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  • We have started using Google Site Search (via an XML feed from Google) to power our search engines.  So we have a whole load of pages we could link to of the format /search?q=keyword,  and we are considering doing away with our more traditional category listing pages (e.g. /biology - not powered by GSS) which account for much of our current natural search landing pages. My question is would the GoogleBot treat these search pages any differently? My fear is it would somehow see them as duplicate search results and downgrade their links.  However, since we are coding the XML from GSS into our own HTML format, it may not even be able to tell.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EdwardUpton61
    0

  • I Have a print website www.print.dor2dor.com and we print 100's of products. I was wandering what is the best way to rank high for severall keywords as we dont want to just rank high for printing because when people are searching they normally type in the product they are looking for with printing at the end of it.

    On-Page Optimization | | WillFrank
    0

  • I've been focusing on the long tail for one of my websites. I've been getting good traffic that has been converting well for me. So far i've mostly been using wordtracker and google keyword tool to find long tail keywords. I did try hitail for a few months, but it gave me very few extra keywords. Does anyone know of some other tools out there to find more long tail keywords? Thanks

    Keyword Research | | PeterM22
    0

  • Most ecommerce sites use the original manufacturer product descriptions in their content. The product features and specifications are the content made by the manufacturer. Sometimes manufacturers insist that the ecommerce sites should use their original content and it is impossible to change what available in the original content and rewrite it.

    Industry News | | IM_Learner
    1

  • I have a client who insists their home page be a single graphic image of their logo with php menus linking to all of the other pages up top. This appears to me to be an seo nightmare. They seem to be unwilling to have anything to do with changing the appearance and want to rely on seo for "all the other pages" on the site. What's an SEO to do in this situation? Is it possible to have a flash image that lands on a "homepage" for google to crawl, rather than a single image? What's the best seo approach here?

    Web Design | | peaceland
    0

  • One of my sites got hit pretty hard during the latest Google update. It lost about 30-40% of its US traffic and the future does not look bright considering that Google plans a worldwide roll-out. Problem is, my site is a six year old heavy linked, popular Wordpress blog. I do not know why the article believes that it is low quality. The only reason I came up with is the statement that low-quality pages on a site may affect other pages (think it was in the Wired article). If that is so, would you recommend blocking and de-indexing of Wordpress tag, archive and category pages from the Google index? Or would you suggest to wait a bit more before doing something that drastically. Or do you have another idea what I could to do? I invite you to take a look at the site www.ghacks.net

    Algorithm Updates | | badabing
    0

  • Hi Moz Team, somehow the last question i raised a few days ago not only wasnt answered up until now, it was also completely deleted and the credit was not "refunded" - obviously there was some data loss involved with your restructuring. Can you check whether you still find the last question and answer it quickly? I need the answer 🙂 Here is one more question: I bought a website that has a huge forum, loads of pages with user generated content. Overall around 500.000 Threads with 9 Million comments. The complete forum is noindex/nofollow when i bought the site, now i am thinking about what is the best way to unleash the potential. The current system is vBulletin 3.6.10. a) Shall i first do an update of vbulletin to version 4 and use the vSEO tool to make the URLs clean, more user and search engine friendly before i switch to index/follow? b) would you recommend to have the forum in the folder structure or on a subdomain? As far as i know subdomain does take lesser strenght from the TLD, however, it is safer because the subdomain is seen as a separate entity from the regular TLD. Having it in he folder makes it easiert to pass strenght from the TLD to the forum, however, it puts my TLD at risk c) Would you release all forum sites at once or section by section? I think section by section looks rather unnatural not only to search engines but also to users, however, i am afraid of blasting more than a millionpages into the index at once. d) Would you index the first page of a threat or all pages of a threat? I fear duplicate content as the different pages of the threat contain different body content but the same Title and possibly the same h1. Looking forward to hear from you soon! Best Fabian

    Technical SEO | | fabiank
    0

  • Suppose an old established site's root has High PA, High DA & High MR scores but the TBPR is significantly low. Can it be taken as a pointer that Google has algorithmically capped that site's  ability to pass link equity when the home page metrics look suspect? Example case: pegasusdirectory*com PA = 88, DA = 86, MR = 6.61, but TBPR = 3 ( aged site ) (p.s: I'm aware that on inner pages of sites, it's quite normal to see high PA, Page level MR but no TBPR; my question is specically about guaging quality of the link for the DOMAIN in question Should I spend time on getting links from such domains ? ) TIA

    Link Building | | seo-wanna-bs
    0

  • Are there any risks of getting penalized by Google if one was to publish a blogger competition on a corporate blog, in which participating bloggers have to include a link* on their blogs to enter? Bloggers also receive a small prize (CD, book,..) to thank them for participating. After what happened with Overstock.com do you think this kind of link-bait is risky? *each blogger has to write an original article and the links are organic. Thanks for your help. o1rRl.png

    Link Building | | ref.price
    0

  • Can anyone weigh in on their own efforts to build links into international TLDs? Which tactics have been successful? Which have failed? Have you engaged any agencies to manage this for you and if so, how did they perform and who are they? We have nine ccTLDs plus our .com site to manage so it's a bit overwhelming! Fortunately, we have teams dedicated to managing day-to-day operations of each site. Each team is comprised of managers who speak the targeted language as their first language and have intimate knowledge of the targeted culture. I want to leverage them to help my SEO efforts, but I'm not sure how my advice should be different than what we do for our .com site.

    International SEO | | RyanOD
    0

  • I'm running a news site, and I have a problem of accuratly measuring which traffic is REALLY coming from google news. I analyzed a lot of  individual articles and I come to the conclusion, that the visits, that come from the google news section in the universal search results are counted as "normal" search engine traffic in google analytics. So if you do a Google search for a topic that includes links from Google news, you don't get an accurate referral count. As an example, if you do a search for "eBay", incorporated into the page 1 search results you may also see Google news results as well. 
    If someone clicks on that Google news link that appears in Google search, it shows up in Google analytics as a referral from Google search, when it was actually from a Google news referral. I was already checking google analytics and google news help forums and searched SEO blogs for this. But I wasn't able to find a working solution. Can anybody help me out with this problem? Thanks so much, Matthias

    Reporting & Analytics | | Mulle
    0

  • I know that link building is one of the more important tools for great ranking and know that "paid links" may hurt a sites ranking. How do I know if a company offering link building will be classified as "paid links"

    Link Building | | stevecounsell
    0

  • Hello If I am trying to rank for the term blue widgets as a primary, and also the term shiny blue widgets , and big shiny blue widgets as secondary - would the url /blue-widgets or /shiny-blue-widgets or /big-shiny-blue-widgets be better (all else equal) Would the word shiny / big dilute or affect of KW in the domain for  the rankings for blue widgets (all esle equal) Regarding anchor text of inbound links, if the anchor text is shiny blue widgets, is that going to help me rank for both queries "blue widgets" and "shiny blue widgets" equally? (all else equal), or would including shiny, affect my ranking for "bliue widgets" Or is it better to keep the anchor text as just blue widgets (of course we could vary it) but Im trying to get a feel for how that would work as we are builfing some links I can control the anchor text. I hope this was clear enough Thanks Sam

    Link Building | | Impact-201555
    0

  • Hi, We are working with a site that we can refer to as: www.clientsbrand.com.au It has a subsection of our clients services at www.clientsbrand.com.au/keyword The client has now decided that this subsection is in fact the most important thing they should be trying to rank for. A large amount of the content that is already existing under clientsbrand.com.au/topic1 /topic2 /topic3 etc would fit naturally under clientsbrand.com.au/keyword/topic1 etc The root domain is currently not ranking for the keyword they wish to target. I am planning on moving a lot of this content to the subfolder to try and boost that silo and get things going for that keyword. As long as we 301 the old URL's to their corresponding new position are there any issues any of you see with doing this? I am worried there may be some traps for young players I have not considered. Thanks in advance for any responses.

    On-Page Optimization | | MrPaulB
    0

  • Working on a forum site that has multiple versions of the URL indexed. The WWW version is a top 3 and 5 contender in the google results for the domain keyword. All versions of the forum have the same PR, but but the non-WWW version has 3,400 pages indexed in google, and the WWW has 2,100. Even worse yet, there's a completely seperate domain (PR4) that has the forum as a subdomain with 2,700 pages indexed in google. The dupe content gets completely overwhelming to think about when it comes to the PR4 domain, so I'll just ask what you think I should do with the forum. Get rid of the subdomain version, and sometimes link between two obviously related sites or get rid of the highly targeted keyword domain? Also what's better, having the targeted keyword on the front of Google with only 2,100 indexed pages or having lower rankings with 3,400 indexed pages? Thanks.

    Technical SEO | | Hondaspeder
    0

  • Wondering why my domain authority has dropped after about three months of trying to implement the best practices suggested on this site. Can anyone help?

    On-Page Optimization | | MauiCoffee
    0

  • Can you recommend any reputable SEO companies for someone with a smaller budget? Mainly just looking for link building.

    Link Building | | bigboy725
    0

  • I have an online store through hosting service Volusion. I have asked them about this and was told that this is normal. I would like to confirm this with you guys because I'm not convinced of the quality of their customer service and I'm not an expert. When I check Analytics the landing page that is visited most often is www....../default.asp and the second most visited is www........./     . These are, of course, both my home page. Volusion has radio button that allows the admin to "enable canonical links", which I have enabled,  and they told me that it is normal to see this on google analytics regardless. When I type in either of those addreses, the homepage comes up as the address that I typed. In other words it doesn't redirect so that it is always the same. Am I right to be concerned about this?

    Technical SEO | | berglin
    0

  • Is the any report that will show the reciprocal vs one-way inbound links?

    Competitive Research | | FastCashOnlineInc
    0

  • I'm curious what correlations or impacting variables SEO professionals have found that have increased or decreased ranking with the most recent algorithm change. It appears that many innocent sites have fallen victim, especially larger sites. It also appears that Google is maintaining that specific sites were not targeted... Meaning there must be proven characteristics.

    Technical SEO | | douglaskarr
    0

  • Today's sitemap webinar made me think about the disallow feature, seems opposite of sitemaps, but it also seems both are kind of ignored in varying ways by the engines. I don't need help semantically, I got that part. I just can't seem to find a contemporary answer about what should be blocked using the robots.txt file. For example, I have folders containing site comps for clients that I really don't want showing up in the SERPS. Is it better to not have these folders on the domain at all? There are also security issues I've heard of that make sense, simply look at a site's robots file to see what they are hiding. It makes it easier to hunt for files when they know the directory the files are contained in. Do I concern myself with this? Another example is a folder I have for my xml sitemap generator. I imagine google isn't going to try to index this or count it as content, so do I need to add folders like this to the disallow list?

    Technical SEO | | SpringMountain
    0

  • A competitor of mine has appeared out of nowhere with various different websites targetting slightly different keywords but all are in the same industry. They don't have as many links as me, the site structure and code is truly awful (multiple H1's on same page, tables for non-tabular data etc...) yet they outperform mine and many of my other competitors. It's a long story but I know someone who knows the people who run these sites and from what I can gather they are using black hat techniques. But that is all I know and I would like to find out more so I can report them.

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | kevin1
    1

  • Hi, today SEOMoz crawled our site and it interfered with an email campaign that we sent out and pretty much brought our site to a crawl (seoMoz even reported numerous 4XX errors). Is there a way to tell the crawler to only allow indexing between certain time periods?

    Moz Pro | | RugsUSA
    0

  • For example, the Chrome/Firefox mozbar uses peid (Root Domain External Links) but the api doesn't allow this. I've done a little bit of reverse engeniering and it looks like the accessID for the mozbar (when logged in as a pro member) is "pro-xxxx". Does this mean that each pro account has its own accessid/secret key? If so, when will pro members have access to that? I've created a tool that I use for deciding which expired domains to buy and it uses all of the free metrics - but I find myself having to do one extra step to get the peid (navigating to ose). It doesn't make much sense that the metric is available to me when I'm using the mozbar logged in as a pro member (which I pay for), but not apart of the API.

    Moz Pro | | SeanStewart81
    1

  • Okay I admit, I've been naughty....I have 270+ domains that are all exact match for city+keyword and have built tons of back links to all of them. I reaped the benefits....and now google has found my duplicate templates and flagged them all down. Question is, how to get the reincluded quickly? Do you guys think converting a site to a basic wordpress template and then simply using 275 different templates and begging applying each site manually would do it, or do you recommend. 1. create a unique site template for each site 2. create unique content any other advice for getting reincluded? Aside from owning up and saying, "hey i used the same template for all the sites, and I have created new templates and unique content, so please let me back".

    Technical SEO | | ilyaelbert
    3

  • Hi, Is a natural link profile a ranking signal? What is the value in a natural link profile? What is a (natural?) link graph? Is Majestic SEO the only company capable of visualizing a link graph? (I know the answers to these questions but I want to hear what SEOMoz has to say in the quasi-official standards of SEOMoz Q/A) Regards,

    Link Building | | qlkasdjfw
    0

  • I have 1 main site with many many city/state pages within the site. I would like to use this site as the 'website' on the google local places pages for all my branch office locations, however I am worried that if my domain authority isn't high enough for the site, google will think I am spamming 'google places'. Are there any best practices I can follow to do this? Ideally I would like my blended search to show www.site.com/boston not as www.site.com

    Image & Video Optimization | | ilyaelbert
    0

  • Hi, we are actually building a new microsite that will live on promo.domain.com.  The site will have a promo for about 5 days and will be changed for a new promo after 5 days. Considering that the site www.domain.com has a high autority (67) and is well indexed in search engine, should I try to optimise this site for keywords such as promo "keyword" rebate "keyword" cheap "keyword" even if the site will be optimized for those keywords only for 5 days. We are already doing PPC campaign on these keywords but I am wondering if Google will have the time to rank us in the top 10 results in those 5 days or if I am loosing my time. My other option is to leave the TITLE of this site always the same like Groupon is doing and focus on very generic keywords.  Which option do you think is the best?

    Technical SEO | | Adviso
    0

  • My company's website has inbound links from very high DA websites (LinkedIn 96, Yelp 91, etc.) but from pages with very low PA (1).  These low PA pages are the company listings pages. In the case of Linked In, there are several products/services listed with ideal anchor text to the relevant pages on our site. How do these links effect our overall ranking and trust, and why aren't they listed when I use OSE to analyze my pages? Thanks!

    Link Building | | sverdino
    0

  • I am trying to figure our how to correct a recently incurred duplication penalty on a partner site. I didn't see any posts on this yet specific to my problem. The site used to be ranked on page 1 of Google for all important keywords but now we ran into the situation that many pages were bumped to pos 100 or lower due to duplication issues. This is an aviation site, discussing airplanes and each page discusses a different model but each page also has the specs of the plane and while the data parts are different for each plane the specification terms are the same ,see here: Primary Function:
            Crew:
            Engine:
            Thrust:
            Weight Empty:
            Max. Weight:
            Length:
            Wingspan:
            Cruise Speed:
            Max.Speed:
            Climb:
            Ceiling:
            Range:  
            First Flight:
            Year Deployed: Is there an easy way to get Google to stop including these terms (not the data in the 2nd column) from the page anaysis to prevent this causing the duplication issues we are are seeing due to this? Thanks in advance!

    Technical SEO | | WizardHQ
    0

  • (1) Can I use OSE to see the number of links per month a site acauired over the past year (month by month)?  For example, I might be interested if I see a competitor acquired a surprisingly high number of links during December, 2010. (2) Can I use OSE to see the a list of links a site acquired during a specific time, such as December of 2010?  For example, if I see a competitor suddenly acquired an unusually high number of links in December, 2010, I'd like to see a list of those links, to figure out how they acquired those links. Thanks!

    Competitive Research | | GregMoore
    0

  • Trying to get some best practices on testing SEO changes. We are going to make a bunch of changes on subsets of pages. Say testing about 5 different on-page changes. Originally we were going to submit separate Sitemaps to GWT and see if our test sets get indexed, how quickly, etc. But we noticed that GWT says some pages in our Sitemaps aren't indexed even though we know they are (what gives?). So we thought, for each test, let's put a unique code on the page so we can see how many get indexed by Google. But that doesn't solve the issue: how many people clicked on our test pages. So we are thinking of putting a tracking pixel on the test pages, specific for each test. But then I am thinking, why not just create a separate Google Analytics profile and place that code on the test pages (set up goals to track visits per test since we aren't going to change the actual URLs). and on and on This is where you come in. What kind of tracking do you implement when you set up tests? Advice appreciated! E

    Reporting & Analytics | | ErinTM
    0

  • The SEO moz is showing an error on one of the sites within my SE Moz account campaign under Crawl Diagnostics: Title tag missing or empty. No problem here but the file associated with this issue is sitemap.xml and that just dose't look right as as far as I know xml files are title tag free. I've searched around and i've  been able only to confirm my initial thought that sitemap.xml dose't use a title tag .. like any other xml. is this an issue ? (the error that is) or i should let it slide. can it be fixed ? if yes, how ? Thanks !

    Moz Pro | | eyepaq
    1

  • What is the optimal Title Tag length when optimizing a mobile version of your site for the iPhone?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GearyLSF37
    0

  • There's a "brands for:" section that appears above the first organic listing for certain search queries.  For example, if you search for "dedicated servers" in Google, you will see that a "brands for:" appears.  How do you get listed there? Thanks, Brian

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | InMotionHosting
    0

  • I have mysite.net and mysite.com......They are both the same age, however, we always had it so that the mysite.com address forwarded to the mysite.net address. The mysite.net address was our main address forever. We recently reversed that and made the mysite.com address the main address and just have mysite.net forward to the mysite.com address. I'm wondering if this change will affect our rankings since a lot of the backlinks we've acquired are actually pointing to mysite.net and not mysite.com (our new main address)???

    Technical SEO | | B24Group
    0

  • Good afternoon! We have a large real estate site with over 400,000 urls. We do pretty well with long-tailed search terms (like addresses--- 123 Main Street, Atlanta GA) so we get a decent amount of traffic (3,500-4,000 uniques a day). 2 months ago we opened up in a new market (Nashville) and hoped to see similar traffic for that market after a few of months, but so far we haven't. In fact, we only get about 200 visits a day. I can't seem to figure out why it's taking so long for us to generate similar traffic in Nashville that we see in Atlanta. All of the Nashville properties are in our sitemap and are being indexed by Google. Any ideas why we aren't seeing similar effects?Thanks in advance for any help you can provide! David

    Reporting & Analytics | | clickscape
    0

  • Since I subcontract out to web design people or work doing SEO for small businesses, I am wondering how others (and if others) deal with non-compliance with good SEO practices. For instance, I had a web designer change a few of the terms for a website because the client wanted another term they thought was better instead of sticking to the SEO they contracted for and she diluted the site architecture in the process. A former small business client called for some changes and I discovered she had made some changes she "thought were good terms." Do you encounter such issues, and if so, how do you deal with them--or do you just oblige the request? Also, I've been getting requests to do "partial" seo instead of entire sites. Is that ever a good idea and if so, how would you handle it? If not, how do you successfully dissuade a client from doing so? (Both small biz and web design peeps)

    Web Design | | TheARKlady
    0

  • I can get a link from this site, but it has a DA=39, Dmr=3.37, Dmt=3.39 and a Page Rank=0

    Competitive Research | | b4tv
    0

  • I am thinking to Add Sub Domains to get better rankings for Local Searches. So I will develop City Specific Sites with Specific Language. For Example qatar.wisnetsol.com. IT will be in Arabic. If my Good standing and Ranking on Google for wisnetsol.com will help my subdomain to rank better? if we setup wisnetsol.com/qatar, how it can target Qatar in Google Webmaster tools? Will links for qatar.wisnetsol.com and wisnetsol.com are seprate? What do you think about this strategy? Is it good or bad?

    Technical SEO | | Khuram
    0

  • I have a site that has been indexed in Google since 2002.  Back then, I secured all of the highly recommended links of the time, like DMOZ and Yahoo Directory, and got just a couple very high PR links from highly relevant sites.  That was enough to get us top listing on our best "niche" keywords and many long tail searches.  Once we got to that point, we got lazy and have just relied upon our original links and any natural links that came our way.  We also have a very highly detailed Adwords campaign in which we bid on almost any keyword that has every resulted in an organic conversion. A few months ago, I decided to kick our SEO efforts up a notch and hired a company to do an aggressive link building campaign and target some very high search volume terms that we had previously given up on.  The campaign has been very successful in getting high ranking for several targetted terms.  However, I am seeing zero impact on our site traffic or sales. I am beginning to wonder if Google's algorithms are so efficient that all of this extra SEO work is to no avail.  Is there a point of diminishing returns where it is not productive to optimize a site's organic listings any further?  Between our Adwords campaign, our already pretty good organic results, and google's ability to divine a searchers intent and lead them to the most relevant results, how do you decide when there is little benefit to further optimization?  It is an important question for me because I have been considering putting a lot of work into adding content to our ecommerce site and I would hate to do all that work for nothing.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mhkatz
    0

  • For one of our sites we are considering restructuring the urls. This is about a Greek site and we are toying between the following options: a) English URLS e.g. www.domain.com/cars b) Greek URLs e.g. www.domain.com/αυτοκίνητα c) "Greeklish" URLs (Greek words spelled with latin characters) www.domain.com/aftokinita Normally we would imagine option b is the best since it would reinforce the main and most relevant keyword that is already present within the page content. We see many people search in google using greeklish (e.g. they are lazy to switch the keyboard locale all the time). Since we would also like to capture this part of the SE traffic but cannot obviously write in "greeklish" within our main page content maybe option c is a good compromise?

    International SEO | | achatzakis
    0

  • I am assisting a company with reputation management. While we know we must use our brand name plus a modifier (or many different modifiers) within our numerous company owned blogs, websites as well as within press releases, blog entries, and article topics - so that we can hopefully get all of our sites to push out the negative ones for the use of our name - the question is whether to simultaneously compete for popular keyword terms to gain more secondary traffic that may not be looking for our company name but product? If getting more hits on our sites helps our rankings, then would it be worth targeting specific key phrases? Or, should we just focus on our brand name only at this point? Thanks, Pamela Ravenwood SEO Essential Solutions

    Branding | | seoessentials
    0

  • I have reviews on Yelp, Insiderpages.com, and Citysearch.  All of my contact information matches up, but Google does not seem to be finding them and adding them to my Google Places page.  Is there anything I need to do to make this happen?

    Image & Video Optimization | | vinnyb2000
    0

  • We are redeveloping our website, and have the option to amend URLs (with 301 redirects from old URL to new), so my question is: Would 'golfsite.com/golf-clubs' achieve superior rankings than 'golfsite.com/clubs' for the search term 'golf clubs' if all other factors were the same? Should the URL reflect the intended search term wherever possible?

    On-Page Optimization | | swgolf123
    0

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