Latest Questions

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  Sitemap link in footer?? Is it needed
  

  Hi, I know sitemap is important to have as it tells google the pages to crawl. I have an xml sitemap for google to crawl. However, Do I need a sitemap link in footer. Any thoughts?? Does it have any harm if I dont include a sitemap link in footer

  Algorithm Updates | | pejman50

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  How much margin do you add when estimating client projects?
  

  After you calculate how many hours you need to complete a marketing project for a client, how much extra do you add for project management, communication, all the little things that come up, unexpected problems, client questions, etc.? One resource I read said to add 10% to 20% for project management, then add 25% to 33% more for fluctuations, then state a +/-15% margin of error on the estimate. I was wondering what percentages others use when estimating client projects.

  Industry News | | AdamThompson

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  What is the weight of .pro domains? Will they rank?
  

  .pro Domains have ben out there for a while but seem to as late started to be adopted. Thoughts and opinions welcome.

  Branding | | bozzie311

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  Google Analytics for example.com and www.example.com
  

  Hello. I have had a Google Analytics account set up to track the property www.example.com for several years. In Google Webmaster Tools, I recently set the preferred domain to example.com (without the www), and we put in a rewrite from www to no-www in the .htaccess file. Should I now change the url of the property in Google Analytics to example.com (without the www), or does Google Analytics see the two urls as the same? Thank you!

  Reporting & Analytics | | nyc-seo

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  Removing Content 301 vs 410 question
  

  Hello, I was hoping to get the SEOmoz community’s advice on how to remove content most effectively from a large website. I just read a very thought-provoking thread in which Dr. Pete and Kerry22 answered a question about how to cut content in order to recover from Panda.  (http://www.seomoz.org/q/panda-recovery-what-is-the-best-way-to-shrink-your-index-and-make-google-aware). Kerry22 mentioned a process in which 410s would be totally visible to googlebot so that it would easily recognize the removal of content.  The conversation implied that it is not just important to remove the content, but also to give google the ability to recrawl that content to indeed confirm the content was removed (as opposed to just recrawling the site and not finding the content anywhere). This really made lots of sense to me and also struck a personal chord… Our website was hit by a later Panda refresh back in March 2012, and ever since then we have been aggressive about cutting content and doing what we can to improve user experience. When we cut pages, though, we used a different approach, doing all of the below steps:
  1. We cut the pages
  2. We set up permanent 301 redirects for all of them immediately.
  3. And at the same time, we would always remove from our site all links pointing to these pages (to make sure users didn’t stumble upon the removed pages. When we cut the content pages, we would either delete them or unpublish them, causing them to 404 or 401, but this is probably a moot point since we gave them 301 redirects every time anyway.  We thought we could signal to Google that we removed the content while avoiding generating lots of errors that way… I see that this is basically the exact opposite of Dr. Pete's advice and opposite what Kerry22 used in order to get a recovery, and meanwhile here we are still trying to help our site recover.  We've been feeling that our site should no longer be under the shadow of Panda. So here is what I'm wondering, and I'd be very appreciative of advice or answers for the following questions: 1. Is it possible that Google still thinks we have this content on our site, and we continue to suffer from Panda because of this?  
  Could there be a residual taint caused by the way we removed it, or is it all water under the bridge at this point because Google would have figured out we removed it (albeit not in a preferred way)? 2.  If there’s a possibility our former cutting process has caused lasting issues and affected how Google sees us, what can we do now (if anything) to correct the damage we did? Thank you in advance for your help,
  Eric

  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eric_R

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  Practice Name vs. Dr. Name in Local Search
  

  I wanted to get some opinions on an interesting situation for local search. Many doctors and dentists are found in one of two ways online: Their name and title, e.g. Dr. James A. Smith, MD Their practice name, e.g Smith Plastic Surgery, P.C Often sites like Healthgrades are providing data on the doctor him or herself, and the information can be tough to switch out. At the same time, there's a tendancy on the Dr's part to want to be listed as their practice name. Their site is often set up that way. How are you handling this kind of setup? Have you found a way to reliably associate (and format) a practice and doctor's name in a listing, in such a way that doesn't violate Google's quality guidelines? I know the drill for handling a doctor within a hospital, but this is a slightly different situation...

  Image & Video Optimization | | BedeFahey

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  Redirect old .net domain to new .com domain
  

  I have a quick question that I think I know the answer to but I wanted to get some feedback to make sure or see if there's additional feedback. The long and short of it is that I'm working with a site that currently has a .net domain that they've been running for 6 years. They've recently bought a .com of the same name as well. So the question is: I think it's obviously preferable to keep the .net and just direct the .com to it. However, if they would prefer to have the .com domain, is 301'ing the .net to the .com going to lose a lot of the equity they've built up in the site over the past  years? And are there any steps that would make such a move easier? Also, if you have any tips or insight just into a general transition of this nature it would be much appreciated. Thanks!

  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrandLabs

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  Can hotlinking images from multiple sites be bad for SEO?
  

  Hi, There's a very similar question already being discussed here, but it deals with hotlinking from a single site that is owned by the same person. I'm interested whether hotlinking images from multiple sites can be bad for SEO. The issue is that one of our bloggers has been hotlinking all the images he uses, sometimes there are 3 or 4 images per blog from different domains. We know that hotlinking is frowned upon, but can it affect us in the SERPs? Thanks, James

  Technical SEO | | OptiBacUK

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  Duplicate Content From Indexing of non- File Extension Page
  

  Google somehow has indexed a page of mine without the .html extension.  so they indexed  www.samplepage.com/page, so I am showing duplicate content because Google also see's  www.samplepage.com/page.html   How can I force google or bing or whoever to only index and see the page including the .html extension?  I know people are saying not to use the file extension on pages, but I want to, so please anybody...HELP!!!

  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WebbyNabler

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  Using Alt Text in stock photography good?
  

  Hello, I got a client who told me that he bought his images from a stock photography website. I know it looks awful and all, but the client can't afford a photographer to get some decent pics. So, How positive it is to use Alt Text on images that aren't yours? The purpose of using alt text properly is to get traffic from an imaged based search right? So if the business shows up with some stock photography it looks kinda bad. Is it worth optimizing images in this case? Or just leave em without optimizing? Changing pics isn't an option. Thanks

  Branding | | Eblan

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  Using H3-4 tags in the footer or sidebars: good or not?
  

  Howdy SEOmoz fans! Is it considered a good / bad / neutral practice to include H tags in the footer, as a mean to group a few links? Take http://www.seomoz.org/ for instance: - Voted Best SEO Tool 2010! = H2
  - Looking for SEO consulting? = H3
  - Product and Tools = H3 Company = H3 etc. I often see the same principle applied to sidebars. I feel like because they don't contribute to the actual content structure and because they are repeated from page to page, we should avoid them, but I have nothing to back my intuition. [+] Perhaps they are helpful for usability (screen readers) and thin added value (i.e. category names that carry more weight than if they weren't headers). What do you think? Thanks for your time.

  On-Page Optimization | | AxialDev

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  Google Analytics Showing Inflated Product Revenue
  

  Hi- For the month of Feb on two of our sites we are seeing inflated product revenues. I have not seen this before and I am not having any luck searching for answers. Here is the issue: Product B sells for $159.95 For the month of Feb we sold 3 thus revenue should be ~$479.85 GA is showing Product B's revenue at $3,360.00 I read online that sometimes folks will bookmark the receipt page and that can cause this and we would need to put a catch in place for this but I am guessing this is not the case as it is happening on two sites. Please let me know if you have any questions.

  Reporting & Analytics | | K2_Sports

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  Reciprocal links
  

  Are they worth anything, if they are from relevant sites?  I'm I better off avoiding linking back wherever possible?

  Link Building | | littlesthobo

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  Google insists robots.txt is blocking... but it isn't.
  

  I recently launched a new website.  During development, I'd enabled the option in WordPress to prevent search engines from indexing the site. When the site went public (over 24 hours ago), I cleared that option. At that point, I added a specific robots.txt file that only disallowed a couple directories of files.  You can view the robots.txt at http://photogeardeals.com/robots.txt Google (via Webmaster tools) is insisting that my robots.txt file contains a "Disallow: /" on line 2 and that it's preventing Google from indexing the site and preventing me from submitting a sitemap.  These errors are showing both in the sitemap section of Webmaster tools as well as the Blocked URLs section. Bing's webmaster tools are  able to read the site and sitemap just fine. Any idea why Google insists I'm disallowing everything even after telling it to re-fetch?

  Technical SEO | | ahockley

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  Reasons for store not showing up on Google?
  

  Hi my client has a store which is not showing up on Google search results. E.g. if you looked up store name and store location on Google, all the stores in that particular city show up except one. Also even if you click the: More results near CITY, and State the stores listing still doesn't show up. So for some reason Google has excluded the store from Google search. But if you go to Google Maps directly, and type in the same keyword "STORE NAME CITY" the store is displayed and there. Does anyone know any reason why the store has been excluded from Google search results, but is listed successfully on Google Maps.

  Image & Video Optimization | | MBASydney

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  SEO Issues From Image Hotlinking?
  

  I have a client who is hotlinking their images from one of their domains. I'm assuming the images were originally stored on the first domain (let's call it SiteA.com) and when they were putting together SiteB.com, they decided to just link to the images directly on SiteA.com instead of moving the images to Site B. Essentially hotlinking. Site A is not using the images in any way and in essence is just a gateway for their other sites and in this case a storage for their images.  It doesn't use those images at all, so it really doesn't get any benefits of the images being referenced since I read that Google sometimes counts that hotlinking as a "vote" for the original image. But again, since ite A doesn't use the images that are being hotlinked at all, there's no benefit for Site A. My concern is that it's affecting their SEO for Site B because it makes it look like Site B is simply scraping data by hotlinking those images from Site A. Their programmer suggested creating a virtual directory so that it "looked" like it was coming from Site B. My guess is that Google can see this, so then not only will it look like Site B is scaping/hotlinking images, but also trying to hide it which may send up red flags to Google. My suggesstion to them was to just upload the images correctly into their own images directory on Site B. They own the images, so there's not any copyright issue, but that if they want proper SEO credit for that content, it all needs to be housed on the correct server and not hotlinked. Am I correct in this or will the virtual directory serve just as well?

  Web Design | | GeorgiaSEOServices

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  Root directory vs. subdirectories
  

  Hello. How much more important does Google consider pages in the root directory relative to pages in a subdirectory? Is it best to keep the most important pages of a site in the root directory? Thanks!

  Technical SEO | | nyc-seo

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  Ignore keywords that have no data in the Google Keyword Tool?
  

  Hello, There are some keywords that have no monthly search data in the Google Keyword Tool. In many cases, this is because there have been very few searches for the keyword. Would you recommend focusing on other keywords that do have search data in the Google Keyword Tool? Perhaps focusing too far out on the long tail of search results can be less productive than focusing on keywords that have proven that at least some people care about them. What do you think? Thanks!

  Keyword Research | | nyc-seo

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  HTML5 Nav Tag Issue - Be Aware
  

  In checking my internal links with GWT, it is apparent that links within the nav tag in HTML5 are discounted by Google as "internal links" This could have major repercussions for designing your internal link structure for SEO purposes. I was surprised to see this result, as I have never seen it discussed. Anyone else notice this, or have any alternative views?

  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | veezer

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  Is it safe to submit the same article to multiple sites?
  

  Hello, I am just getting into SEO and I need some guidance with article submissions. I have read in many different places that submitting articles to other sites  (EzineArticles, Digg, Etc.) is a great way to build links back to your site. My question is, can I submit articles already posted on our site to these sites or is it best to write new articles?

  Link Building | | ScottReinmuth

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  Would Too Many Scoop.it Backlinks Hurt Our Website?
  

  Hi, We noticed in our Google Webmaster Tool that we have received a total of 10,162 links (still increasing) from Scoop.it over a period of less than 2 months from January. All these links are linking to our home page, and it is topping the list of "Who links the most" under our "Traffic > Links to Your site" in our Google Webmaster. Our second domain that links the most to us only has 1,831 links to our domain. According to our marketing service company who posted our brief bookmark content on Scoop.it: "That just has to do with the page structure of that site. If multiple scoop.it users promote your URL, the link will appear multiple times on each user's page.  Plus, it's a curated site, so the link will be recommended to other users. Scoop.it has an Alexa of <1000 so it's a very popular site. If Facebook was fully indexed by Google (and other search engines and crawlers had full access), you'd see a similar situation. There's currently no way to exclude specific social sites, sorry for the bad news. The high # of links from scoop.it are totally normal (and natural for that domain), it's just because of all their internal linking. Google seems to LOVE scoop.it (60M+ pages indexed), so I wouldn't worry." However, we still don't feel comfortable with the explanation because it appear so very unusual and clearly appear to be 'Unnatural' to us as we concern. I wonder if anyone knows if this would get us into trouble with Google? More seriously, get us deindexed due to 'Unnatural' backlinks in short period of time, from one single domain? Can anybody advise us what could we do with the current situation? Highly appreciate your advise, and many thanks! Enam

  Social Media | | enam937

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  Best Practice issue: Modx vs Wordpress
  

  Lately I've been working a lot with Modx to create a new site for our own firm as well for other projects. But so far I haven't seen the advantages for SEO purposes other then the fact that with ModX you can manage almost everything yourself including snippets etc without to much effort. Wordpress is a known factor for blogging and since the last 2 years or so for websites. My question is: Which platform is better suited for SEO purposes? Which should I invest my time in? ModX or Wordpress? Hope to hear your thought on the matter

  Web Design | | JarnoNijzing

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  Industry benchmarks stats
  

  Hi Mozzers, Just wondering if someone could point me in the direction of some useful industry benchmarks stats. I'm currently looking at a healthy active living website but trying to find out some average benchmark stats (things like av bounce rate, av time on site, pages per visit etc) for this sector so I can compare this with the site analytics. Having had a look around I can't find a great deal out there relating to average benchmark stats for this sector. Your help greatly appreciated. Thanks Simon

  Search Behavior | | simon_realbuzz

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  What can I do if my reconsideration request is rejected?
  

  Last week I received an unnatural link warning from Google.  Sad times. I followed the guidelines and reviewed all my inbound links for the last 3 months.  All 5000 of them!  Along with several genuine ones from trusted sites like BBC, Guardian and Telegraph there was a load of spam.  About 2800 of them were junk.  As we don't employ any SEO agency and don't buy links (we don't even buy adwords!) I know that all of this spam is generated by spam bots and site scrapers copying our content. As the bad links have not been created by us and there are 2800 of them I cannot hope to get them removed.  There are no 'contact us' pages on these Russian spam directories and Indian scraper sites.  And as for the 'adult book marking website' who have linked to us over 1000 times, well I couldn't even contact that site in company time if I wanted to!  As a result i did my manual review all day, made a list of 2800 bad links and disavowed them. I followed this up with a reconsideration request to tell Google what I'd done but a week later this has been rejected "We've reviewed your site and we still see links to your site that violate our quality guidelines."  As these links are beyond my control and I've tried to disavow them is there anything more to be done? Cheers Steve

  Technical SEO | | SteveBrumpton

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  Should We Request Payment Upfront For SEO Services
  

  Hi, I would like to hear how people work their billing for SEO work. I have previously been charging month in arrears to my clients but now have had a couple of companies run into financial difficulties and not be able to pay there bills. I would like to know how many of you choose to charge clients up front for work or send them a bill after a month etc. Thanks

  Search Behavior | | markseouk

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