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  • Hi, Are you still using XML sitemaps today? If yes, does it bring any benefit to your website like faster indexing of webpages or better rankings? Are you using special features like video sitemaps or sitemap index files? Best regards, Tobias

    On-Page Optimization | | Tobiask-121573
    1

  • Recently, I was looking over the linking profile for one of our large clients, and I noticed that a ton of spammy links were appearing. I have never purchase any links or done anything shady that would contribute to this large increase in bad links. It appears as though someone is trying to hijack the SEO of this company, and I don't know how to proceed. Currently, they have not been penalized by Google, but I would not be surprised if a penalty is on its way due to the obvious link spam. Is there any way to report this to Google to ensure that no penalties occer? Any advice on the issue is much welcomed! Thanks

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | tqinet
    0

  • The site in question is http://www.ejmh.eu I am pretty unsatisfied with the results I am getting from the Site Search provided by Google. We have over 160 pdf files in this subfolder: http://www.ejmh.eu/mellekletek The files are the digital versions of articles. When I search for content in those pdf files, Google does not show results. It does show results from older pages, dating back 1-2 years but it is certainly not showing anything from pdf files that I have just put up 3 weeks ago. My questions: If I place a Google Search on a site, does it not automatically display results from ALL the content in the root domain? Is there any correlation between how the Site Search is indexing the files and how Google is indexing the urls in general? Should I just wait and see whether site search performance improves or should I switch to another Search software like Zoom Search? It is vital to have a proper, high-quality search functioning on that site in the very near future. What are your experiences? Any tips are greatly appreciated.

    Technical SEO | | Lauroca
    0

  • Hi guys, i'm having problems with duplicated page title, and i want to know what is the best way to avoid this problem. The example is like this: Title page (A): Product name A - category - section Title page (B): Product name B - category - section, What you think guys i can resolve this problem, Thank you so much for your help.

    Technical SEO | | NorbertoMM
    0

  • With large ecommerce sites, we usually have more than 100 links per page and many times have more than 200 links on each page due to links and images in the header, footer, guided navigation and then the body product grid and content. When I use most on-page link counting tools like SEO x-ray and the SEO Moz Pro crawl report, I notice that every visible link on the page gets counted. This includes and javascript based links that expand the product grid to 30, 60 or view all, javascript sorting links, javascript links to view customer reviews for each product. etc. There was a QA post here http://www.seomoz.org/q/should-i-nofollow-the-main-navigation-on-certain-pages about nofollowing and page rank sculpting and it seems pretty unanimous that most don't think that page rank sculpting is very valuable. So my question is, are the javascript links on pages that don't link to another page viewed differently by search engines? If so, shouldn't there be a way to see on-page link count minus javascript call links that don't actually link to another page? To expand a bit on my question, we also use nofollow attributes on the text links in the left navigation that are meant for refining products just as the javascript links in the product grid are meant to refine the products, sort them, allow for product comparison, allow for viewing customer reviews, etc. So should it be ok to have 300 links on a page if the unimportant ones that you don't want crawled like the left navigation refinements and product grid javascript links all have rel="nofollow" applied to them? I know that would basicly be PageRank sculting, but it seems like the best options for shopping sites that have a lot of navigation links.

    Moz Pro | | abernhardt
    0

  • I generally use wordpress as a CMS and have the H1 tag coded in the header.php include file. This results as it being the same in all page - I normally do something like Keyword - Company name and set the company logo as the background and move the text off screen using text indent (CSS). Is having the same on every page a bad thing? I might be tricky to change so their all unique.

    On-Page Optimization | | JamesJacobs
    0

  • This is pretty much an opinion question, I was under the impression that footer links had been devalued almost to the point of uselessness, and if they weren't going to be of any real use to the users of the site why bother. I was speaking to a web developer though whose opinion I do largely trust who remains very pro footer links, and I was wondering what everyone else thought. Am I being too dismissive, or are footer links on the way out?

    On-Page Optimization | | Tompt
    0

  • Hi, I'm in the process of rebuilding/designing an existing well ranking niche bespoke software site and have the following question - In the footer, I'm planning on linking to the main landing pages (blue widget software, red widget software etc theres about 7 in total). In these links I want to know if its best to have the word "software" in each link as I'm scared of it looking spamy. We sell custom software, and a lot of the keywords that currently attract traffic (as reported in analytics) end in the word software, for example - blue widget software red widget software In the footer would you end each link with software or not? How much effect would this have on rankings? Thanks in advance.

    On-Page Optimization | | JamesJacobs
    0

  • Hi, I'm currently in the process of redesigning/rebuilding a well ranking but a dated looking and structured website. Using analytics info I'm trying to put togerther an optimied site map plan for the site based on keywords. Currently the site is structured like this (a few examples) for some of its best ranking keywords / landing pages www.companyname.co.uk/frames/software/companyname-software/keyword/overview.php www.companyname.co.uk/frames/software/companyname-software/keyword/keyword.php I'd like to simplfy this as part of the re build so url's look like this www.companyname.co.uk/companyname-software/softwarecatogry/keyword Obviously I would 201 the old urls. My question is : A. is this a good idea? (From what I've read it is?) B. is there any benifit from having the company name repeated in the url (ie www.companyname.co.uk/companyname-software). My thinking before this is that companyname-software currently ranks well and brings a good amount of traffic. Or should I just go with www.companyname.co.uk/software/softwarecatogry/keyword as opposed to www.companyname.co.uk/companyname-software/softwarecatogry/keyword? Many thanks in advance!

    On-Page Optimization | | JamesJacobs
    0

  • Hi Everyone, We have example.org.uk with 20K inbound links. We want to target the US as well as the UK. I would be interested to hear what approaches are best for SEO. For example is it better to keep our current domain and have subdirectories for USA for example. Or would it be better to register example.org and then use subdirectories. Or is it better to use different domains for each country? Any help with this much appreciated. Cheers

    International SEO | | MarkChambers
    0

  • Our UK site has 72 pages in our sitemap. 30 of them are product pages which take a productid  parameter. Prior to 1st Feb 2011, all pages were indexed in Google but since then all of our product pages seem to have dropped from the index? If I check in webmaster tools, I can see that we have submitted 72 pages and 42 are indexed. I realise we should have some better url structuring and I'm working on that but do you have any  ideas on how we can get our product poages back into googles index http://www.ebacdirect.com

    Algorithm Updates | | ebacltd
    0

  • So far in 2011 we have seen some minor and some quite major updates to the Google Algorithm. So what does this mean for future link building in 2011, what type of links do people think are going to continue to work? Are directory and  article submissions totally dead? I personally believe that this year a big area of link building that is going to be crucial is Guest Blog Post, finding high quality relevant websites and getting a guest post done on them. This is personally what I am really going to target this year.

    Link Building | | rfksolutionsltd
    0

  • Hi, I'm having a few issues with my landing page conversion. I have followed several guides found on this site (especially the unbounce.com ones) but what'ever I try my landing page CRO doesn't seem to increase. the landing page in question is http://www.drivingtestnow.co.uk/find-driving-test-cancellations. I'm getting traffic to my landing page solely through PPC traffic from Google. My stats are rough as follows: Arrive at landing page - 100% (obviously)
    Click through to buy now page - 15-20%
    Actually complete the buy now process - 1% Conversion from organic traffic landing directly on the homepage at http://www.drivingtestnow.co.uk is having a conversion rate of about 5%. It seems odd to me that my highly targeted ad campaign and landing page are convertign so badly compared to the less atrgeted organic search traffic and homepage. Have you got any ideas why this might be occurring and also any tips on how I can improve the conversion rate for my product? Gary...

    Conversion Rate Optimization | | perfectweb
    0

  • Hi there, on my website (http://dealcity.de) I aggregate group shopping deals from Germany. To obtain a good user experience there is a large main navigation in the header where users can choose the city they are interested in. The problem is, that the main navigation has 220 links to all cities. Of course this is way to much on a fairly new site like this to have the link juice flown to the sites that are important to us. What should I do with the main navigation? Is there any way to remove these links from the linkgraph but keep the current user experience? Best Regards
    Markus

    Technical SEO | | marfert
    0

  • I'm consulting for a web series that features ~6 well established characters, and I would like to establish a twitter stream for each character before the start of the new season in a few months. The characters all have first names but no last name, and the web series's name (Naked In A Fishbowl) is too long, and the acronym NIAF is not well-branded yet. What would be the best way to pick Twitter handles for cast members (BonnieNIAF, Jean NIAF? BonnieFishbowl? Bonnie_NIAF?)

    Branding | | EthanStanislawski
    0

  • I have two websites, www.joecline.com and www.affinityproperties.com. Originally, I wanted joecline.com to be focused on west austin only. I now realize that I only have time to really handle the promotion of one site. I'm wondering SEOwise, which url would be better to keep. I would consolidate all content on one site and 301 the migrated site to the new URLs in the domain which I would keep. Any ideas would be great. Thanks Joe

    Technical SEO | | simplesimon
    0

  • I have an e-learning website called www.graduatetestprep.com and we provide university students preparation for the GRE examination. This is an entrance exam required for admittance to graduate school across the US. I was wondering what is the best way to find the best keywords focus on to optimize on google and the other search engines. I feel I can't use "on-page" on pro-dashboard properly unless I have the right keywords to focus on. Thanks

    Competitive Research | | anuraag
    0

  • Greetings, I want to optimize my site, www.atstrust.com. I know that posts to Facebook and Twitter help improve ranks. Does it matter though if my twitter/facebook sites have a different name than the domain I am optimizing? For example, my Facebook site is facebook.com/easyinspection. I assume that doesn't matter as long as the URLs on the site refer to my domain? Thanks! Eric

    On-Page Optimization | | Ericc22
    0

  • Hi Guys, Well, the problem seems normal but I guess it's not. I have tried many things, and nothing changed it, now I give it last try... ask so maybe you will help me. The problem is.. I can't find my site nowhere in Bing, I mean nowhere by not in first 20 pages for my keywords "beauty tips" and the site is: http://www.beauty-tips.net/. In my opinion it should be pretty high... maybe it's too high so I can't see it ;). I never had special problems with Bing, was easier to be there "somewhere" than in google, but with this one is totally opposite. Any ideas? Thanks for your time!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Luke22
    0

  • When building a blog to promote a particular affiliate offer, I usually like to use a static "page" homepage and then have my posts displayed on another part of my site. I've noticed that my wordpress pages almost always rank higher than wordpress posts and I can't explain it... Here are some possibilities I've thought of: XML Sitemap priority is set at 60% for pages and only 20% for posts My main navbar lists the pages which consequently means they get linked to on every page on my website. Some other phenomenon within the wordpress framework... If it helps, I use Thesis v1.8 on all my sites. I guess my ultimate question is: If pages do in fact rank higher than posts, is it worth it for me to go back and change the site structure on all my blogs which are using posts instead of pages. I know making major modifications like that can be disasterous but will it ultimately pay off? Thanks

    On-Page Optimization | | drewhammond
    1

  • Hi, just posted this on google webmaster, and thought I'd post it here for ideas as well: When using the search term site:www.thebudgetfashionista.com with the exception of the homepage the only results that come up are from three years ago. We are not sure whats going on, but other symptoms include:
    A drastic reduction of our crawl rate (via google webmaster)
    A reduction in traffic from google searches (via analytics)
    We first noticed it after a pronouced downward trend after the most recent agolrithm was released Recent activities include:
    Fixing crawl errors in GW with 301 redirects
    Optimizing older URLs and creating redirects for those. Any hints of suggestion of what might be the problem what greatly be appreciated

    Technical SEO | | simplygoodmedia
    0

  • If given the choice to add an attractive stock photo to a conversion focused page, do the pros out number the cons in terms of SEO and CRO. Some pros are that you can include the keyword in the image filename and image alt tag. It can also increase user experience by making the page more attractive. Some cons might be that it increases page load time which can have a negative impact on SEO and user expereience. Also the visitor might get distracted away from the lead form button.

    On-Page Optimization | | SparkplugDigital
    0

  • I am designing the structure of a large travel webiste and have the following problem. The obvious structure from a users perspective would be to structure locations as follows: Home/Hotels/Country/County/City i.e. Home/Hotels/UK/Lancashire/Preston The problem is, it is the cities that I need closer to the root directory, instead of countries and counties. If I did Home/Hotels/City or even Home/Hotels/Country/City There may be too many links on one page and google may think they're spammy. How can I get the cities closer to the root directory as they are the most important pages on the site. Even if I did a text based sitemap I would encounter the same problem. *scratches head! Thanks in Advance, Nick UPDATE_________________________________________________________ Sorry I may have phrased the question wrongly. I should have said that I need the city pages to be less clicks from the root directory, as opposed to their actual URL structure. Ideally, I want to be able to access the city pages before the county and country pages on the site, as they are more important. Thanks A Bunch

    On-Page Optimization | | Townpages
    0

  • Our site involves e-commerce transactions that we want users to be able to complete via javascript popup/overlay boxes.  in order to make the credit card form secure, we need the referring page to be secure, so we are considering making the entire site secure so all of our site links wiould be https.  (PayPal works this way.) Do you think this will negatively impact whether Google and other search engines are able to index our pages?

    Technical SEO | | seozeelot
    0

  • First off, SEO learner, not a professional, therefore question is not for any client. A new (less 1 yr) ecommerce site in a particular sector is now moving into partnership with relevant websites to be their online store. A 'store' link on the partner site will redirect to the ecommerce domain to a dedicated area (on a domain/directory path) with the partner's branding. To do this though means duplicating the entire catalogue for each partner that comes on board for this scheme. So the original ecommercesite.com/categories also delivers ecommercesite.com/partner1/categories (with partner's brand identity) ecommercesite.com/partner2/categories (with partner's brand identity) and so on Won't duplicating the product catalogue in directories cause problems in delivering effective SERPs for the original ecommerce site?

    Technical SEO | | BeIntermedia
    0

  • Hello, My question is regarding networks of websites. Right now I have over 150 websites that I bought of the auction houses. They are all sitting on the same GoDaddy account. Most of them have different C-Class IP's. I think I have around 55 different ones. So my question is, does it matter if they are all under one GoDaddy account? Does this have any negative impact on my rankings. And also, how can I upload content to all of the websites quickly, instead of having to login constantly to every single on of them. I use these websites of course to rank a few main websites, I have a client, and I began first using blogrolls to send links to him, and recently I started using actualy content links since I've read here that is a lot more powerful.

    Link Building | | grommeman
    0

  • Many times I have wondered whether building sites on expired domains, which are sold at popular domain auction websites like TDNAM(Godaddy),SEDO etc. Is it of any worth ? Buying domains with existing parameters such as PR,Alexa ranks etc. and already indexed pages where these expired sites rank on keywords which one is looking forth and then building sites on these domains to promote your other sites. How successful would this trick be?

    Keyword Research | | 99fusion
    0

  • I recently noticed a drop in rankings for my site shortly after the new algorithm update.  I'm not sure exactly why rankings went down, but would like to know if it has to do with having videos on our site that do not belong to us. We have a few videos on product pages that the manufacturer of the product had created.  I was wondering if Google maybe thinks we are maliciously stealing these videos or something and penalizing us for it.  And if stuff like this has anything to do with the recent algorithm update. We make our own videos, but some of our manufacturer's videos are just better... and they work with us and are glad for us to have their videos listed. Thanks in advance

    Content Development | | poolguy
    0

  • i am trying to start add arabic keywords to my campaign  and its not working , can you help me on this ? thanks in advance

    Keyword Research | | omarfk
    0

  • Hi guys, A client of mine has bought a raft of keyword domains for use in an AdWords campaign. This isn't my area of expertise, hence the question. They have a hosting account which can host an unlimited number of domains. Can they set up the domains with the same content on each site and then use AdWords to drive traffic to the sites? I've suggested they can use rel="canonical" to specify that the preferred site is the main site of the company which should bypass the duplicate content issue. Is this the best way to host the sites or is there a better alternative? Thanks in advance, Brendan.

    Paid Search Marketing | | brendanbelladesign
    0

  • Much of the work I do tends to be on a lot of small to medium sized company websites, the kind of businesses that do not have thousands of pounds to spend or the budgets to create reems of quality content. That said, neither do the competition so one approach that has worked well in the past has been article marketing. The approach would usually be to develop some relevant content for the site itself, even if that is just a range of service type landing pages or answers to relevant customer problems and then build links from the article marketing sites (primarily ezinearticles.com). An average approach would be to write articles that are relevant to the individual services, for instance, problems that can be solved by the service and then to link these articles back to the service pages with the desired keywords in the anchor text. Another approach has been to develop an article with the client that solves a common customer problem for their own site and then to write a few summarised versions of the article for the article marketing sites. Again, with the intention of gathering traffic, giving a basic answer and linking back to the main article with the main keywords we wish to rank this page for. For smaller sites serving a fairly tight geographic area this approach, combined with submission to some quality directories (local and niche) has been a strong combo historically. I know there is a lot of junk on the article marketing sites and there could be negative affects from posting loads of pointless articles but using them properly, to broaden the net, provide answers (albeit summarised) and generate links - is this still a valid approach post the Google Farmers update? It may be interesting to see how the article sites like ezine have to tighten up the editorial process now and if the content becomes better across the board, it may possibly strengthen this approach over time. Do any of you still use article marketing as part of your SEO campaigns? If so, what are your strategies and where do you use? Would love to hear your thoughts folks. Marcus

    Link Building | | Marcus_Miller
    0

  • I've seen that for some domains Google will show a nice clickable site heirarchy in place of the actual URL of a search result.  See attached for an example.  How do I go about achieving this type of results? categorized.png

    Technical SEO | | Carlito-256961
    0

  • A category page on an e-commerce sites, containing a list of the products within the category, usually shows the product image above the product text link. If both image and anchor text link to the product page, this would mean that the image is counted as the link in terms of ranking value. What would be the best way to make the anchor text count in stead of the image? I guess some ways would be: 1. Not making the product image a link
    2. Using some kind of link masking / redirecting technique for the image
    3. Employing a technical trick to make the anchor text link come first in the code readable by search engines. What would be the easiest way to solve this issue? Or do you believe it's not worth bothering?

    Technical SEO | | DeptAgency
    0

  • For those of you who have been doing white hat SEO for many years, I'm curious what % of your time (and/or how many hours/week) you spend on 2 activities: -- creating new, original content for your site -- work on getting links to your existing content I find that working at getting links via article marketing, guest blogging, forum posting, etc, is an open ended time suck that never ends. But maybe a necessary investment for sites that have fewer external links than their competitors (?). Adding unique original content to my site is also time consuming, and I'm not sure about the short-term vs long-term benefit of it. I'm curious if you guys who rank in top 3 positions of the SERPs split your time evenly between link building and content building, or if you spend more time on one than the other? And does the answer change for a site that's been around for a while and already has several hundred external links and several hundred pages of original content? Where should I spend my time on a site that is 8 months old, has about 90 pages of original content (all with good on-page SEO), and several hundred external links (with mostly relevant anchor texts)? My goal is to rank higher for the key terms people search on to find a service like mine. Currently I'm on page 1 in SERPs but not in top 3.

    Link Building | | scanlin
    0

  • Hello we are using Joomla as our cms, months ago we used a component to create friendly urls, lots of them got indexed by google, testing the component we created three different types of URL, the problem now is that all of this tests are showing in google webmasters as 404 errors,  37,309 not found pages and this number is increasing everyday. What do you suggest to fix this?? Regards.

    Technical SEO | | Zertuxte
    0

  • I am building a couple of brand new websites for myself and a client. I'm operating on a fairly limited budget ~$1000.00 for 3 sites.  All 3 are in the life sciences and chemistry field. If you were me what are the first sites you try to get links from? Or should I just hire a link building service like Paul and Angela's? I guess Im looking for specific domains that are a must to get links from.

    Link Building | | RedFunnel
    0

  • Hi i would like to buy book about seo but i dont know which is good or not maybe you may recommend me some seo book special about google caffeine i found this to books on amazon, http://www.amazon.com/Search-Engine-Optimization-Secrets-2011/dp/1452885443/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1299373573&sr=8-1 http://www.amazon.com/SEO-2011-Search-Optimization-Secrets/dp/1450727972/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1299373627&sr=8-3 Thank you Kerem

    SEO Learn Center | | pentimento
    0

  • Callcatalog.com is a complaint directory for phone numbers.  People post information on the phone calls they get.  Since there are many many phone numbers, obviously people haven't posted information on ALL of the phone numbers, THUS I have many phone numbers with zero content.  SEOMoz is telling me that pages with zero content looks like duplicate content with each other.. The only difference between two pages that have zero coments is the title and phone number embedded in the page.  For example, http://www.callcatalog.com/phones/view/413-563-3263 is a page that has zero comments.. I don't want to remove these zero comment phone number pages from the directory since many people find the pages via a phone number search. Here's my question:  what can I do to make google / seomoz think that thexe zero comment pages is not dupliicate content?

    Moz Pro | | seo_ploom
    0

  • Hello, I use a wordpress plug in that allows me to display tot he user any link I want from my domain, so it might be like: www.domain.com/gift-card, but the actual link is www.someaffiliatelink/w09fjai;owfoienw  <--- and then a bunch of crap after the domain for the affiliate link.  It uses the common technique of an iframe to hide the actual url from the user and show the one that I want them to see.  What I am wondering is, does link juice in this case flow to my site, or to their site?  And also, do you have any comments regarding this type of link cloaking?  Thanks. Thanks

    On-Page Optimization | | BigJohnson
    0

  • Is it better to repeat a keyword phrase on a page's text that you have already used once, or to use a different variation of the keyword phrase?

    On-Page Optimization | | SparkplugDigital
    0

  • I have a site that has around 5,000 pages now. Are there any recommened online free/paid tools to generate a sitemap for me?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rhysmaster
    0

  • Hello, I'm in a professional services industry. My services, and my competitors' services, can be broken down into about 20 categories or so. Most of my competitors have 50–100 pages describing their services, pages all cross-linked with appropriate anchor texts, but pages that have a lot of duplicate (though rewritten) content. That is, each individual page is pretty shallow, but they create the structural appearance of a lot of relevant content. Should I do the same, or should I just stick to the 20 categories with a handful of cross-links as necessary? This will allow me to get more relevant keywords on the page, and will likely be easier for the user, but might make Googlebot think the site isn't as deep, and it might affect my ability to do as many internal anchor text links.

    On-Page Optimization | | maxkennerly
    0

  • Since there are no dumb questions, here's mine: Our url structure currently displays the date followed by the post title. However, our news website has many categories like world, sports, entertainment etc. Now, when tracking in GA we get to see how many hits a specific page is getting (like entertainment) but since the category is not defined in the URL GA does not add the detail story views to the category page views. To illustrate further, a story from the entertainment section maybe displayed on the Home page and a reader may click on that story and read it without going to the entertainment page. This however, does not reflect in the analytics for that specific page(in this example, the entertainment page). My question is, should we ammend the url structure to include the categories, if so, would the editor have to do that while composing the post or is there some other way. We are using WP. Or should I create some filters or something on GA. Thanks!

    Reporting & Analytics | | RishadShaikh59
    0

  • I'm just wondering if there would be some benefit if this was followed since the purpose of it is to add trust to your site.

    On-Page Optimization | | BradBorst
    0

  • Searching for any variation of the companies name or domain name returns the correct www.domain.com/ as the result domain, but searching for any variations of site:domain.com/ returns HTTPS://www.domain.com/ Even if I search site:domain.com -blog -product -forum -store -everything -etc I've done that all the way down to 3 results, none of them are HTTP://www.domain.com/ WTF?!?! does this mean? I know it means duplicate content, but beyond that. If I 301 to correct domain, or remove the HTTPS version in google webmaster tools will anything drastic happen?!!? Thanks!

    Algorithm Updates | | Hondaspeder
    0

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