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  • I wanted to start a blog so I could get some longer tail search term results. I am a knowledge expert in my area but am very busy as an entrepreneur so I had been putting it off for some time. It occurred to me that I might be able to outsource the article writing and I have started doing that. I have either come up with or have approved the topics. I am a very critical editor and demand high quality writing. The articles are all original. We are proofreading everything to make sure the articles are of high quality and inform readers about the subject. I plan to only put external links in the articles that link out to the sources for the information that was used to write the articles. We are also using pictures info graphics and video where possible. I plan to close the comments because, while we have had a website for some time and get some visitors (2500 per month) we are new to blogging and do not have a following that would post comments. My questions is this.......will these be viewed negatively by Google? I think this will be good content but I don't want to do anything to negatively affect us.

    Content Development | | AndreB
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  • Hi our site has always been either number one in google or at the bad times number two for the search word gastric band hypnotherapy but today we have dropped three places and we do not understand what has happened Can anyone please have a look and see what we need to do to get back on top. the site that is above us does not have much information on the subject so we are very puzzled here is our site www.clairehegarty.co.uk/virtual-gastric-band-with-hypnotherapy many thanks

    Technical SEO | | ClaireH-184886
    0

  • Hi I am working on a site at the moment http://www.cheapflightsgatwick.com and i had the site using a different template and in the search engines for the search term cheap flights gatwick we were fourth and for the term holiday magazine we were 12th in google but now we are not even in google on the first page for the search terms. But now after changing the template in joomla our rankings have gone out of the window. It took me about a day to sort out the site with the new template so i was not expecting any problems with the search engines but for some reason there is. If you put into the search engine www.cheapflightsgatwick.com then you will see that google has not visited the site for four days and also it is not showing the description and instead it is showing details about joomla. Can anyone let me know if there is anything i need to do to sort this out and why google is taking so long to visit my site

    Technical SEO | | ClaireH-184886
    0

  • with seomoz, i rank on google in one spot.  With market samurai, I rank in another spot,  With KPMRS (or whatever) i rank another place.  But then when i just type my keywords into google, it puts me in a whole different world... am confused... and the client i am trying to help rank higher is confused. Thanks for any help you can offer be blessed bd

    Competitive Research | | creativeguy
    0

  • Hello! Advice is much appreciated. I'm targeting two keywords, primary and secondary. Should i bold just the primary keyword or primary and secondary? The same for the alt tag and URL. Should i include just the primary keyword or primary and secondary? Thank you. Shane

    On-Page Optimization | | ShaneO
    0

  • For blog commenting and gaining viewers, ultimately trying to get more links, should I leave comments with the Name +URL or leave a comment with my twitter account? Which do you all feel would be more effective?

    Social Media | | AlphonsoSanchez
    0

  • I have an E commerce site that I want to boost search rank for.  I had taken some else's advice and created a wp blog on a different url then created content around the products we offer and linked back to the main site using the specific keyword in anchor text. I just joined seomoz earlier this month.   It seems like the main consensus here as far to install the blog in the domain.com/blog  and I just did that.  So now when I create content for that blog should I just link back to the specific categories and or products then? Should I be aware of duplicate content issues? So if the product is widgets and I am talking about widgets in the blog, or blog title, could they be competing or helping the main URL?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Yevgeny
    0

  • When linking internally on an ecommerce site between pages and from a sitemap, is partial or exact match on the anchor text a significant factor? If it matters to Google, which is a better practice to use? I found plenty of info on external links, but precious little on internal links (which suggests it doesn't matter enough to worry about).

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AWCthreads
    0

  • My client site http://www.tshirtsubway.com has a ABC quick find selector on the homepage of the site and throughout the site and as a result is is showing an error of to many links on the SEO moz error crawls reports. I wanted some advice on improving this and perhaps looking for an alternative also looking at the current setup and asking is this wrong.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onlinemediadirect
    0

  • A few of the sites that I 'compete' with have blogger accounts...and according to the research I've done they have over 500 million external, followed, links! These are mom blogs....and they aren't trying to do any SEO. I've noticed that if you are using blogger (as opposed to wordpress) and adding embed youtube videos to your blog you can set it to auto populate to youtube and also get a link in return. From what I can gather this just happens with blogger accounts since bloggers...and youtube...and google are all related.  Does that have something to do with the crazy amount of followed external links they are getting?  They also have a domain authority of 96 (which is because blogger is a trusted domain.... Is the sub-domain a better number to look at since their blog is a sub domain on blogger? Also, does anyone know who to get the same sort of exposure in youtube as blogger blogs get...or if it's even possible? Thanks.

    Algorithm Updates | | NoahsDad
    0

  • I understand that multiple links fro a site dilute link juice. I also understand that external links to a specific page with relevant anchortext helps ranking. I wonder if there is an ideal ratioof tgese two items

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Apluswhs
    0

  • Hey there. I'm new here at our company, and I'm working on SEO for a website we are working on (www.greenthumbdepot.com). We are doing some link-building (forums, articles, blogs, directory submissions, etc) and are currently trying to find some good quality links, as well. After 3 months, the site was on page 15 for the search term "hydroponics nutrients" on Google, and on the first pages of organic search for Bing and Yahoo!. However, looking again, our website has disappeared from the first 50 pages of Google (according to SEOMOZ). From what I can see, the incoming links are not spammy, and the articles we have been submitting have been driving a small amount of traffic to the site. Are we doing something incredibly wrong here? We've changed the meta tags a couple of nights ago. I'm a noob here, so please go easy on me! I'm learning... so thanks for any advice you can give. -jen

    Link Building | | RENDEV
    0

  • Hello, So I have searched the Q & A , Google, the zen cart forum and at this point I am looking for some one to give a concrete answer on what I should do.  There is a lot of different opinions on " rel=canonical" and how to apply it , since there are many other variable in place. I have a zen cart site.  I am using the latest 1.3.9 version.  The default setting ( seem to me) uses the  rel=canonical to point back to the specific link product or category respectively. Most of the time I have two scenarios. 1. Main category --->  Sub category----> Product 2. Main Category----> Product I'll give an example http://www.perfectindesign.com/awards ---main category http://www.perfectindesign.com/awards/acrylic-awards sub category http://www.perfectindesign.com/awards/acrylic-awards/slanted-award  product (this example has three sub categories with maybe 12 products in one 4 in the second and 5 in the third) From looking at the source code for each url it the rel=canonical just points back to its own url. I want to avoid competing against my self, for the example above keyword "acrylic awards" so should the use of the re=canonical be changes site wide to have products point back to sub categories when they exist and have products point back to main categories when no sub categories exist? I am very new to seo, specifically eCommerce seo.   If you have experience and have done this to a site you manage for a client or your own please advise how to proceed. Also if I'm missing some thing that will give me a better understanding of the bigger seo picture that would be great. Thanks, Yevgeny

    Technical SEO | | Yevgeny
    0

  • Hey Everyone... Really new to the SEO world and have learned tons each day.  When I joined SEOmoz I went to my host and set up the 301 direct to have frogfanreport.com go to www.frogfanreport.com. After a couple of days I noticed that Rogerbot only crawled 1 page on www.frogfanreport.com.  Looked into the community posts to try to find an answer.  So, I went in and took the 301 direct off and setup a new campaign just for frogfanreport.com.  It has now crawled over 300 pages. Not sure what I need to do or if I just did not set it up the 301 direct correctly.  Looking at the link stats the root domain stats are obviously the same.  The subdomain stats is where there is a big difference: www: ext f links 1, total ext links 5, total links 5, f root domain 1, total linking root         domain 4 non-www: ext f links 76, total ext links 109, total links 7.962, f root domain 11, total link root domain 19 I am guessing that I should go back in and put the 301 direct from www to non-www?  Is this going to affect RogerBot going in?  Or did I just not set it up correctly? zach

    Moz Pro | | TCUFrogFanReport
    0

  • I have a robots.txt file on my server, which I did not develop, it was done by the web designer at the company before me. Then there is a word press plugin that generates a robots.txt file. How Do I unblock all the wordpress pages from googlebot?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ENSO
    0

  • On December 14th one of my sites dropped completely for multiple keywords. I cannot figure out why this happened. I have been adding content more in the past few months than ever before... www.howtomac.com is the website I am attaching a few webmasters screenshots so you can see the drop. Any help is much appreciated. htm-webmasters-0.jpg

    Technical SEO | | 38wesley
    1

  • When processing the backlink data of our clients for this month (searches done on 28th December), we're finding that the information gathered from Open Site explorer is identical to the data that was found on searches done at the end of November. It appears to have happened for the reports we use for every single client so it must be more than a coincidence. From our perspective, it's almost as if no data has been tracked since the last time we gathered backlink reports. Could you help us get to the bottom of this?

    Moz Pro | | queryclick
    0

  • Hi, we are in the process of creating a video about a topic that is highly relevant for our customers. Once it is completed we want to offer the video to our customers so that they can embed it into their own websites for free. What is the best way to do this and still receive maximum SEO juice? If we use a a video service like youtube or vimeo, then the link will go to vimeo or youtube and not our site. One thing we are thinking about is asking our customers to link to our site in return for embedding the video, but if there is an automatic solution then this would be a lot better. Any tips will be highly appreciated! If you have anyother  tips regarding video content then the same of course! Many thanks! Daan

    Image & Video Optimization | | daan.loening
    0

  • Hi there, A campaign was crawling fine, but at the last crawl, for some reason, SEOmoz can only crawl one page... any ideas? If I run a custom crawl I still access all of the site's pages.

    Moz Pro | | harryholmes007
    0

  • HI I know that having a strong domain can help when creating sub domains, but can it also work the other way round? Can having a number of strong sub domains help the top level domain's quality and history? My reason for asking is that I have half a dozen domains which have been used for various projects, and still are, which have involved having a landing page on the root domain and running dozens of sub domains.  These subdomains, across 6 root domains, have about 500,000 pages indexed. I have now decided I should do something with the root domain so am wondering if there are any benefits I would have gained from my initial approach. Thanks

    Technical SEO | | Grumpy_Carl
    0

  • Hello, I have fairly recently taken up a position as an in-house SEO, having previously had my own (not terribly successful) ecommerce venture, so my SEO experience is at beginner level. I have read a LOT in coming up with a strategy (Laura Lippay's 8 Step Strategy, amongst so much more on here, has been epic), and have come up with something fairly comprehensive. However, it's taken me months! This is partyly due to other non-SEO responsibilities, and partly due to finding my way around all the tools & resources available, how everything fits together and what should be prioritised over what. This is massively inefficient for future projects, or indeed if I ever got a job in agency, and so I need to get quicker/more productive. I keep reading about identifying and capitalising on 'low hanging fruit' - how does one go about this? Details would be hugely appreciated - starting from the bottom up, i.e. keyword research, competitive & backlink analysis, link building etc. For the record, I have zero coding capabilities (something I plan to rectify one day soon) and so my strategy revolves primarily around content and outreach, rather changing site architecture. In any case, our website seems well put together, since new content is indexed very quickly. Thanks so much in advance, Ali (UK)

    Link Building | | AliClinks
    0

  • Hi, Is it possible for an individual to go against the big boys in a industry sector? Lets say flowers in the UK, all the massive flower companies go for 2 keywords: 'flowers delivered' (30,000 ems) and 'flowers by post' (30,000 ems) Would it be possible to start a new site and within 6 months (July) be up in the top 5? Scrap any exact match domains as there gone, I'm talking about creating a brand such as flowerpower.co.uk picking a term and going for it. Is this possible?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper
    0

  • I am using for the first time the crawl test tool from SEOmoz and I do not really understand which URLs the tool is going to crawl. First, it says "enter any subdomain" --> why can´t I do the crawl for the root domain? Second it says "we'll crawl up to 3,000 linked-to pages" --> does that mean that the tool crawls all internal links that it can find on the given domain? Thanks for your help!

    Moz Pro | | Elke.GetApp
    0

  • My wordpress URL is breaking and there are 5000 not found urls in webmaster due to some code being added %E2%80%9d. This code stands for double quotation marks - " Now the question is, where has my site gone wrong? I will tell you the changes which i have made Deleted a Vbulletin forum - Half of the errors are due to the forum being deleted directly Upgraded to Wordpress 3.3 (crawl errors did not show on the same day. Much later) Upgraded to Blue host pro (crawl errors did not show on the same day. Much later) These are some of the speculations. But nonetheless i have no idea why this is happening. To give further hints, the Home page URL is being added to the original URL. http://www.marketing91.com/article/http://www.marketing91.com http://www.marketing91.com/article/http://www.wrodpress.org So these are a list of problems i am facing in URL. Now i have no idea why this is happening. I can account for the deletion of a vbulletin forum. But that accounts only for half of the crawl errors. So any replies or answers??

    Technical SEO | | hith234
    0

  • I'm pinning because it's fun, but I'm getting some nice traffic and benefits to my websites. One of my sites has received over 100 links from Pinterest users, plus some embeds on users own personal sites. http://pinterest.com/source/thingsyoushoulddo.com/ The average pinner is female and between 25 and 45 years of age.  Do you have any visual content that might appeal to her?

    Social Media | | juliemarg
    1

  • Hello, One of my clients have a new website (just 3 months old) and for some keywords it's already working quite well (some of them already on first page for organic search results in Google). But suddenly one of the keywords (just one) dropped 25 positions from one day to another, while the rest of them are ok and even getting better. What may be happening here? The only thing I have done for this keyword different to the rest is that I have created a few internal links (just 7 o 😎 using the keyword. The site is big, with around 60 pages including a blog. I know that I'm not being very explicit with the information I'm providing... Thank you in advance for your help!

    Technical SEO | | Juandbbam
    0

  • Hi there, I just signed up for seomoz pro today and have been playing around in OSE looking at a number of local business websites that I manage SEO for. For all of them, I have put an endless amount of effort ensuring they have good quality, accurate business listings in all the local directories like yelp, yellowpages, hotfrog, tripadvisor, etc. For most of them, I did this months or even up to a year ago. However, I don't see a single link reported in OSE that is a result of my efforts here. Does OSE not report links from local business directories, or should I be concerned that I'm somehow not optimizing properly, or are these types of links of such little value that they don't get picked up, something else? Thanks for the help!

    Moz Pro | | rianDS
    1

  • I have a customer who has many domain names and assets but she's wanting to consolidate some of them to help her simplify things for her customers but mostly she wants to build up her website through which she sells products. Grief Reflection - www.griefreflection.com is a personal journal that she's keeping to process the impending death of her husband and it's also linked to her business website which sells healing from grief types of products. Storybooks for Healing - www.storybooksforhealing.com is the website through which she sells workbooks and memory books for people who want to keep the memory of their loved one alive after they've gone. I've setup both of these domains as campaigns and have been looking at the metrics for both.  The grief reflection blog out performs the storybooks for healing website. If we merge the two then the Grief Reflection blog would likely become a subdirectory under www.storybooksforhealing.com and be more fully integrated which she thinks will help her visitors not get confused while navigating her website. www.griefreflection.com has 12,637 links while www.storybooksforhealing.com has 1,462.  Also, Google has indexed 380 pages of Grief Reflection and only 100 pages for Storybooks for Healing, though that may be because there are fewer pages to index. Grief reflection also has a 4.36 mozRank and 5.30 mozTrust, where Storybooks has 4.13 mozRank and 5.15 mozTrust. Should I counsel her to keep these domains separate?  If not, would simply setting up 301 redirects from the www.griefreflection.com domain name to the new subdirectory under www.storybooksforhealing.com be the way to go? Thank you ever so much for any wisdom anyone can provide.

    Technical SEO | | ChristiMc
    0

  • Per definition, a 404 is displayed for different url (any not existing url ...). As I try to clean my website following SEOmoz pro advices, SEOmoz notify me of duplicate content on urls leading to a 404 🙂 This is I guess not that important, but just curious: should we add a cononical tag to the template returning the 404, with a canonical url such as www.mysite.com/404 ?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nuxeo
    0

  • I'm looking for tool where I can insert a keyword phrase and have it give me a list of websites with a percentage of the traffic they receive: example: keyword is "knee brace" result: Amazon 35.16% next site 24% next site 13.54% etc Does anyone currently use a website or know of a tool that can provide this information.  Free sites would also be doubly appreciated!  Thank you Mozzers.

    Competitive Research | | dmedirect_sbcglobal.net
    0

  • Hello, We have an online soccer equipment retail store (http://www.soccerstop.com) that we have been working on to get higher ranking results in many different areas of specific product pages, as well as our general homepage for several years.  SeoMoz has been an excellent addition for us to learn and analyze, etc. In addition to our current PPC, and SEO efforts, we are going to create a blog as we have many thoughts, opinions and interesting information for what hopefully will be a good sized audience of soccer enthusiasts!  We currently have a person who goes on other soccer blogger websites and offers our thoughts and expressions, but we now want to give our own blog. My thought is to create a subdirectory of our domain something like: http://www.soccerstop.com/blog as that seems what is recommended in many posts here in this forum. I am also thinking of using wordpress blog as it also seems recommended.  We have a lot of ideas about content, and feel we will bring people to our blog in various ways through our existing and coming customers at the retail online store.  However, it seems to get the best backlink performance possible out of our new blog, we need to join blog networks to get our blogs posted on outside third party websites.  Is this right, and where would I begin to understand and start this process?  I understand the first step is to get our blog started, but I want to foundationally have an idea where we are going with this as we build.  This way it is built in a sound way, ready to be as effective as possible!  Please understand I am a builder and not the blogger, which is why the structure and initial setup of syndication is so important to me! Thanks for any advice.
    James

    Link Building | | SoccerStop
    0

  • SEO moz lists my site http://holmesbailbonding.com as listing 2nd for raleigh bail bonds but when I search I am getting different results even with a cleared cache. Just wondering what factors contribute to this and what I need to be doing more of to get my site to rank for Raleigh Bail Bonds in raleigh, nc. Thanks,

    Image & Video Optimization | | MaddDogg
    0

  • I understand that there is a suggested maximum length for a URL so as not to be penalized by search engines. I'm wondering if I should if should optimize our ecommerce categories to be descriptive or use abbreviations to help keep the URL length to a minimum? Our products are segmented into many categories, so many products URL's are pretty long if we go the descriptive route. I've also heard that removing the category component entirely from a product URL can also be considered. I'm fairly new to all this SEO stuff, so I'm hoping the community can share their knowledge on the impact of these options. Cheers, Steve

    Technical SEO | | SteveMaguire
    0

  • Hello Mozzers, I just logged into my account and after what has felt like a few months of on site work I finally see ZERO errors across the board for my main campaign with SEO Moz! I just wanted to share that with everyone because at one point above the errors were in the 5,000 range. It was causing penalties and weight in serps, but now thanks to SEO Moz and the help that I have received in the Q&A section, I have corrected all the errors! So, thank you to SEOMOZ and the pro community very very much!!! As a discussion though, how are the errors with most other users? Are you typically always seeing no errors, a few errors or a lot of errors for your campaigns? Thanks! Jesse

    Moz Pro | | getrightmusic
    1

  • I have had a yahoo site for a couple of years. I want to start blogging so I had a worpress site built. After the site was build I noticed the urls from the previous site were not the same. For example www.besthomecaremn.com/about_us is now www.besthomecaremn.com/index-php/about_us. The company working on the site told me that that yahoo did not support permalinks and they could not make them match exactly. This is a problem because several of my pages rank differently for different terms: /about_us, /employees, /clients, /contact_us, etc, all rank differently. When they came up in the search results and were clicked on you were taken to the old site so it was like we had two sites. The company has now set that to send you to a page that says this page under routine maintenence. They are basically telling me they cannot make the urls for those pages stay the same. I am very frustrated and don't really know what to do at this point. Are they right? Can it really not be done? Can those pages alternatively be set to redirect to the new page urls or will that negatively affect the rank for those pages and how? Should I have them put the old site back up and swith hosting companies? Any advice on what to do in this situation is greatly appreciated.

    Web Design | | AndreB
    0

  • A competitor of ours is using dynamic keyword insertion for exact urls in our field. I'm not 100% clear on this, but isn't that not allowed in adwords? I am not one that usually turns in a competitor for shady doings, but I'm not sure what to do. Any advice?

    Paid Search Marketing | | ClaytonKendall
    0

  • So I pruned my vbulletin forum the other week and now webmaster tools detects over 4000 urls as not found.  Is there a solution to this?  Is this something that could negatively effect rankings?  Any ideas?

    Technical SEO | | TheTippingPoint
    0

  • Hi, I was wondering if you may know if you have to keep to the and coding when adding schema code to the site. For example if I'm already using H and P tags can I add the "itemprop" to those or do they have to be in aor as in the example below: <span itemprop="name">Kenmore White 17" Microwavespan>
    Product description:
    <span itemprop="description">0.7 cubic feet countertop microwave. Has six preset cooking categories and convenience features like Add-A-Minute and Child Lock.span> So could I code it like this? <h1 itemprop="name">Kenmore White 17" Microwaveh1>
    Product description:
    <p itemprop="description">0.7 cubic feet countertop microwave. Has six preset cooking categories and convenience features like Add-A-Minute and Child Lock.p> Thank you,
    Etela

    Technical SEO | | DragonSearch
    0

  • Does anyone know the trick to have Google Rankings to be as good as Bing/Yahoo Results?

    On-Page Optimization | | hfranz
    0

  • Hi, I like to know the inbound marketing sources of my competitors, and like to know how many traffic are receiving from Organic Ranking and Adwords or Search Engine Paid Marketing. ANd it would be nice to know the social media traffic too. I am searching, but i see here compete.com, but at the moment it's too expensive for me, like to ask you if you can find me to find any software cheaper than compete. Thanks.

    Competitive Research | | leadsprofi
    0

  • When checking my crawl diagnostics this morning I see that I have the error Duplicate page content.  It lists the exact same url twice though and I don't understand how to fix this.  It's also listed under duplicate page title. Personal Assistant | Virtual Assistant | Charlotte, NC http://charlottepersonalassistant.com/110 Personal Assistant | Virtual Assistant | Charlotte, NC http://charlottepersonalassistant.com/110 Does this have anything to do with a 301 redirect here?  Why does it have http;// twice?  Thanks all! | http://www.charlottepersonalassistant.com/ | http://http://charlottepersonalassistant.com/ |

    Technical SEO | | eidna22
    0

  • I have a bunch of  WP Blogs and was thinking of taking all linkjuice from these to my main money site. The most of the other WP Blogs is hosted at godaddy.com (domain and site) and I know they have a URL Redirects page in site manager but I`m not sure this is the right way to go. Also I wonder some of these sites have hundreds of blogposts  there is no way I can "re-create" those on the money site but I am sure that is not a must-thing to do in order to keep the "juice" right or wrong? Last but not least, I was wondering if you think it would be best to redirect the sites to relevant pages on money sites. For instance if i had a domain called cheap-ties.com with 100 blogposts about this and on money site a webshop with a category called ties, should redirect to this or to main domain  or doesnt it matter?

    Technical SEO | | fAgBxa8b
    0

  • I recently launched a scrollable web comic at www.shoutout.co.in. In space of 2 days after launch, i got more than 100 likes. While this is great number, i am not sure if this is best usage of options provided by facebook. Which option is best share/like/share-with-comment option? Currently i only have "like" implementation. Is this giving less probability of visibility to friends than "share-with-comment" option? stats and numbers from your experience/campaigns will help.

    Branding | | ShoutOut
    0

  • If you could build your website from scratch and have your developers do anything you want (within reason), what list of SEO requirements would you send them? Does anyone know of any good articles on the perfect SEO wish list? Happy Holidays!

    Web Design | | MirandaP
    1

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