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  • I want to modify my urls for the purpose of creating clean, informative urls that can be pasted directly for backlink purposes.  Instead I have urls with long, garbled, strange characters.  When I change the URL it breaks existing back links! Any way around this?

    Technical SEO | | natearistotle
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  • In the beginning of SEO days, it was going around that .com is the best for SEO and that .net is not as good. Is there any truth to this, and what about .org or .edu? I always hear that .edu sites have high PR. Is there any rhyme or reason to this, or all they all equal? Thank you, Afshin Christian-Way.com

    Technical SEO | | applesofgold
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  • Is there any merit to the statement that Google will give some SEO value to sites that display Adsense? Or is there absolutely no SEO value for or against a site that displays Adsense Ads? Clearly, it would benefit Google's finance to give at least a small boost to sites that display Adsense, but do they do it? My guess is no, but I'm wondering ...

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | applesofgold
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  • I am building a site which sells a product in 50 states and in each state we will have independt partners. From an SEO perspective, what are the tradeoffs in using a single domain vs. having each state a subdomain? Each state also has varying regulatory issues that are specific to that state.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | uwaim2012
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  • I'm doing a site audit for someone and they have a links page full of reciprocal links for other similar businesses across the country. My gut instinct is to remove this page. How would you approach this if this was your client?

    Link Building | | MarieHaynes
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  • Hi, If I want to serve a subset of pages on my mobile set from my desktop site or the content is significantly different, i.e. it is not one to one or pages are a summarised version of the desktop, should I use m.site.com or is it still better to use site.com? Many thanks any help appreciated.

    Technical SEO | | MarkChambers
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  • During the web development stages of our Joomla CMS website, we have managed to get our site indexed for totally irrelevant test pages mainly to do with Joomla and some other equally irrelevant test content. How damaging is this to our domain from an SEO prospective and is there something we can do about it? When we do a site:domain.com search we see hundreds of testpages with test/irrelevant meta tags etc.

    Algorithm Updates | | Fuad_YK
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  • My question will take a bit of explaining, so here goes: I have 3 blogs on the same server: 1.  personal finance blog; 2.  credit card blog; 3.  prepaid credit card blog. The personal finance blog is my flagship site started in 2007, which feeds my family and pays the mortgage.  By contrast, the other two sites (started in 2008 and 2010) I would gladly kill if the result would help my personal finance blog. In the fall of 2010 (before Panda) the prepaid card blog was penalized by Google.  This has been confirmed by Google in response to a reconsideration request.  Of course, they don't say why.  I've tried a number of things and resubmitted the site, but with no luck. Both the personal finance blog and credit card blog were hit by Panda 2 (April 11, 2011) and have not recovered. While the personal finance site covers many topics (e.g., investing, credit, debt, money management), its income comes largely from credit cards.  We review individual credit cards and have pages that list cards by category (e.g., balance transfer, cash back, travel). The credit card blog does the same thing, but of course covers credit cards in more depth.  There is a similar overlap between the prepaid card blog on the one hand, and the credit card blog and personal finance blog on the other.  However, all content is unique. I do not currently link between the sites, although until a few months ago I had blogroll links between the sites and a few (less than 10) content links. If you've made it this far (and I hope you have), here are my questions: 1.  Could the existence of the credit card and prepaid credit card sites be hurting my personal finance blog's rankings in Google, whether via Panda or otherwise? 2.  If there is a reasonable chance that the answer to question 1 is yes, what would you suggest I do? Of course, I could just take down the sites, but I wonder if there are other options. One thought I had was to deindex the two card sites (I assume I can do this by disallowing googlebot via robots.txt) and give it time.  Would Google treat this as if the sites did not exist?  Both sites get a fair amount of traffic from bing and yahoo, so this option appeals to me.  Of course, for all I know the existence of the two card sites are hurting my personal finance blog's rankings in bing and yahoo, too. I thought about selling the sites, but if they are hurting my personal finance site, I grow concerned about how google distinguishes between a site being sold and a webmaster just trying to make the sites look like they are owned by different people.  In this regard, I've never tried to hide the common ownership of the sites and have no intention of doing that now. If I kill the sites, should I redirect them to my personal finance site?  For the penalized prepaid card site, this seems both risky and unhelpful.  But perhaps redirecting the credit card site is an option. Given that the personal finance site is my livelihood, I greatly appreciate your thoughts on my dilemma.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bergerlaw
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  • Hello, I have to understand if this site www.spacemilanmodels.com.pt can be optimize since the entire website is in flash wich is not good for optimizacion. What do you guys suggest? Recommendations? Is it possible only with link-building? Tks for the help!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PedroM
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  • Hi guys , my website www.starpluservices.com  on google first page for the past 2 years and we were page rank 4, 2 months ago we changed all page titles and Keewords after that the page rank droped to 1 and we are not anymore in page 1 in google, we have done all this changes to target another keyword Office Cleaning London, now after 2 months I had 3 quotes for SEO , and 2 SEO companies told me that I need a new website because my one was done with tables and the other company told me that if I still on first page with some keywords andon the 2 page with cleaning companies to dont make a new website just update my one!! Could anyone let me know what should I do? Regards Sergio

    On-Page Optimization | | starplus
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  • Ok, we have been pretty dismissive of Google+ but having read more and more about how it is now directly influencing search results (currently in the USA) we are going to suggest setting up accounts for business. The question is, which Google Account should be used for the business page? In the nice presentational video on Google+ the example business is a nice local bike shop, which is simple right? Just use the small business owners account. But what about larger clients? Who in the org should have the business page on their account? What if that individual leaves? Can the page be separated from that account? Should you use maybe a Google Apps for Business account? But the issue with that is you will obviously have no one in any circles to share that page with. It all seems to be too closely tied to the personal side of Google+ Any help would be great. Thanks.

    Social Media | | CarlE
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  • Does Any Know How Long It Takes Google Adsense to Approval App? I have been waiting almost a month.

    Affiliate Marketing | | AppleCapitalGroup
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  • My main web development company is linked to many of our clients and our clients link back to us using footer links back.  We obviously have a high volume of c-block relations. If I change my main site's location to a different server will it make any difference or is it too late?

    Web Design | | sanchez1960
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  • Hello all, I was wondering if anyone can help me. Currently I'm trying to set up a HTML sitemap for our website and am having trouble with the 500+ pages of content under each category. How do you segment your HTML sitemap in a case like this, keeping in mind the less than 100 links per page rule? For example, http://www.careerbliss.com/salary/ allows our users to search salaries under company, job title, and location. You can imagine how many thousands of pages we need to represent. Any help will be greatly appreciated! Cheers! Reyna

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CareerBliss
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  • Hello I have about 800 warnings with this. Example of one url with this problem is: http://www.theprinterdepo.com/clearance?dir=asc&order=price I was checking and I think all links are important.  But I suppose that if I put a nofollow on the links on the left which are only for navigation purposes I can get rid of these warnings. Any other idea?

    Technical SEO | | levalencia1
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  • What have you found to be the best way to convince quality blog sites with authority to let you become a guest blogger for their site? I know that providing samples of quality writing is key. But other than that, what is the best way "in"? I have a handful of quality writers at my disposal and also write myself, but I'm trying to find effective ways of convincing established blogs to let me write for them. Please send me your best, most creative suggestions! What has worked for you? Thank you, Afshin Apples of Gold

    Content Development | | applesofgold
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  • Hello This is my robots.txt file http://www.theprinterdepo.com/Robots.txt However I have 8000 warnings on my dashboard like this:4 What am I missing on the file¿ Crawl Diagnostics Report On-Page Properties <dl> <dt>Title</dt> <dd>Not present/empty</dd> <dt>Meta Description</dt> <dd>Not present/empty</dd> <dt>Meta Robots</dt> <dd>Not present/empty</dd> <dt>Meta Refresh</dt> <dd>Not present/empty</dd> </dl> URL: http://www.theprinterdepo.com/catalog/product_compare/add/product/100/uenc/aHR0cDovL3d3dy50aGVwcmludGVyZGVwby5jb20vaHAtbWFpbnRlbmFjZS1raXQtZm9yLTQtbGo0LWxqNS1mb3ItZXhjaGFuZ2UtcmVmdWJpc2hlZA,,/ 0 Errors No errors found! 1 Warning 302 (Temporary Redirect) Found about 5 hours ago <a class="more">Read More</a>

    Technical SEO | | levalencia1
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  • Do "nofollow" links provide any SEO value, particularly for Google? I have heard that they still can, since Google doesn't necessarily follow all of the tags. Is this true? Is there any value in obtaining nofollow links? Can they also hurt in any way? Thank you! 
    Afshin Apples of Gold

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | applesofgold
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  • I have a quality site with good PR and we have very few outbound links. We are always looking for good content since it is a blog, and I get frequent requests from "guest bloggers"–some of which actually provide really high quality & unique content. But, of course, to get their content I have to give them at least 1 link. I have always been taught that external links really hurt your site and that basically 1 outbound link cancels out 1 inbound link because they balance each other out. Is this true? I always wondered why we must get penalized for linking out to good sites? It makes me get very "stingy" with my outbound links, whereas if my site would not be effected, I would want to be more generous. Any suggestions & info would greatly help! Thank you, Afshin

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | applesofgold
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  • I am looking for a transcription software the can transcribe a podcast. Does anybody know of a software that can do this?

    On-Page Optimization | | AppleCapitalGroup
    0

  • How sensitive do you think the Google Places NAP algorithm is? If I have different Google Places pages for one client with multiple locations, but the same phone number for all locations with different addresses, will this hurt my Google Places ranking or organic webpage result?

    Search Behavior | | Mike-i
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  • Hi, I have been actively doing guest blogging for last few weeks . But the page authority , moz Rank and moz Trust of my guest posts appear 0 as those posts have their own pages on blogs  with snippets of posts on home page.  I wanted to ask if i should backlink to my guest posts to increase the authority, mR and mT of pages. Those posts are already appearing as backlinks in webmaster tools but if i backlink to my posts to increase mR and mT, then will it also increase the juice passed by backlinks in those posts to landing pages on my site ? Thanks,

    Link Building | | shaz_lhr
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  • As an ecommerce site, one of the tabs on the product description is filled with delivery information. This tab is populated the same way on every product page. I think this is contributing to an increased score on my pages similarity to each other. Is there a way to obscure this info for se's and is it worthwhile doing so?

    Technical SEO | | LadyApollo
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  • I am interested in finding people or websites that are influential in a particular industry. For example, in the finance world, who has "weight" when it comes to the keyword gold, or mining stocks. Not just for website hits but for social media influence too. Is there a tool to do that?

    Social Media | | StreetwiseReports
    0

  • On our product pages, he have short descriptions and some bulleted lists. Resellers of our products, and many other sites who are not resellers are copying this content, often verbatim. While I'm not as concerned for the product pages themselves as we're hoping the category pages will rank, does this duplication of our content hurt our site overall? FWIW, our brand name is in our domain and often also shown on these sites that copy the content.

    Content Development | | minutiae
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  • I know that no question is supposed to be a dumb questions so I am going to go for it... Our keyword ranking on google for one of our companies  capitol collision  is getting better all the time but the same can't be said for yahoo or bing. Could you please offer some advice on how to improve this as well? Thanks

    Algorithm Updates | | allstatetransmission
    0

  • Which one do you weigh more than the other? I prefer high-authority sites over low-authority but relevant sites/pages personally. From my experience, non-relevant'authoritative' websites/pages tend to have a bigger impact than 'relevant' websites/pages. What do you think? What is your experience?

    Link Building | | qlkasdjfw
    0

  • Hello, I recently did an SEOMoz crawl for a client site.  As it typical, the most common errors were duplicate page title and duplicate content.  The client site is a custom social network for researchers.  Most of the pages that showing as duplicate are simple variations of each user's profile such as comment sections, friends pages, and events. So my question is how can we limit duplicate content errors for a complex site like this.  I already know about the rel canonical tag, and rel next tag, but I'm not sure if either of these will do the job.  Also, I don't want to lose potential links/link juice for good pages. Are there ways of using the "noindex" tag in batches? For instance: noindex all urls containing this character?  Or do most CMS allow this to be done systematically? Anyone with experience doing SEO for a custom Social Network or Forum, please advise. Thanks!!!

    Technical SEO | | BPIAnalytics
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  • Hi, have you guys an opinion on this point, mentioned by Matt Cutts in 2010 : Matt made a point to mention that users are more likely to click on the first link in an article as opposed to a link at the bottom of the article. He said put your most important links at the top of the article. I believe it was Matt hinting to SEOs about this. http://searchengineland.com/key-takeaways-from-googles-matt-cutts-talk-at-pubcon-55457 I've asked this in private and Michael Cottam told me he read a study a year ago that indicated that the link juice passed to other pages diminished the further down the page you go. But he can't find it anymore ! Do you remember this study and have the link ? What is your opinion on Matt's point ?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | baptisteplace
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  • Can anyone offer any insight into why since the Google Panda update www.bedandbreakfastsguide.com has been fluctuating on Google so much? One week it's ranked as it used to be, the next it's nowhere to be seen? If you take a look at the screenshot of our traffic, this is the traffic after 75% loss (dropped in two stages) you'll see we get traffic for a week and then nothing. This has been happening for months. Some points that might be involved: Around the same time the SEO guys suggested setting the canonical url to www.bedandbreakfastsguide.com (before there wasn't one so traffic was coming from www. and non-www). A lot of the original urls have been consolidated and rel="canonical" added throughout The "pages" of results all have had a rel="canonical" set to page 1 Could it be that the www is competing with the non-www despite the 301 redirects. We're doing everything we can to help this client (and have reduced their site errors from the millions to low tens-of-thousands) so it's not filling them with confidence when their site just keeps plumetting! What's also irritating/odd is that some of their competitors -who used to be ranked lower and have sites which contradict every rulebook still rank high. Hopefully you can spot something we've missed. Tim I8PNL

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TimGaunt
    0

  • just want to check is anyone using these other products? and if so do they work? RankTracker Seo Spyglass Website Auditor LinkAssistant? Thank you!

    Competitive Research | | mikedw
    0

  • This topic has me entirely confused, and unsure if we should keep a website focused on one keyword group, and using synonym contextual links to rank it for other keyword  synonyms. We simply have not seen enough data or run enough tests to find our answer, and wanted to reach out to the community to see if anyone has. I have seen Google rank a synonym to my search query on the first page, and is why we are confused. Let's use an example: We'll use "Industry" as the main keyword for our page. "Company" or "Companies" is viewed as a synonym by Google of this keyword.  When we query "Industry", "Company" and "Companies" are also found in bold. 1.) Is it best practice to also create a unique page targeting synonyms? Our thinking is that it would be best to try and target exactly what the user is looking for rather than having a synonym to their search for better conversions, but as mentioned above we feel it's best to hit exactly what they query because that's their way of thinking.  That they're looking for that exact match. 2.) Have the page "Industry", but do some link building using contextual links "Company" or "Companies" pointing back at our "Industry" page. Would this help rank our "Industry" page for "Company"  or "Companies" even though the main page is "Industry"? Just not sure we want to do this as the reasoning explained in #1. Thanks for your help!

    Link Building | | cyberlicious
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  • Hi all, Another issue while trying to resolve all the duplicate content SEOmoz reports to me. May be some of you guys can help: I have a dynamic error page on our website, generated in case of error, that can happen on many urls. Of course that one should not be indexed. I added the following tag on the HEADER: name="robots" content="NOODP,NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW" /> To me this should prevent from having this page indexed, but also from having this page reported by SEOmoz analyzer as duplicate content. Any hints?

    Moz Pro | | nuxeo
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  • Hi SEOmozers! I have a question. SEOmoz analysis report me some duplicate that I thought I had fix. I can give a concrete example. This page: http://www.nuxeo.com/en/about/events/dec2011training-boston/moreinfo is reported as having 6 duplicated URL in the tool. When I click on 6, SEOMOZ tells me "Our crawl bots are getting their joints greased to fetch you even better data. Sorry for the delay!" And on the page itself, I placed a canonical link to follow recommandation. rel="canonical" href="http://www.nuxeo.com/en/about/events/apr2012training-boston" /> As a result I am curious why I would have this reported as duplicate by SEOmoz. Is this a bug? Thanks for feedback!

    Moz Pro | | nuxeo
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  • Hello all ! I've decided to delete many pages from my website wich had poor content. I've made a php 301 redirect from all these old pages to a unique page (not the home page, a deep page). My problem is that this modification has been made a week ago and my position in the SERPs have crashed down... What can I do ? I believe that I'll get up again when Google will see that these pages don't exist anymore but it could take a long time 😞 (these page are in the Google cache with a date older than my modification's date) I've read somewhere that I should put a link to the destination page (where old pages are 301 redirected) but I don't understand how it could help... Can someone help me ? Tell me what I've done wrong... These pages were very poor and I've deleted them in order to boost the global quality of my site... It should help me in the SERPs, not penalize me...

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | B-CITY
    0

  • How would you handle multiple pages using the same video content? As sometimes it does not make sense to have new videos for every product so you re purpose. Will you still get the effects in search results if the thumbs and video location is duplicated for some product urls?

    Technical SEO | | andrewv
    0

  • What tools can you teel me like keywordspy or SemRush that shows me what keywords my competitors are using to get traffic?

    Keyword Research | | Montse
    0

  • So I joined the BBB for 1 of 3 stores we have located in difference cities and states. My local rankings dropped in all cities except the one that's registered with the BBB. Coincidence? Anyone experienced something similar?

    Link Building | | schmeetz
    0

  • I've been doing some local SEO lately and noticed something today.  When I do a search for "State/town name Cat Toys", I see the title tag of the website in the local results as opposed to the business name. I'm happy they are showing up above the normal results, but I wonder if having the brand name at the end of the site title impacts clicks.  For example: Site name: New Hampshire Cat Toys and Accessories | Cats R Us But in the places results the title is cut short because they show the address, so all they see is: New Hampshire Cat Toys and.... Do you think branding is especially important in local results?  Or less important?  I could hear arguments for both sides.  I realize the site URL is shown in green below the title, but it's not the same as having a brand in the title portion.  It also looks like some of the competition has just their name show up as opposed to their website title.  Is this something I can fix in Google Places, or is something Google does on its own? Cheers, Vinnie

    Algorithm Updates | | vforvinnie
    1

  • In Google Webmaster Central, if a URL is reported in your site map as 404 (Not found), I'm assuming Google will automatically clean it up and that the next time we generate a sitemap, it won't include the 404 URL. Is this true? Do we need to comb through our sitemap files and remove the 404 pages Google finds, our will it "automagically" be cleaned up by Google's next crawl of our site?

    Technical SEO | | Prospector-Plastics
    0

  • I'm new to SEOMoz and trying to find something like SEMRush for finding what keywords competitors use. Is there anything like that within SEOMoz?

    Moz Pro | | seanuk
    0

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