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  • I'm currently managing SEO for my company's website, and I'm getting into link building for the first time. As part of the process, I'm using Open Site Explorer to see who's linking into our competitor sites, to get a better sense of what's available to us in our particular avenue of e-commerce. However, I'm finding that our competitors are getting inbound links from high-authority sites pretty far afield from selling jewelry - census.gov, parallels.com, warnerbros.com, and others. I try clicking through to these links, but each link starts a download of a file. I've seen .f4v, .7z, and .apk files listed as inbound links to our competitor. How is this happening? Again, I'm new to link building, so there may be a simple answer here, and if so I apologize for asking. However, this seems really strange to me, and a difficult situation to confront.

    Moz Pro | | jozaksut
    0

  • Hey Mozzers, I've been working on a bunch of different templates lately to approach various companies in our industry for link exchanges.  But I'm somewhat stumped on what the best approach would be.  I want to convey the message that a link exchange would be beneficial to their ranking in search engines, but I don't want to come off sounding overly spammy. Do you have a template that you have found worked well for you? Share it with us!

    Link Building | | adriandg
    0

  • Helping my wife with ecommerce site. Selling clothes. Some photos are given by producer, but at times they are not too good.  Some are therefore taking their own photos and i suspect ppl are copying them and using them on their own site. Is there anyting to do about this - watermarking of course, but can they be 'marked' in anyway linking to your site ?

    Technical SEO | | danlae
    0

  • I'm curious which strategy is better in the short term and in the long-term?  Part of my link building strategy involves contacting bloggers and posting some guest blogs on their sites. Now there are advantages with posting on a few blogs and creating a link between you and the blog readers and the blog owner.  It also saves time trying to contact blog owners etc. However would my time be better spent contacting hundreds of blogs and seeing where I can guest blog and then post on as many as possible; in order to have a diverse number of links going back to my website? What do you think is the best option and why?

    Link Building | | Grow
    0

  • For a blog that already has thousands of posts, what is a good template for meta descriptions? I guess I assume that the best way to do it would be to do a custom one for each post, but given the amount of time that would take, I'd like to hear some alternatives. Thanks!

    On-Page Optimization | | kylesuss
    0

  • Does anyone know how to edit the ecommerce javascript with Volusion dynamic variables? I thought I did it correctly but none of the information got recorded in GA. It recorded that there was a transaction made but not info on the purchase price, order #, etc. This is the current code I am using: NOTE: In Volusions customer support center they provided this information: Where Order-Specific Information is Generated Order-specific information can be generated by JavaScript on the OrderFinished.asp page within Volusion. On this page, two JavaScript arrays will be initialized that advanced users may need to be aware of. The arrays and their contents are as follow:
    Order Array Contents Order[0] = Order ID
        Order[1] = Unused
        Order[2] = Payment Amount
        Order[3] = Affiliate Commisionable Value
        Order[4] = Sales Tax
        Order[5] = Total Shipping Cost
        Order[6] = Billing City
        Order[7] = Billing State
        Order[8] = Billing Country OrderDetails Array Contents OrderDetails[X][0] = Order ID
        OrderDetails[X][1] = Order Detail ID
        OrderDetails[X][2] = Product Code
        OrderDetails[X][3] = Product Name
        OrderDetails[X][4] = (unused)
        OrderDetails[X][5] = Product Price
        OrderDetails[X][6] = Quantity Note that in the above example, X refers to a line item number (beginning from zero). Note that there can be multiple Order Details arrays - one for each item contained within an order. I'm a newbie at Analytics installation and could really use any help. Thanks!

    Reporting & Analytics | | jhooley
    1

  • How do we solve an issue faced on the Printer Friendly version of the page lets say, There is an Actual Page (Page A) and a Printer friendly version (Page B) of Page A. Page A is ranking at position 5 and Page B is not ranking. Both these pages are indexed by Google and most of the backlinks are going to Page B as compared to Page A. one of the ways is to implement Canonical on Page B. Are there some other ways to solve the issue and how can we implement it? How can ensure that all the links going to page B pass on the link value to Page A.

    Technical SEO | | SEOTeam35
    0

  • I have a website which "houses" five different and completely separate departments, so the content is separated by subfolders. e.g. domain.com/department1 domain.com/department2 etc. and each have their own individual top navigation menus. There is an "About Us" section for each department which has about 6 subpages (Work for us, What we do, Awards etc.)  but the problem is that the content for each department is exactly the same. The only difference is the navigation menu and the breadcrumbs. This isn't ideal as a change to one page means having to make the change to all 5 and from an SEO perspective it's duplicate content x5 (apart from the Nav). One solution I can see is to have the "About Us" section moved to the root level (domain.com/about-us) and have a generic nav, possibly with the department names on it. The only problem with this is that it disrupts the user journey if they are forced away from the department that they're chosen. Basically i'm looking for suggestions or examples of other sites that have got around this problem, I need inspiration! Any help would be greatly appreciated.

    Reporting & Analytics | | haydennz
    0

  • (urls have been altered) We are KitchenApps.Com, your online portal for kitchen appliances. One of our biggest selling products is toasters, but despite SEO efforts, **KitchenApps.Com/toasters **ranks on page 6 for "toasters"  and barely budges. One of our competitors, Kool-Kitcken-Apps.biz just tossed in the towel and sold his domain/site to our boss for the cheap. It's an old domain, but the URL isnt lovely. He's got content, but it aint pretty and of course, we sell differently than he does, have some different products, etc. BUT BUT BUT hold everything, he ranks on the first page, with his homepage, for "toasters" his best ranked keyword. A lot of sites have linked to his site for toasters, buying toasters, etc. Of course, the boss wants to just toss his content, and since his domain is different than company name (which is literally KitchenApps.Com) we should redirect Kool-Kitchen-Apps.biz to our SEO friendly KitchenApps.com/toasters url. He expects that will keep the same positioning, and we'll snag the toaster clicks. Can we expect to maintain the positioning on page #1?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EricPacifico
    0

  • Hi! I would like to ask if anyone has any ideas on why the second website in this analysis is getting position 2 on google and website 1 is getting position 5: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/comparisons?site=bonobetfair.info&comparisons[0]=www.bonobetfair.com&=Compare The metrics indicate that the first website is clearly superior in (almost) all metrics. Why could this be?

    Reporting & Analytics | | inmonova
    0

  • I'm sure by now a lot of you have had a chance to read the Let's Kill the "Bad Inbound Links Can Get Your Site Penalized" Myth over at SearchEngineJournal. When I initially read this article, I was happy.  It was confirming something that I believed, and supporting a stance that SEOmoz has taken time and time again.  The idea that bad links can only hurt via loss of link juice when they get devalued, but not from any sort of penalization, is indeed located in many articles across SEOmoz. Then I perused the comments section, and I was shocked and unsettled to see some industry names that I recognized were taking the opposite side of the issue.  There seems to be a few different opinions: The SEOmoz opinion that bad links can't hurt except for when they get devalued. The idea that you wouldn't be penalized algorithmically, but a manual penalty is within the realm of possibility. The idea that both manual and algorithmic penalties were a factor. Now, I know that SEOmoz preaches a link building strategy that targets high quality back links, and so if you completely prescribe to the Moz method, you've got nothing to worry about.  I don't want to hear those answers here - they're right, but they're missing the point.  It would still be prudent to have a correct stance on this issue, and I'm wondering if we have that. What do you guys think?  Does anybody have an opinion one way or the other?  Does anyone have evidence of it being one way or another?  Can we setup some kind of test, rank a keyword for an arbitrary term, and go to town blasting low quality links at it as a proof of concept?  I'm curious to hear your responses.

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AnthonyMangia
    0

  • We are trying to decide whether a password protected site, that we will noindex, should be set up as a subdomain or if it should be its own domain. The determining factor here is whether or not having that noindexed subdomain will increase domain authority since its noindexed. Any ideas???

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | grayloon
    0

  • Hi, I have recently been getting my comparison website redesigned and developed onto wordpress and the site is now 90% complete. Part of the redesign has meant that there are now dynamic urls in the format: http://www.mywebsite.com/10-pounds-productss/?display=cost&value=10 I have other pages similar to this but with different content for the different price ranges and these are linked to from the menus: http://www.mywebsite.com/20-pounds-products/?display=cost&value=20 Now my questions are: 1. I am using Joost's All-in-one SEO plugin and this adds a canonical tag to the page that is pointing to http://www.mywebsite.com/10-pounds-products/ which is the permalink. Is this OK as it is or should i change this to http://www.mywebsite.com/10-pounds-products/?display=cost&value=10 2. Which URL will get indexed, what gets shown as the display URL in the SERPs and what page will users land on? I'm a bit confused so apologies if these seem like silly questions. Thanks

    Technical SEO | | bizarro1000
    0

  • Usually duplicated content is a brief to fix. I find myself in a little predicament: I have a network of career oriented websites in several countries. the problem is that for each country we use a "master" site that aggregates all ads working as a portal. The smaller nisched sites have some of the same info as the "master" sites since it is relevant for that site. The "master" sites have naturally gained the index for the majority of these ads. So the main issue is how to maintain the ads on the master sites and still make the nische sites content become indexed in a way that doesn't break Google guide lines. I can of course fix this in various ways ranging from iframes(no index though) and bullet listing and small adjustments to the headers and titles on the content on the nisched sites, but it feels like I'm cheating if I'm going down that path. So the question is: Have someone else stumbled upon a similar problem? If so...? How did you fix it.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gustav-Northclick
    0

  • First of all I would like to stress that this relates to a new site which is just a few weeks old, however it is something that has regularly happened to a lot of our websites in the past, so I am wondering if there is some underlying problem. We have recently setup the domain www.calcioitaliashop.com. The domain name itself "calcio italia shop" is actually one of the main keywords we are targeting. However, when we enter this into google (we are using .co.uk version), a lot of the category pages appear, yet the root domain does not. Does this indicate some coding problem with the website?  I thought we might have some robots problem, but running a site://www.calcioitaliashop.com command shows that the homepage is in the index, so I am just wondering what could be causing these results?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ukss1984
    0

  • Hi I've been rather silly and been linking out to other websites for reciprical links.  I added about 20 and just discovered some were bad neigbourhoods.  On Sunday my rankings tanked but the page was only cached the following day on the Monday.  Just wondering if there is any connection. I genuinely did not know that linking out could was bad and have removed all reciprical links as a precaution.

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BelfastSEO
    0

  • If a visitor comes to my site from 3 different traffic sources within a session, does GA report shows 1 visit and 2 returning visitors ? Previously ( before Google made changes in session )  it used to show 1 visit and zero returning visitors. right ?

    Reporting & Analytics | | seoug_2005
    0

  • We have uniquely created all of our product content on our website (Titles, product descriptions, images etc). However, we are also a manufacturer of these products and supply to a number of trade customers. These customers often wish to setup their own websites to re-sell these products. In the past we have quite happily given this content in order to assist our customers sell on their sites. Generally we give them a 'data dump' of our web data and images, but reading about duplicate content this will lead to the search engines seeing lots of identical content on these customer sites. Whilst we wish to support our customers we do not want to harm our (and their) site by issuing lots of duplicate content around the web. Is there a way we can help them with the data without penalizing ourselves? The other issue is that we also take this data feed and use it to sell on both Amazon & Googlebase. Will using this identical data also rank as duplicate content as a quick search does show both our website and amazon product page? When creating Amazon listing do these need to vary from the standard website descriptions? Thanks

    Technical SEO | | bwfc77
    0

  • Hi there! We have similar websites in different countries (it's an ecommerce site). Some times, those websites share the same language and, for example, people from Mexico end up in a page from our website in Argentina. Therefore they see our products in their language buy in a foreign currency. We would like to show them a pop-up (like a shadowbox) depending on their IP to allow them to go to their local website. There wouldn't be any redirect. Would that affect our rankings in any way? Would Googlebots see that as well? Thanks!

    International SEO | | jorgediaz
    0

  • We have been building a new website for one of our clients which he wants it to replace an existing website which will be taken down shortly. The existing site has a reasonable amount of inbound links and we would like to redirect that link juice to the new website, can anyone tell me what the best way to do this would be. Thanks Fraser

    Link Building | | fraserhannah
    0

  • I have a wordpress site that is about a product that is now getting some great traffic. Right now It has affiliate stuff on it. I want to sell my own product so I will be turning this wordpress site into an ecommerce site. I want to redesign it so I am not looking for simple plugins to just add a cart. The part I am really confused about is what to do with my posts and categories? How does that work when turning this site into an ecommerce site? Lets say the site is "hats for adults" My post pages are things like "funny hats for adults", "hats for adult men" etc etc. Would I turn these posts pages into like category pages that have a category of products. Or should I create real categories and have my developer turn those into the ecommerce category pages and then redirect my posts to those categories? Maybe I don't even know what I am talking about. Is this even making sense? This is a small site (5posts and 1 category) and most of the traffic will come from the homepage keywords anyways.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PEnterprises
    0

  • Google just announced the new 12-pack site-links 2 weeks ago, and now it looks like they're testing some changes that restrict it to a 6-pack. Are others seeing this? Has anyone seen an official report (Google blogs or major search site)? Is this an homage to beer or abs?

    Industry News | | Dr-Pete
    0

  • We have around 1.3m total pages, Google currently crawls on average 87k a day and our average page load is 1.7 seconds.  Out of those 1.3m pages(1.2m being "spun up") google has only indexed around 368k and our SEO person is telling us that if we speed up the pages they will crawl the pages more and thus will index more of them. I personally don't believe this. At 87k pages a day Google has crawled our entire site in 2 weeks so they should have all of our pages in their DB by now and I think they are not index because they are poorly generated pages and it has nothing to do with the speed of the pages.  Am I correct?  Would speeding up the pages make Google crawl them faster and thus get more pages indexed?

    Technical SEO | | upper2bits
    0

  • I have a site that I had removed from the wayback machine because I didn't want old versions to show. However I noticed that in many seo tools the site now always shows a domain age of zero instead of 6 years ago when I registered it. My question is what do the actual search engines use to determine age when they factor it into the ranking algorithm? By having it removed from the wayback machine, does that make the search engines think the site is brand new? Thanks

    Technical SEO | | FastLearner
    0

  • I was ranked #5 for the keyword "Become a Sportscaster" - had been in the top 10 for months, then all of a sudden dropped to #46. I haven't touched this page in a few months, so I don't think I messed anything up. Any thoughts on why such a dramatic drop would happen? Brian Clapp Founder, SportsTVJobs.com

    Reporting & Analytics | | sportstvjobs
    0

  • My campaign in SEO Moz Campaign Manager has just ran it's weekly crawl, and all my keyword rankings are messed up. 18 keywords have apparently dropped by massive amounts, but when I do a physical search, they haven't moved. Also Keyword Tracker agrees with the physical search, so why is the Campaign Manager showing the wrong rankings all of a sudden??

    Moz Pro | | gdavies09031977
    0

  • According to the Panda Update information, website content that is or was written to help with SEO is now not the best idea, but content that is very informative and interesting is the way to go. But if you have an Ecommerce Website how can you write informative bookmarking content, if each product you sell is very similar, and the information for the product is just details about the product. Its hard to write good content for an eCommerce website. We have 300+ products that are all similar, but if we would write content about each product, it would be similar and not interesting to read. People just want to purchase the product, not read a bunch of content. How do websites that sell many products and not content driven websites rank well in search?

    On-Page Optimization | | hfranz
    0

  • Hi Folks, My company is in discussions with an ERP provider to migrate our existing website to a new backend system, new url structures..the whole 9 yards. We have over 15,000 products, and a lot of "odd" url structures created by an outdated system that we were unable to adjust. All and all, if you're talking about a raw url count, it's in the 100s of thousands. During discussions, we were told that bulk 301 redirects would be a problem. They could be performed manually though (greaaattt). Due to this, I ran an OpenSite Explorer report, and isolated our top pages. After exporting the CSV, I was able to breakout "all" urls that have links from other domains. My question is, has anyone used the OpenSite Explorer on a website of similar size, to form the basis of a migration? Do you have enough confidence in the tool to use it in this way, or should we re-negotiate our agreement until a way can be found to mass 301 ALL urls. I'm at least a little concerned that OpenSite Explorer isn't indexing all of the links out there. Gasp..or would there be a better tool to accomplish what I'm trying to do? Thanks!

    Moz Pro | | Blenny
    0

  • Hi, I am seeing a very strange result in google for my site. When doing a search for the term "london reflexology" my site comes up 18th in the results. But when I click the link or check the URL it shows up as: http://www.reflexologyonline.co.uk/reflexologyonline.php?Action=Webring This is not right at all. It looks like some sort of cloaking but I am not sure. I am new to SEO and I do not know why goole is showing this URL that does not exist on my site and of witch the content is totally wrong. Can anyone please help with this? See the 2 linked images for more details. It seems to me the site might be hacked or something to that effect. Please help.... jyJdP.png 71Mf4.png

    Technical SEO | | RupDog
    0

  • I am getting ready to implement a blog for my company.  We have our website controlled through a commercial Content Management System that has a blog feature, but it is cumbersome to use and doesn't have all the bells and whistles of a Wordpress blog for example.  I know for SEO purposes that we would be better to use the CMS blog and make it a subfolder (www.mysite.com/blog) instead of using a subdomain (blog.mysite.com).  However, we would like to use the hosted WordPress blog and find a way to retain the same SEO value for our www.mysite.com site that it would provide being a subfolder on the site. Any suggestions? Installing Word Press CMS on our current web servers is not an option.  We would have to use Wordpress hosting services for the blog.

    Content Development | | KHCreative
    0

  • Hi I'm considering using this pinging service http://www.pingler.com I would just like people opinions on this? They will ping 25urls for me each month on regular basis. I can choose either to get my urls pinged daily or every 10 days for only $3 a month. Does any have experience with pining services & will this benefit my seo, thanks.

    On-Page Optimization | | Socialdude
    0

  • We have a site using Joomla CMS, integrated with Jreviews and Jomsocial. Utilizing ACE SEF to generate Dynamic URL structure. Our issue is that we are recieving multiple instances of duplicate url's and duplicate titles due to the way joomla is working with jreviews for all our 7,000+ business listings. Site is already ranked for many broad/national keywords, concerned that our state and local rankings are limited by these errors. How can we prevent this from happening without re-writing the entire website?

    Technical SEO | | mdmcn
    0

  • Aug 26th Archive of Rand's Webinar "Using Open Site Explorer to Uncover New Marketing Opportunities" I don't see this in the archive, anyone know how to get it? Thanks

    SEO Learn Center | | josey
    0

  • Hi, I have a site with a site-wide footer that currently has 28 internal links.The footer terms are the terms the pages are focused on. This footer is on every page of the site (hundreds of pages). Some pages of my site have 10 or so additional links pointing to internal and external pages (besides the footer) and some pages (like the homepage) have about 50 links besides the footer. I'm going for a half dozen new terms with new pages that I would be adding to the site-wide footer. Do you think I should trim the existing footer before adding these new terms? I guess I would remove the terms that show no real hope of ever getting to page one... like pages stuck in the 40s. Or, pages I for whatever reason don't care much if they rank or not. Would trimming it to a smaller number do more to help the remaining linked pages/terms? What do you think? Thanks!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 94501
    0

  • I'm looking for some nuts and bolts ideas about how to best layout the HTML code for a webpage. Can you point to some case studies? Perhaps you've done some testing yourself? This could be folded into the Tom Critchlow's question about what should be included in a updated developers SEO cheat sheet.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 19prince
    0

  • Hello MozPeeps! I wanted to see if I could get some help on the best method for troubleshooting our abandoned shopping cart funnel. Maybe point me in the best areas to research, or what are the best tools to use, or an improved method for analyzing and interpreting the existing data for more clarity about what is happening. I have attached the screen shot that shows what's going on. This account is using a Magento shopping cart with a custom built checkout page that is trying to copy Overstock.com's checkout page. Here are my thoughts: 1. Use Clicktale to monitor the checkout pages in question to try and get a feel for what people are doing or why they are clicking off? 2. Use another tool (not sure which one) that allows us to monitor page load speeds for the checkout process to see if orders are being hung up by slow loading pages. 3. Or, maybe 62% is not an uncommon abandoned cart rate and therefore we should just focus on automating abandoned cart follow up emails for the customers. Thanks in advance for any help! funnel-goal-visualization.jpg

    Conversion Rate Optimization | | JerDoggMckoy
    0

  • Hi SEOmoz peeps. Was doing some research on robot commands and found a couple major sites that are not using them. If you check out the code for these: http://www.amazon.com http://www.zappos.com http://www.zappos.com/product/7787787/color/92100 http://www.altrec.com/ You fill not find a meta robot command line. Of course you need the line for any noindex, nofollow, noarchive pages. However for pages you want crawled and indexed, is there any benefit for not having the line at all? Thanks!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | STPseo
    0

  • Hi Guys I manage a few facebook pages and a day ago something weird happened to one and i cannot figure it out.  It started with me trying to auto share a youtube video to the facebook page and offcourse added the "comment" and shared.  The video is then visible when i log in to the page but not when i am not...and it also does not share to the followers....and then the same happened with a normal link and image post....I see it when logged in but it does not get sent to my followers or to the page if not logged in....am i missing something here. Should i just log in and then click on share and see if that send it out?? please help...facebook drives me crazy half the time..thanks in advance

    Social Media | | nomad-202323
    0

  • I started a web app campaign for a site that I recently finished. It had no errors or warnings, but issued rel=cannonical notices for every page on the site. What does this mean?

    Technical SEO | | waynekolenchuk
    0

  • My twitter feed is picked up in the daily roundups like Paper.li. Do these links count towards my SEO effort or are they just empty. Clearly they spread my content so that great, just wondered if the links pass juice to the site.

    Social Media | | GlobalLingo
    0

  • Hello, I see a lot of errors on my webmaster tools because of this ajax code on my questions pages of the site (screen) : www.dismoicomment.fr The code : | / ADD ANSWER FORM |
    |   | $("#answer-add-button").click(function () { |
    |   | $.ajax({ |
    |   | type: 'POST', |
    |   | url: '/answers/quelle-assurance-choisir-pour-un-scooter/', |
    |   | data: $("form#answer-add").serialize(), |
    |   | dataType: 'html', |
    |   | success: function(data) { |
    |   |   |
    |   | if(data=="answer") { |
    |   | $('.answer-add-message').show().empty(); |
    |   | $(document).ready(function() { |
    |   | $(' Vous avez déjà répondu à cette question. ').appendTo('.answer-add-message'); |
    |   | }); | I have add a line on my robots.txt : http://www.dismoicomment.fr/robots.txt for remove all urls with /answers/. These urls with /answers/ aren't indexed in google. Do you think that it is dangerous and  that can be considered as duplicate content ? 1129546035.png

    Content Development | | elitepronostic
    0

  • I would like to export the keywords from all of my campaigns but I can't find anywhere to do that. I don't need data, just the keywords. I want to do an audit and refresh of what I am tracking and excel would be quickest. Thanks!

    Moz Pro | | SEI
    0

  • Hi guys, I am thinking about redirecting the ranking subdoman to a new subdomain which has my main keyword within it. I am trying to outrank an exact match competitor and don't seem to be able to do so. For example: page.example.com would be my existing ranking URL which is very powerful, and I am thinking about redirecting this to a new URL being keywordpage.example.com What are your thoughts on do this? Thanks B

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HaymarketMediaGroupLtd
    0

  • In this redirect rule, what does the "$1" mean? RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(oldsiteaustin|www.oldsiteaustin) [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://austin.newsite.com/$1 [R=301,L]

    Reporting & Analytics | | SEOteamfl
    0

  • Hi mozzers, I was wondering if theres anything out there that would crawl a site and sort your pages into the number of words they have?

    Technical SEO | | PeterM22
    0

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