradeMark in the URL (they have about 57,000 domain names with active trademarks in their database). How do we get Google to recognize this domain name as either a brand or a store? Has anybody seen an example of a store or brand with a .com or .net in Google brands or Google stores? It may be that don't even allow URLs to show. Thanks

Branding | | mozworks

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Setting up a 301 redirect from expired webpages

Hi Guys, We have recently created a new website for one of our clients and replaced their old website on the same domain. One problem that we are having is that all of the old pages are indexed within Google (1000s) and are just getting sent to our custom 404 page. We are finding that there is an large bounce rate from this and also, I am worried from an SEO point of view that the site could lose rank positioning through the number of crawl errors that Google is getting. Want I want is to set up a 301 redirect from these pages to go to the 'our brands' page. The reason for this is that the majority of the old URLs linked to individual product pages, and one thing to note is that they are all .asp pages. Is there a way of setting up a rule in the htaccess file (or another way) to say that all webpages that end with the suffix of .asp will be 301 redirected to the our brands' page? (there is no .asp pages on the new site as it is all done in php). If so, I would love it if someone could post the code snippet. Thanks in advance guys and if you have any other ideas then be my guest to suggest 🙂 Matt.

Technical SEO | | MatthewBarby

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Stats show /blog/wp-cron.php at the top. What is it?

Hi, I have worked with websites for years but have no clue when it comes to Wordpress. We have our main website and then a Wordpress blog running in a subfolder that is only about a year old. The blog has only 7 posts so you can see how small it is vs main website with 200 pages. Usually our main index page of the site is at the top of the stats with the most views and this page /blog/wp-cron.php is about 30% lower. Now suddenly over the last month this page has jumped to the top and accessed almost as much as the home page of the site. We took a big hit with the latest Google Update so we are tyring to determine if there is anything technical in our site that has caused an issue. Thanks in advance Force7

Reporting & Analytics | | Force7

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301 from old domain to new domain

Hi, I need to create a 301 redirect for all internal pages located on organic7thheaven.com to the homepage of our new site at http://www.7thheavennaturals.com/ Currently internal pages of the old site such as the following are returning a page not found www.organic7thheaven.com/products/deepcleansing/miraclemud.asp Can anyone help me in setting up a .htaccess file for this problem please? Thanks

Technical SEO | | MJMarketing

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Trailing slash at end of URLs?

Hi, I'm just about to put up a new site and I need to decide between having no trailing slash at the end of the all the URLs, or putting one in there. I think Matt Cutts has a slight preference for them, as stated here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-interview-googles-matt-cutts-on-redirects-trust-more "Matt says he would slightly advocate for using a trailing slash simply because it clearly indicates that a URL is a folder and not a document." However, I'm really wondering. I mean, if people link to my site, they'll tend not to insert a trailing slash, I'm thinking... Your thoughts would be welcome on this one! Cheers, Luke

Search Behavior | | McTaggart

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Website taken a hit?

We have recently (yesterday 12<sup>th</sup> April) taken a hit for our main keywords it seems that there is no constant fall but it seems to be the most competitive words as anything that ranked purely on content still seems to rank which makes me assume that we have just lost a lot of power from links (are SEO did build quite a few links from article sites he also built a few blog network links which we did not know till we got the webmaster message 3 weeks ago (24<sup>th</sup> may) and we have made him remove them all but some still show which a) he can’t contact or b) were scrapers). But on the other hand we still have decent on site content and some good links from graphic design blogs (review articles) which would suggest a penalty as some sites with poor links and poor on site content are outranking us for a couple of our good keywords. I cannot decide if this is a penalty, keyword anchor text penalty (this is wiping more power out than the bad links) or just devaluation of links (but as said before our good links are still much more powerful than the competitors out ranking us and with our content we should easily not have lost many places). If I was going to come up with an idea it would be like the bad links have taken twice there power away from the site, so our on site content is still good but compared to medium on site and crap links they are out ranking us. (we did use a lot of anchor text with keywords in) If this is the case if we build gooad quality review links, press releases and make them more natural not go for normal link building – articles ect would this help and has anyone ever dealt with this before and have any idea how to know what is happing and how long it might take to recover.

Algorithm Updates | | BobAnderson

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With or without the "www." ?

Is there any benefit whatsoever to having the www. in the URL? My domain is quite long therefore I've not been using the www. however a few people have mentioned it's good practice to include it. The www. forwards to the main URL (non www.) and I've set my preferred domain name in webmaster tools to the non www. so I'm thinking that should all be ok. Just hoping I could get some of the experts views to make sure this is all ok. The site is a year old and I'm just starting to really get going on the link building so it's not too late to change if I'm wrong. If others link to my site and include the www. will the link juice be passed, as I suspect many will include it without any thought?

On-Page Optimization | | Optimise

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Elaborate Search Results

Please see the attached image. My question : How can I have such results showing for my own website? I mean what should I do to make this happen? 3ZQfr.jpg

Algorithm Updates | | KS__

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What would you do with virtually unlimited quality content?

Hi All, We have a site with over 6000 products, several hundred category pages, numerous brand landing pages etc etc. As part of an ever expanding SEO team we have a number of article/content writers that are writing QUALITY content. Because we are in the cooking/cookware/kitchenware niche, these articles are on a range of subjects. E.g. recipes, how to clean products, getting the best out of products, differences between brands and styles, seasonal trends etc etc. We currently have a dedicated blog that is a completely different URL to our ecommerce site, a number of smaller blogs that are quite spammy but rank well for certain terms that are all interlinked in a random way (hey, don't hate me), buying guides, all the usual social media accounts etc. We also sponsor a number of quality external cooking blogs that link back to our site when we give them products to review. My question is, how would you best use this content? We are looking at starting our own blog hosted on our ecommerce domain as well (the one on the other domain is OK, but our new blog will have awesome content). Any suggestions would be very helpful. Thanks!

Link Building | | bradkrussell

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Merging three sites to one

Hi guys, I just wanted confirmation if this is the right way to go about doing this. I need to merge three websites and I've never done three websites in to a brand new site before. Ok so we have Sitex.com
Sitey.com
Sitez.com We've created a SiteB.com SiteB.com has SiteB.com/SiteXCat
SiteB.com/SiteYCat
SiteB.com/SiteZCat Each X,Y and Z have over 1,000 pages. They only have about 10 pages each with Page Authority above 10 and the domains arn't that strong. What i plan to do is: 301 redirect each site domain (X,Y,,Z) to it's corresponding category. e.g. Sitex.com > SiteB.com/SiteXCat 301 redirect each page off X,Y,Z that has a Page Authority above 10 to their new pages on SiteB.com Then, I'm unsure if i should 410 every other URL... I don't think its worht 301 every single URL if they arn't in search results much - but maybe it is if they have a lot of inbound links even with low page authority? Any ideas and does the above seem the best practise? Thanks.

Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Profero

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I have one page on my site... but still get duplicate name and content errors.

i have only the index.html page. my domain has a permanent 301 to the root. why am i getting duplicate problems? i only have one page the index .html???

On-Page Optimization | | one4u2see

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Changing Subfolder that has been crawled before

Question: I am using a wordpress multisite and I enabled the crawl options yesterday www.abc.com/subfolder <-original but i find that www.abc.com/sub is good enough I checked the site:abc.com but I find that my pages in the /subfolder has been crawled before. Can I just change it to www.abc.com/sub or it will raise duplicate content issue?

On-Page Optimization | | joony2008

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Block search engines from URLs created by internal search engine?

Hey guys, I've got a question for you all that I've been pondering for a few days now. I'm currently doing an SEO Technical Audit for a large scale directory. One major issue that they are having is that their internal search system (Directory Search) will create a new URL everytime a search query is entered by the user. This creates huge amounts of duplication on the website. I'm wondering if it would be best to block search engines from crawling these URLs entirely with Robots.txt? What do you guys think? Bearing in mind there are probably thousands of these pages already in the Google index? Thanks Kim

Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Voonie

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How does an exact match .net compare to .com?

I'm looking into buying an exact match tld, but it is .net. Do .net domains get the same exact match bonus .coms do?

Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jeremydavid

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SERP and SEO Moz ranking

Until a couple of months ago the predicted SEO Moz ranking for a specific keyword was fairly close to what I actually experienced with my website. However, since then the correlation has not been good. For example, according to SEO Moz I am ranked #1 for a specific keyword with google.ca and google.com yet my site actually shows up consistently at #3 for that keyword. Has anyone else noticed this divergence?

Algorithm Updates | | casper434

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What are the best enterprise level hosting and/or ecommerce platforms?

Greetings, I was wonder what are some of the best enterprise level hosting and/or eCommerce platforms for Mid Size Companies? Thanks, Tony

SEO Learn Center | | Tonyd23

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Google recipe search...

I just did a search for a recipe and saw something new. Google has a sidebar that lets you toggle on/off ingredients... Pretty nifty, and interesting. I did not have the recipe toggle marked, I was just using regular search "everything"

Competitive Research | | Mcarle

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New feature on SERPs

I noticed something new on Google's SERPs today. Has this been up for a while? Has anyone else seen this. https://www.google.com/search?q=bubba+watson+wife&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a gm8rI.png

Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MargaritaS

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Rankings Up and Down Every Single Week

This is so insanely frustrating. One week my client's rankings will be great, working up the second page and on our way to the first. The next week those rankings will drop (according to SEOMoz Rankings) to well below 50. The very next week those rankings will be back up on the second page. It's like a pinball machine with a different rank every week. I'm doing absolutely nothing from week to week, and am not understanding why it's bouncing back and forth so much. I've never seen anything like it, actually. I've never had a client bounce up and down so frequently and in such huge numbers. Any ideas? (http://erasedisease.com) Thanks

Technical SEO | | Linwright

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Is Google able to determine duplicate content every day/ month?

A while ago I talked to somebody who used to work for MSN a couple of years ago within their engineering department. We talked about a recent dip we had with one of our sites.We argued this could be caused by the large amount of duplicate content we have on this particular website (+80% of our site). Then he said, quoted: "Google seems only to be able to determine every couple of months instead of every day if the content is actually duplicate content". I clearly don't doubt that duplicate content is a ranking factor. But I would like to know you guys opinions about Google being only able to determine this every couple of X months instead of everyday. Have you seen or heard something similar?

Reporting & Analytics | | Martijn_Scheijbeler

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Mega Menus - Site Links - Bottom of the Page

Here are the questions: If you replace your top menu with a mega menu - like rei.com, target.com etc - that has dramatically more links and lots of non-optimized testimonials and calls for action, and locate the actual code of the mega menu at the bottom of the HTML , How will this affect your sitelinks? Will this now, make your on-page content more visible and indexable? Or does the Google bott dismiss this as just navigation content? In the past, I've have seen this technique work well, but that was before site links were easier to obtain. Looking at sites with virtually no navigation on their home pages and good authority, I've seen site links seemingly gleamed from alt attributes.

Technical SEO | | Runner2009

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WordPress blog hosted on GoDaddy domain mapping help

We set up a WP blog that's hosted through GoDaddy. For various reasons, we purchased a URL to use to get through the technical build and set up and are trying to map that to a subdomain of our company website. (We can't host it on our own server, unfortunately). My question is: for WP blogs hosted via WP you can buy a domain mapping upgrade and I'm trying to find a similar plugin that could offer the same thing that would apply to our GoDaddy hosting and point to our subdomain (GD apparently doesn't offer the domain mapping). Anyone have any thoughts, please?

Web Design | | josh-riley

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Weird 404 erros

Hi guys, new here. Did a little search here and didn't see anything exactly like it. My bad if it's been discussed. I've read most of the FAQ's and haven't seen this exact problem addressed.My site is **http://tinyurl.com/89aury5**I recently installed a new design and since then have been having lots of 404 errors.You can see the screenshot here http://awesomescreenshot.com/0b92z1615There has been a perfect correlation between loss in traffic and the rise in errors as well. **Most of the errors I have are /function.opendir after what would be a normal URL. **Most of these appear on the 2nd and 3rd page of the crawl report which you can't see on the screenshot.Anyway, I don't have any broken links on the site(that I can find), and certainly not any of these that google is crawling. I've read it might be a PHP error but no one seems to be able to find it. Pretty bizarre.Looking for any help. Thanks!

International SEO | | astahl11

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Can somebody explain Canonical tags and the technical elements of SEO?

Newbie here,and learning fast. But... I can't help but feel the technical elements of SEO (i.e. canonical tags, javascript amongst others) are holding me back. My knowledge of programming and coding is basic at best. Do I have to have an understanding of this to get ahead in SEO or is it simply a case of reading some more and knowing the techniques? What percentage of SEO is technical (e.g. html coding etc...) Thanks in advance. N. p.s. could someone explain what canonical tags are?

Technical SEO | | Buzzwords

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Is using a platform to automatically cross post on the social bookmarking websites good or bad for SEO?

Social Media | | Melia

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In Site Explorer My Blog.URL.com Shows "No Data Available for this URL"

Why when I use http://www.opensiteexplorer.org and I'm researching our Blog.URL.com's does the tool say "No Data Available for this URL"? Example: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=blog.centurypayments.com

Moz Pro | | cfield_splashmedia.com

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Internal search : rel=canonical vs noindex vs robots.txt

Hi everyone, I have a website with a lot of internal search results pages indexed. I'm not asking if they should be indexed or not, I know they should not according to Google's guidelines. And they make a bunch of duplicated pages so I want to solve this problem. The thing is, if I noindex them, the site is gonna lose a non-negligible chunk of traffic : nearly 13% according to google analytics !!! I thought of blocking them in robots.txt. This solution would not keep them out of the index. But the pages appearing in GG SERPS would then look empty (no title, no description), thus their CTR would plummet and I would lose a bit of traffic too... The last idea I had was to use a rel=canonical tag pointing to the original search page (that is empty, without results), but it would probably have the same effect as noindexing them, wouldn't it ? (never tried so I'm not sure of this) Of course I did some research on the subject, but each of my finding recommanded one of the 3 methods only ! One even recommanded noindex+robots.txt block which is stupid because the noindex would then be useless... Is there somebody who can tell me which option is the best to keep this traffic ? Thanks a million

Technical SEO | | JohannCR

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How to get power tweets & Likes for social signals!

Hi, Just been looking into social signals a little deeper. From what I have read a tweet from one page is not the same as a tweet from another page, the authority and influence is also a big part. So a tweet from CNN does a lot more then a tweet from a random. So how do you find these authority and influential pages/users? I have come across Klout.com which gives a score out of 100, which is one way I guess BUT I have also noticed mozbar stats change for different facebook pages. Q: Can you use the mozbar on facebook & twitter pages to workout who will generate the best social signals? Cheers

Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper

0

Google Query Contamination.... Are you seeing this??

I have been searching on Google.com with FireFox this morning. I searched for a state name.... like "georgia". Then I search for a product... like "guitars". For the Guitars query the first page of the SERPs include some music stores in georgia. So, Google is contaminating your search results with information from your most recent query. Are you seeing this too? Has Google been doing this for a long time? Or, I am going crazy?

Search Behavior | | EGOL

3

Yahoo Local rejected because of office in residence

I have a client with an office in their home. Yahoo Local has rejected it 3 times for No Physical Location The location is correct, they are listed correctly in just about every reputable local directory available including Google Places. They do see clients at their home office. Any suggestions? Should they pay the $300 for the Yahoo Directory? Should they the $9.95 for the enhanced local listing? Thanks in advance...

Paid Search Marketing | | cozyweb

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Need to rank xxx.com to 2 locations

Hi, I have a voip service, currently my keywords are ranking good in US. But i would like to rank them for India too. As i am selling India based voip services. I have a single domain .COM and no country specific domain. Here what i am planning to do. I would change the setting in Google webmasters central to change the target country to USA. And then i will do on page seo to match keywords related to India. Is there anyother suggestions? please let me know.

Search Behavior | | Dexx22

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Optimizing E-Commerce Category Pages For SEO

Hey, Does anyone have any tips for optimizing e-commerce category pages? Looking to add content to each category page but not sure where to put the content i.e. above the footer? Above the search results? In the left hand nav bar? Have a landing page which they click through to see search results? If anyone has any good examples or tips it would be much appreciated. cheers David

On-Page Optimization | | DavidLenehan

0

How to remove backlinks?

Hey guys, With all this anti over optimization movement going around with Google, I decided to do a link building profile audit. I see some pages with PR 0 and some pages that expired. My websites are not penalized at this moment, however I do want to avoid this at all costs. What can I do? Could a backlink from an expired domain penalize my site?

Link Building | | nrv

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Conversion Rate - site feedback

Hi We gave a website a bit of a facelift last nov with the aim of increasing its position within Search Engines and getting it to begin making sales. The site: www.funkyfootstools.com is now moving in the right direction for its keyphrases, footstools and ottomans although it still needs some work. The issue I have is that from the visitors that come to the site, the stats prove they have a look around, they are just not purchasing - I am not sure if this is because of the layout, ie. usability or if there is something else. Any ideas & feedback would be greatly appreciated. Thanks Carl

Conversion Rate Optimization | | keane-114517

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