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  • Red_Mud_Rookie


    We have a blog on each of our country sites, but the content on the English speaking sites is shared i.e. locally produced in US is mixed up with stuff produced in UK and vice versa. I'm not concerned about duplicate content because we have taken the necessary measures to let the search engines know that we have a US site for the US and and UK site for the UK. My question to you is whether we should develop the blog independently in each country or develop one blog to satisfy our global sites. I believe a local blog for each country is better because the content would speak to the audience better and any reference points or product and price points would be 100% relevant to the audience.

    International SEO | | Red_Mud_Rookie
    0
  • inhouseninja


    If a site has a bunch of 404’s that are basically old URL’s that no longer work and point to pages or documents that don’t exist anymore -  Can someone clarify if it’s a problem when fixing a bunch of these 404’s to point them all to the home page? so if there is not really anywhere else that is applicable for the old broken URL, is it really a problem to 301 old pages to the site home page? I have read some different things on this recently on some different sites, so I just wondered what the latest thinking on this was….thanks...

    On-Page Optimization | | inhouseninja
    0
  • Alex.Conde


    Ahoy! I'm working with a publishing site that has a series of primary topics for free content using a fairly wide keyword, under which we have cluster of associated keywords used in posts. For usability/simplicity some of the neccesarily broader topics have keywords within their cluster that aren't that closely related. We've had success with keeping related keywords and content grouped like this, but I'm not sure how much value to put on this. The issue is that we're writing a new free report (download) that is about "Y". "Y" is in topic category "X". X and Y are loosely related (it made more sense to put Y in X than anywhere else, and adwords/wonderwheel back this up), but there is an obvious disconnect where not everyone searching for X is interested in Y and vice versa. Since the new free report is predominantly about Y, should I go to the effort of using X keyword as a primary keyword since we've got a substantial amount of content in X topic where the two are related and the report will be housed? Or should I just focus on optomizing for Y and not care that it's in the X topic. My feeling is that we'd be better off just focusing on Y, and our general X topic page can continue to be the page focused on ranking for X, even if we normally aim to get an associated free report ranking for other topics' primary keyword. (Blast, that's a rather long and confusing explanation.)

    On-Page Optimization | | Alex.Conde
    0
  • CodyWheeler


    This is a canonicalization type question, so I believe it should be a pretty straightforward answer. I just haven't had much experience with using the canonical tag so I felt I should ask so I don't blow up my site 🙂 Ok, let's say I have a product page that is at: - www.exampledomain.com/products/nameofproduct Now on that page I have an option to see all of the specs of the product in a collapsible tab which I want to link to from other pages - So the URL to this tab ends from other pages ends up being: - www.exampledomain.com/products/nameofproduct?=productspecs This will link to the tab and default it to open when someone clicks that link on another page. Correct me if I'm wrong, but if I understand canonicalization correctly I believe creating this link is going to cause a duplicate page that has the opportunity to be indexed and detract from our SEO to the main product page. My question is... where do I put the "rel=canonical" tag to point the SEO value back to the main page since the page is dynamically generated and doesn't have its own file on the server? - or do even need to be concerned with this? Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on any of the above. Like I said - this is something I am fairly familiar with how it works, but I haven't had much experience with using. Thanks!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CodyWheeler
    0
  • JerDoggMckoy


    Right now I have an E-Commerce website that has layered menu properties. I have one page trying to rank for "NextGen Digital Ballast" that is the main category page. However, on that category page I link out to three product pages which would be "NextGen 400W Digital Ballast", "NextGen 600W Digital Ballast" and "NextGen 1000W Digital Ballast". The on page ranking factors tools is saying I may need to consider making adjustments because of the potential self-cannibalization, but I wanted to get some feedback to see what others thought about that. Thanks.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JerDoggMckoy
    2
  • JohnECF


    Hi everyone - The site I am working on is going to start giving users the option to tweet that they completed an action. It reads, for example, "I just took the first step to (    ) with (site): (shortened link) via (Twitter name)" Here's my question: Should I worry about the fact that the shortened URL (we're possibly going to use Twitter's shortener T.Co, but I'm not dedicated to it) changes each time? Should we instead have a permanent short URL for the homepage (where we are going to direct people who click the link in the tweet)? Thanks!

    Social Media | | JohnECF
    0
  • JamesO


    So I started making a sitemap for our new golf site, which has quite a few "low level" pages (about 100 for the golf courses that exist in the area, and then about 50 for course architects), etc etc. My question/open discussion is simple.  In a sitemap that already has about 50 links, should we include these other low level 150 links?  Of course, the link to the "Golf Courses" is there, along with a link to the "Course Architects" MAIN pages (which, subdivides on THOSE pages.) I have read the limit is around 150 links on the sitemap.html page and while it would be nice to rank long tail for the Golf Courses. All in all, our site architecture itself is easily crawlable as well. So the main question is just to include ALL the links or just the main ones? Thoughts?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JamesO
    0
  • BlinkWeb


    I have a client who has 3 ecommerce sites. They are somewhat differentiated but for the most part sell the same stuff. Luckily 2 of them are quite authoritative, old and rank reasonably well. Most of the visitors and sales come from the US. He wants to start targeting Europe, Mexico and Canada. What are your suggestions for doing this? Are we better targeting on the main domains? Not really sure how to do that? Should we use a subdomain and a new store front for each geo? Should we use a .co.uk .co.mx and .co.ca each with a unique storefront? It looks like we are moving to a Magento platform so setting up multiple storefronts on a single database is not a big issue. Anyone have any experience with this?

    International SEO | | BlinkWeb
    0
  • musillawfirm


    Has anyone used nolo.com's directory and do you think it is worth it for link building? How about bbb.org I run www.musillawfirm.com thanks in advance

    Link Building | | musillawfirm
    0
  • EricVallee34


    I'm working with a client who has a website, but doesn't really have a clearly defined idea of who their key audience is nor do they know what keyword phrases they would like to rank for. I know that I can generate a starting list by reviewing their site, but I want to set some parameters on it so I can provide an accurate estimate. I'm looking for suggestions on how to do this.

    Keyword Research | | EricVallee34
    0
  • BradBorst


    Should I wait until my press release has been syndicated to post to my press page.  If I post it to my press page first, will it cause a duplication problem?

    On-Page Optimization | | BradBorst
    0
  • evoNick


    We recently removed /img and /imgp from our robots.txt file thus allowing googlebot to crawl our image folders.  Not sure why we had these blocked in the first place, but we opened them up in response to an email from Google Product Search about not being able to crawl images - which can/has hurt our traffic from Google Shopping. My question is:  will allowing Google to crawl our image files eat up our 'crawl allowance'?  We wouldn't want Google to not crawl/index certain pages, and ding our organic traffic, because more of our allotted crawl bandwidth is getting chewed up crawling image files. Outside of the non-detailed crawl stat graphs from Webmaster Tools, what's the best way to check how frequently/ deeply our site is getting crawled? Thanks all!

    Technical SEO | | evoNick
    0
  • JedHenning


    I have seen many sites that include the "|" in page titles and was wondering if there is some SEO value in the practice. Example: Product Name | Company Name Instead of: Product Name by Company Name I have not seen any value in it myself other than a good way to avoid stop words.  I wanted to make sure.  Currently I have the "by" included in the page titles.

    On-Page Optimization | | JedHenning
    0
  • timhatton


    Say I have a site which sells widgets. Site structure is as follows: Home Widgets Blue Widgets Green Widgets Red Widgets About Us Contact Us I know the money term is "blue widgets".  Not "widgets" (as this is too generic, and blue/red/green widgets are only a subset of the whole 'widget' universe). How do I prevent the site from cannibalising this keyword?  Do I only try to make www.mywidgetsshop.com/blue-widgets the main page for blue widgets or do I try and make the home page rank for this phrase?

    On-Page Optimization | | timhatton
    0
  • EricVallee34


    I'm curious about how others evaluate the competition of keywords when putting together an SEO program: Do you place any faith in the competition listing in the Google Keyword Tool? Do you find value in SEOmoz's Keyword Difficulty tool? What other tactics or processes do you perform?

    Keyword Research | | EricVallee34
    0
  • EricVallee34


    I'm doing keyword research in the Google Keyword Tool and was looking and spending a lot of time looking at keyword competition and local searches. I'm trying to determine what is a good rule of thumb for what level of competition and local searches people have used when selecting the keywords they will optimize for.  I've currently been trying to find ones that have less than 50% (moderate) competition and less than 1,000 monthly searches. Also, which do you put more weight on the competition or the number of searches.

    Keyword Research | | EricVallee34
    1
  • EricVallee34


    I've been doing some research on SEOmoz and have seen some posts relating to invisible long tail keywords.  I have a couple of questions relating to this: Am I correct to understand that an invisible long tail keyword won't show any search in a tool like the Google Keyword Tool?  If not, how do you define it? If an invisible long tail keyword has almost no search (or search that can be proven by an SEO researcher), how can you be confident that it will produce results?

    Keyword Research | | EricVallee34
    1
  • VebianWebandMobileDevelopment


    I'm creating a website for my new web design company in Vancouver. I'm looking to target such keywords as "Web Design Vancouver", etc. I have another company with a hyphenated domain name which is terrible when I'm on the phone and my client asks me for my domain (hard to say, always spelling it out). Also I wanted to have a good snappy name for my new business so I found a 6 letter .com and matching .ca for my company. My question is: is it best to use a short domain name or is it better have my keywords in the domain name? eg. xyz.com vs xyzvancouverwebdesign.com Thanks

    On-Page Optimization | | VebianWebandMobileDevelopment
    0
  • AaronSchinke


    This morning I was redirected to https://encrypted.google.com. Thought it was interesting. Google making a play to get some trust back?

    SERP Trends | | AaronSchinke
    0
  • ThomasHgenhaven


    Hi mozzers, I have a little riddle. A few weeks ago the bounce rate on one of our website dropped 90% - from 45 % average to 5 % average. We haven't changed much in the code of the site, layout or anything else. The traffic is pretty stable too. Anyone can guess why? Or have experienced something similar? xOvrb.jpg

    Reporting & Analytics | | ThomasHgenhaven
    0
  • clolsen


    Does it matter if I use hyphens in URL versus. "no separation". Ex www.mysite.com/someproducts or
    www.mysite.com/SomeProducts vs.
    www.mysite.com/some-products The last is perhaps more readable by humans, but does it make any SEO difference using one or the other?

    Content Development | | clolsen
    1
  • Partouter


    Hi Are there any SEO guidelines for "one page websites". I'm looking into the 'benefit' it might have in combination with exact match URLs. Many thanks in advance.

    On-Page Optimization | | Partouter
    2
  • David680


    Hi, I have read the book "art of seo", now I found that there is a SEO training videos " Ultimate Advanced SEO Bundle: Tips, Tricks & Tactics Volumes 1 & 2 URL: http://www.seomoz.org/store/4 What is the content inside? is it worth to buy even if I already read the book "art of seo"? please advise. Thanks -David

    Image & Video Optimization | | David680
    0
  • BethelMedia


    I'm being docked for too many on page links on every page on the site, and I believe it is because the drop down nav has about 130 links in it. It's because we have a few levels of dropdowns, so you can get to any page from the main page.  The site is here - http://www.ibethel.org/ Is what I'm doing just a bad practice and the dropdowns shouldn't give as much information? Or is there something different I should do with the links? Maybe a no-follow on the last tier of dropdown?

    Technical SEO | | BethelMedia
    0
  • ngw


    Hi, I have a blog on posterous that I'm trying to rank. SEOMoz tells me that I have duplicate content pretty much everywhere (4 articles written, 6 errors at the last crawl). The problem is that I tag my posts, and apparently SEOMoz thinks that it's duplicate content only because I don't have so many posts, so pages end up being very very similar. What can I do in these situations ?

    Technical SEO | | ngw
    0
  • atohad


    appliance-repair-ny.com I recently got some new good page rank backlinks (4-5) to my site. After a nice increase in rankings i left it for a couple of day (holiday) when i came back i found out that my rankings dropped dramatically for many different keywords when in some cases the backlinks are listed higher than me for the keyword. Any suggestions? should i keep on building links in the same paste, or slow down a little? UPDATE: I now noticed that the seomoz app has a warning that my homepage is missing title tag and meta tag. I'm using wordpress and headspace plugin. I recently updated wordpress.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | atohad
    0
  • ir-seo-account


    Has anyone else noticed discrepancies between these tools? Take keyword A and keyword B. I've literally seen situations where A has 3 or 4 times the traffic as B in Google Webmaster Tools, but half the traffic of B in Google Insights for Search. What might be the reason for this discrepancy?

    Technical SEO | | ir-seo-account
    0
  • GardenBeet


    My blog  sits on the wordpress domain http://gardenbeet.wordpress.com/ - it has good page rank and has around 300-400 visits per day  - should i move it to my website or Should I start a new blog? i have a page set up for it on my website but it now has good rank http://www.gardenbeet.com/content/design-blog.html - and now want to keep this URL am a bit confused - what is the best strategy in terms of SEO?

    Content Development | | GardenBeet
    1
  • Thos003


    Just wanted to get a roll call from our active Moz community on who is attending SMX Advanced.

    Industry Events | | Thos003
    0
  • JohnMcGreevy


    We sell some 25,000 products over the web on our site and on March 17, 2011 our orders dropped by 67% and have remained at this lower level since.  Any one know of any Google changes on this date that could have caused this decrease? Thanks John

    Technical SEO | | JohnMcGreevy
    0
  • jcolman


    These are two metrics highlighted in the "Organic Traffic Data" report in the PRO campaigns.  Since this report is composed of data linked from Google Analytics, I bet there's a way to find this same information in GA. So...anyone know how to do that in Google Analytics?  I want this information for some long-tail productivity/potential research.

    Moz Pro | | jcolman
    0
  • VebianWebandMobileDevelopment


    I'm opening up a web development company in Vancouver and I'm stuck between getting hosting in Montreal or Vancouver. Montreal is a cheaper but, my company is in Vancouver. I have a .ca which will be my domain name, so I'm already on top of that aspect. From what I understand it would help for SEO purposes if my IP is a local Vancouver IP for my company website. So my question is... Should I go for the Vancouver hosting and pay more or stick with the Montreal hosting.

    Technical SEO | | VebianWebandMobileDevelopment
    1
  • EricVallee34


    google analytics

    I recently received help on a question I asked on SEOmoz but need additional clarification.  I am trying to set up goals in Google Analytics for people who click on a “purchase botton” which sends them to PayPal.  I created a Thank You page and tried to get PayPal to redirect to it, however, our customers only get  to our site’s 404 page. Here is what I’ve done so far: Went into my PayPal account and turned the “Auto Return” to ‘on’ Under website payment preferences, I added the following URL http://www.teecycle.org/thank-youutm_nooverride1.  (I formatted the URL this way because the person who provided me with help recommended using the format ?UTM_nooverride=1.  However, our CMS system won’t allow “?” or “=”)

    Reporting & Analytics | | EricVallee34
    0
  • JamesO


    Hey everyone. We are about to create a sitemap.html page and have always just kept the site theme in place and put the sitemap in the "content" section of the page, with the header navigation, sidebars and footer in place. Well, now with the new "only first link counts" Google rule, wouldn't it be better to just have a "plain" html sitemap page without any other links on it?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JamesO
    0
  • JamesO


    We are working on a new website that is golf related and wondering about whether or not we should set up a subnavigation dropdown menu from the main menu. For example: GOLF PACKAGES
      >> 2 Round Packages
      >> 3 Round Packages
      >> 4 Round Packages
      >> 5 Round Packages GOLF COURSES
      >> North End Courses
      >> Central Courses
      >> South End Courses This would actually be very beneficial to our users from a usability standpoint, BUT what about from an SEO standpoint? Is diverting all the link juice to these inner pages from the main site navigation harmful?  Should we just create a page for GOLF PACKAGES and break it down on that page?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JamesO
    0
  • JohnBeagle


    My site has been in Google News for about 3 years. Over the weekend, I received this message from Google Hi John, We periodically review news sources, to ensure Google News offers a high quality experience for our users. When we reviewed your site, mainstreetmonroe.com, we found that we can no longer include it in Google News at this time. We reviewed your site and are unable to include it in Google News at this time. We can't include sites that don't have a formal editorial-review process for submitted content. If this exists on your site, please let us know where and we'll be happy to review your site again. Mainstreetmonroe is scheduled to be removed from Google News for a period of at least 30 days. After this 30-day period has elapsed, you can re-apply for inclusion in Google News provided your site meets our guidelines. We appreciate your assistance in this matter. Please note that you'll still be able to find your site in Google Web Search and other Google services. Thanks for your interest in Google News. Regards, The Google News Team What exactly do they mean? I submitted my website news section, but they have been displaying our forum area in the news too. I think the forum is what GN is talking about. What is the best way to fix this problem? Move the forum to a subdomain? Website: http://www.mainstreetmonroe.com/ Forum: http://www.mainstreetmonroe.com/Voice/forum.asp?FORUM_ID=2

    Content Development | | JohnBeagle
    0
  • AaronSchinke


    Well, does it?

    Industry News | | AaronSchinke
    0
  • DanDeceuster


    In the old Q&A set up your response was automatically given a thumbs up by you so that you got a mozpoint for every response you gave. Now you have to manually thumb up your responses. Why was this change made? Can we get it back to the way it was?

    Moz Pro | | DanDeceuster
    1
  • Mulith


    Hi All, I'm launching a new website with a number of country specific sub-domains and I wanted to know if Google will calculate the number of new links as a root domain or if it will treat each subdomain seperately? For instance if I built 50 links per month to each of my five proposed subdomains would google see it as 250 links built to one root domain(and penalise me as a result) or will they view these subdomains independantly and accept these 50 links per page as an acceptable amount per sub domain. Thanks in advance. Ross

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mulith
    0
  • inhouseninja


    What are the characteristics of a Google penalty - i.e. how do you know by looking at the rankings for your keywords? Do all keywords that you had previously ranked for fall from say top 5 to nowhere? Do you disappear from SERP for a branded keyword? Or something else?? Basically how do you know if you have been penalized? Thanks

    On-Page Optimization | | inhouseninja
    0
  • Francisco_Meza


    When can us Mozzers pay for this http://www.seomoz.org/mozcon I need to buy my Mozcon tickets for July 27 - July 29, 2011 and begin arranging hotel and airfare before rates go up even more. It's peak season.

    Industry Events | | Francisco_Meza
    0
  • BlinkWeb


    I'm working on an e-commerce site that currently has about 50 root categories and growing, with no sub-categories. They are all linked from the sidebar of every page and all the products are pretty related. They could probably be sub-categorized in to 5 root categories. At want point does categorization become too flat?

    Technical SEO | | BlinkWeb
    0
  • Matthew_Edgar


    Hi, I have a client who has thousands of pages on his site - 50,000+. It is a news website so most of these pages are old news articles and blog posts that receive very little traffic. We are moving to a new content management system and are debating on whether or not to keep all that old content. So far our decision is to keep the content that has gotten at least 100+ visits from Bing or Google in the last 6 months but dump everything else. This amounts to around 30,000 or so pages most of which have several links pointing to them. My question is from an SEO standpoint is that okay to do? We'd not only lose pages but links as well. Part of me thinks that in light of the Panda update getting rid of old content that is good but not great could about help out the site (we do great in the SERPs and actually got a bump in traffic after the Panda update to new articles/posts). However, we obviously don't want to cause problems and that is why I'd appreciate the thoughts and ideas on the best way to handle this major downsizing in content. Thanks!

    Content Development | | Matthew_Edgar
    0
  • iAnalyst.com


    We work with ecommerce clients specifically and many of them get duplicated content from their manufacturers. I've heard of people using the turk to outsource product re writing and am wondering if anyone here has had success? Do you just get all the product descriptions re written and delivered in a CSV for uploading or have any of you developed a more automated approach? How is the content quality been? Thanks much!

    Industry News | | iAnalyst.com
    0
  • KevinBloom


    My client is a kitchen remodeling company in Sterling, Virginia and is trying to rank well in local results.  I am struggling with keyword selection mostly because I am still learning about local SEO. The city the company is located is Sterling, however their business comes from several other close by cities like Reston, Herndon, and Fairfax (Nobody lives in Sterling so they don't care too much about owning that in search engines). Is the right strategy: 1. Choosing one city and focusing on that (kitchen remodeling in reston, VA) 2. Optimizing for multiple cities (kitchen remodeling, reston, herndon, fairfax...) 3. Optimizing for an entire region (kitchen remodeling, northern virginia) I know it's hard to answer this with little information but gut reactions would be appreciated. I am a new SEOmoz member so excuse me if this question is too specific for this forum.  I'm still getting a feel for the community. Thanks! Sean

    Keyword Research | | KevinBloom
    0
  • RobertFisher


    Does anyone have any experience with getting a local review site to show up when it is turning out tens of thousands of reviews on local companies in one specific industry (no not restaurants) (Insurance agents, etc.)? Is there a submission process for Google? Thanks mozzers

    Branding | | RobertFisher
    0
  • inhouseninja


    So for the past 3 or 4 weeks or so I’ve been making some on page tweaks for keywords that we should rank for, implementing all the keyword recommendations, and  getting “A’s” in the report card for page optimization in the Pro tool, and also doing things like fixing a bunch of 404’s that I found ….so I thought I was doing a bang up job… My rankings for some keywords were generally trending (slowly) in the right direction, but this morning I see that 2 important keywords that I had been working hard on, and which had trended from around 40 to in the high 20’s in rankings, has now dropped out of top 50 altogether…. I’m a little dispirited, and now wondering if I did something wrong?  Any thoughts or recommendations?   Is it normal just to drop out of top 50 when you were in the 20's or 30's? Thanks!

    On-Page Optimization | | inhouseninja
    0
  • EdKim


    I know I've asked this one before but I was wondering if you had any coupons to SMX Advanced. I think I've scraped up enough to come to Seattle even without it but I was hoping you might have one as a sponsor. Thanks and looking forward to checking out all your new stuff at your booth! Ed

    Industry News | | EdKim
    0

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