Latest Questions

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  Does blocking domains help remove bad links?
  

  I have affiliate websites that are harming for one of 2 reasons: 1. They are on adult websites (and I don't want to be in a bad neighborhood) or 2. They are using a Frameset (so their content appears identical to mine and I am getting "credit" for all their junk links) I cannot get these websites to remove our links so I have blocked their IPs on our production firewall. Is this an effective method or should I do something else with these links?

  Link Building | | theLotter

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  Google Analytics for multiple languages on multiple domains
  

  Hi folks A quick question in regards to setting up Google Analytics for a website with multiple languages on multiple domains. The domains that needs to be tracked are: www.example.com -> English www.example.se -> Swedish www.example.dk -> Danish To my best knowledge this can be acheived in Google Analytids using 3 different setups: Different accounts Different properties Profiles What would you guys consider the best approach?
  Pros and cons? Have a great day Fredrik

  Reporting & Analytics | | Resultify

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  Has anyone attended or hired anyone from Full Sail University? Or schools offering Internet Marketing or SEO
  

  We are actively looking for a couple of positions. A qualified SEM (for PPC, etc) pro that has experience with Google but also others including BING and Yahoo. And a good SEO person who gets it is about delivering a result and not blowing sunshine up someone's skirt or pant leg. 
  That said I got a resume the other day from a guy and he stated he had a Master's Certificate in Internet Marketing from Full Sail University. I looked them up and they offer a Bachelors Degree and a Masters Degree in Internet Marketing. They also offer a certificate in Internet marketing they call a Master's certificate. So, I set a time for him to call me as I was mildly skeptical. 
  When I started asking about the certificate (His LinkedIn page had Masters Degree in IM) he said he had taken the certificate and I did not pursue the LinkedIn. I asked how long he was in school for the certificate and he stated 6 months (curriculum is 4 months and is fairly t h i n.
  I asked what he had done and he had completed an Internship with a Texas company and helped a construction firm move to page one. When I asked how he started telling me about inserting keywords in the meta tag field in the CMS..... He did not know what a title tag was, knew nothing of content, H1, H2, Local Optimization and then wanted to tell me how when you put their Domain name in google they are number two on page One.  So you get it, I believe. I am just really frustrated with the whole "certification" etc. thing and believe we do need it. Market Motive is as close to good as I can see, but I would love to hear from you. (Note on MM- I do not like the if you pay monthly you get Provider or whatever but it you shell out $3500 you are a Master. Just doesn't feel right to me. And, I did speak with someone a while back with a masters from them and again, I scratched my head). Would just like to hear of your experience and if anyone has hired from these schools with success.

  Reporting & Analytics | | RobertFisher

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  Favicon.ico
  

  "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.0" 404 "GET /Scripts/AC_RunActiveContent.js HTTP/1.0" 404 I checked the server log and found the 2 files ( favicon.ico and AC_RunActiveContent.js) always return 404 error code, I do not have 2 fileson the server, how can I fix the problem.

  Technical SEO | | semer

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  Which one - Article Directories or Web 2.0 Sites ?
  

  I have lots of unique article and ready for spreading but want to know which one is more effecting in SERP. Currently i am adding articles to Ezine and Hubpages, please let me know your suggestion ?

  Link Building | | mamuti

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  Which is Best Practice for creating URLs for subdomain?
  

  My website is related to education. We have created sub domains for all major colleges, universities & Entrance exams like Gre, Toefl ETC. for eg:  amityuniversity.abc.com (Amity is Name of University ) Now if have to mention city name in URL as well (college is located in multiple locations) amityuniversity-delhi.abc.com
  amityuniversitydelhi.abc.com Now my Q is can we use hyphens in sub domains if we have to add city name or shall we create without using any  hyphens. In Directory  structure we can always separate words with hyphens, can we follow same practice in subdomain as well Which is a  best URL for subdomain amity-university-delhi.abc.com
  amityuniversity-delhi.abc.com
  or amityuniversitydelhi.abc.com

  On-Page Optimization | | rohanarora536

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  Too many links on page -- how to fix
  

  We are getting reports that there are too many links on most of the pages in one of the sites we manage. Not just a few too many...  275 (versus <100 that is the target). The entire site is built with a very heavy global navigation, which contains a lot of links -- so while the users don't see all of that, Google does. Short of re-architecting the site, can you suggest ways to provide site navigation that don't violate this rule?

  On-Page Optimization | | novellseo

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  Getting a Google Places listing verified on an automated phone system.
  

  I've been having issues getting my Google Places/+ listing verified as we have an automatic phone system. If you call our office you have to dial a number to reach an actual human being or before you can leave a message. Whenever the Google Bot calls we aren't able to receive our Google Place verification code. Currently.. there is no option to send a postcard.. which is weird because for awhile  that was the only option. Has anyone had any success on an automated phone system & how did you do it? Thanks!

  Image & Video Optimization | | DCochrane

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  Do Local Listings like Yellow Pages and yelp count for backlinks??
  

  I am wondering if adding your company with url on a local listing like yellowpages.com, yelp.com, merchantCircle.com, etc. actually counts as a "backlink"? I'm thinking it is not considered a link because I have never seen one listing in Open site explorer, either that, or it is considered a backlink, just not one important enough for open site explorer to show it. Does anyone know for sure??

  Link Building | | DTOSI

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  Product URL structure for a marketplace model
  

  Hello All. I run an online marketplace start-up that has around 10000 products listed from around 1000+ sellers. We are a similar model to etsy/ebay in the sense that we provide a platform but sellers to list products and sell them. I have a URL structure question. I have read http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-to-define-best-url-structure-for-product-pages which seems to show everyone suggests to use Products: products/category/product-name Categories: products/category as the structure for product pages. Because we are a marketplace (our category structure has multiple tiers sometimes up to 3) our sellers choose a category for products to go in. How we have handled this before is we have used: Products: products/last-tier-category-chosen/product-name (eg: /products/sweets-and-snacks/fluffy-marshmallows) Categories: products/category (eg: /products/sweets-and-snacks) However we have two issues with this: The categories can sometimes change, or users can change them which means the links completely change and undo any link building work built up. The urls can get a bit long and am worried that the most important data (the fluffy marshmallow that reflects in the page title and content) is left till too late in the URL. As a result we plan to change our URL structure (we are going through a rebuild anyhow so losing old links is not an issue here) so that the new structure was: Products: products/product-name(eg: /products/fluffy-marshmallows) Categories: products/category (eg: /products/sweets-and-snacks) My concern about doing this however, and question here, is whether this willnegatively impact the "structure" of pages when google crawls our marketplace.Because "fluffy marshmallows" will no longer technically fit into the url structure of "sweets and snacks". I dont know if this would have a negative impact or not. FYI etsy (one of the largest marketplace models in the world) us the latter approach and do not have categories in product urls, eg: listing/42003836/vintage-french-industrial-inspired-side Any ideas on this? Many thanks!

  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LiamPatterson

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  Temporarily suspend Googlebot without blocking users
  

  We'll soon be launching a redesign, on a new platform, migrating millions of pages to new URLs. How can I tell Google (and other crawlers) to temporarily (a day or two) ignore my site?  We're hoping to buy ourselves a small bit of time to verify redirects and live functionality before allowing Google to crawl and index the new architecture. GWT's recommendation is to 503 all pages - including robots.txt, but that also makes the site invisible to real site visitors, resulting in significant business loss.  Bad answer. I've heard some recommendations to disallow all user agents in robots.txt.   Any answer that puts the millions of pages we already have indexed at risk is also a bad answer. Thanks

  Technical SEO | | lzhao

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  Why is my direct traffic down DRASTICALLY?
  

  I have been seeing a trend for a while that is intesifying. My direct traffic numbers are down A LOT. We are not down 50% to LY (in actual number not just percentage of traffic) I am trying to understand what could be the causes of this issue. I was considering simply bigger meaner competition, but I actually perform decently on my returning customers.  Also my performance on my brand keyword is more inline with my current trend so I would except these KW to do equally as bad if the actual brand/store was the issue. The more surprising even, is the fact that I can trace back the start of the trend exactly to the day. Overnight on Sept 22 LY direct traffic went down 30% (to LY) when it was trending UP 20-25%(to LY) before. Now, we did do a redesign of the website on May 2011 (4 months before the drop), and did change host Oct 2011 (a couple weeks after the start of the trend). Do you have any clue as to why this could be happening? Did GA start tracking direct traffic differently?
  Any thoughts?

  Reporting & Analytics | | CassisGroup

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  Re-running Crawl Diagnostics
  

  I have made a bunch of changes thanks to the Crawl Diagnostics Tool but now need to re-run as I have lost where I started and what still needs to be done. How do I re-run the crawl diagnostic tool?

  Reporting & Analytics | | Professor

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  Can you have too many words on a page for SEO?
  

  One line of thinking is that you can not have too many words on a page because the more words you have the higher the chances that a long tail phrase will attract traffic. But can you go overboard with this? Is there a limit to the number of words on a page in terms of SEO?

  Content Development | | ProjectLabs

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  XML Sitemap Index Percentage (Large Sites)
  

  Hi all I'm wanting to find out from those who have experience dealing with large sites (10s/100s of millions of pages). What's a typical (or highest) percentage of indexed pages vs. submitted pages you've seen? This information can be found in webmaster tools where Google shows you the pages submitted & indexed for each of your sitemap. I'm trying to figure out whether, The average index % out there There is a ceiling (i.e. will never reach 100%) It's possible to improve the indexing percentage further Just to give you some background, sitemap index files (according to schema.org) have been implemented to improve crawl efficiency and I'm wanting to find out other ways to improve this further. I've been thinking about looking at the URL parameters to exclude as there are hundreds (e-commerce site) to help Google improve crawl efficiency and utilise the daily crawl quote more effectively to discover pages that have not been discovered yet. However, I'm not sure yet whether this is the best path to take or I'm just flogging a dead horse if there is such a ceiling or if I'm already at the average ballpark for large sites. Any suggestions/insights would be appreciated. Thanks.

  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danng

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  Meta Keywords: Should we use them or not?
  

  I am working through our site and see that meta keywords are being used heavily and unnecessarily. Each of our info pages will have 2 or 3 keyword phrases built into them. Should we just duplicate the keyword phrases into the meta keyword field, should put in additional keywords beyond or not use it at all? Thoughts and opinions appreciated

  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus

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  100 + links on a scrolling page
  

  Can you add more than 100 links on your webpage If you have a webpage that adds more content from a database as a visitor scrolls down the page. If you look at the page source the 100 + links do not show up, only the first 20 links. As you scroll down it adds more content and links to the bottom of the page so its a continuos flowing page if you keep scrolling down. Just wanted to know how the 100 links maximum fits into this scenario ?

  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jlane9

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