Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Danny Sullivan's epic rant about link building.

Priceless!

Hi Andrew!

Creating a scholarship is a great way of getting links from sites with a high domain authority. Whether Google gives more weight to .edu (or .gov) links is open to debate but generally speaking .edu sites tend to have a lot of authority due to the large amount of natural links that they attract (although this is not always the case).

One thing to be aware of, Google does not look at page authority (PA) or domain authority (DA) specifically as these are Moz metrics. However, they will give a good indication to the overall authority of a site as these metrics are closely related to PageRank, which is a Google metric.

It is not uncommon for internal pages on a site to have much lower authority metrics than the overall domain. This is not a bad thing and you shouldn't be worried about gaining links on pages that have a lower PA than the overall DA. It may be that these pages are newer and will therefore have less links than the home page resulting in a lower PA. So to answer your question of whether these links are worth it? I would say yes, for sure.

I hope that helps.

I believe this may answer your question:

What does google[referral] mean?

Adam.

Hi Roel,

Personally, I wouldn't bother with this kind of strategy. First you have to purchase the domain, then pay for hosting the domain and all for what? Some extra link juice?

People get too obsessed with gaining link juice to increase their own PR and they forget the main purpose to creating links. Not only will the links (if they are good quality) help you in the SERPs, they can also direct valuable traffic to your site that could potentially create sales or conversions. How valuable is a link from an unrelated typo to your business really worth?

There is also the possibility that the typo link won't last long. Either the webmaster realises the error and fixes or removes the link, or the webmaster of the non-typo site notices the typo and asks for it to be changed. You are then left with a useless domain.

My advice, just focus on building good quality links.

Adam.

I completely agree with Ben.

You can find a lot of useful info on the Warrior forums and there are some really good SEO's on there but you often have to wade through a lot of misleading information to get to the real pearls of wisdom. I probably wouldn't pay for acces to it either.

Hi Shawn,

1. Yes it is good practice to list all urls.

2. As long as these urls are linked to internally then they will be indexed.

3. You only need to submit the index file not every individual sitemap. It doesn't matter which order the individual sitemaps are listed.

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=71453&from=35655&rd=1

Hope this helps.

Generally it is considered best practice to separate words using a hyphen (-) rather than an underscore (_) as Google recognises hyphens as spaces. It also looks much neater using hyphens in urls as opposed to underscores which is why I advise using hyphens instead.

However, it doesn't really make a huge difference as Google can generally recognise the keywords without the use of hyphens. There are of course exceptions to this. The most famous example of this being www.expertsexchange.com. I'm sure you can see the issues with this domain.

Hope this helps.

Hi David,

At the end of the day a domain is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it. Sedo.com is a domain broker and it is in their best interest to get the most they can for a domain hence prices are slightly inflated on that site.

Just because your domain is only 4 letters doesn't mean it is worth big money. Several 4 letter domains sell on Go Daddy auctions for only a few hundred dollars. Although the domain is aged, which will help to increase its value, it doesn't really have much commercial value behind it and so is not really worth that much. Also, having checked opensiteexplorer the domain doesn't have a lot of authority or links pointing to it so to be fair it isn't worth the several thousands you are asking for it.

Adam.

The answers you've been given are completely right and offer the right advice for your future guest posting.

However, in terms of your current situation and the blog posts you have already acquired. There are a few things you can do to promote those in order to gain more shares/likes/+1s.

First, you should make use of the advertising options with both Twitter and Facebook. You will find that paying for a promoted post/tweet could gain more exposure and certainly more targeted exposure than just posting to your own followers.

Also, you will need to think about the time of day/week you are promoting the posts on social media. For example, on Twitter, your followers may well be more active on the weekend after dinner time. If you are promoting your posts on a Monday morning, it may be unlikely to reach a captive audience.

You could also use blog comments from related blog posts to direct readers to your article. Obviously I'm not talking about spamming blogs with links to the post, but more trying to encourage readers of more established blogs to perhaps check out your article that may be of interest.

Hope this helps,

Adam.

You should read this really interesting post about EMDs by Dr. Pete:

Are Exact-Match Domains (EMDs) in Decline?

In your case I would just stick to a .com domain with your business name rather than a keyword rich domain. Also if you are competing in the SEO industry and you do not already rank well for your key terms, then you will find it hard to rank regardless. SEO terms are highly competitive and there are several sites offering this service that will have invested heavily in their own SEO, making it very difficult to compete.

In terms of your other question, it is generally best practice to separate words in a URL with a hyphen (-) rather than underscore (_).

Hope this helps,

Adam.

There are certainly quite a few issues with the SEO of your site and many areas where you could look to improve.

Firstly, you mention that your site has been penalized. Why do you think your site has been penalized? I am not suggesting that your site has or has not been penalized but many people's first reaction is that their site has been penalized when in fact they have just suffered a drop in rankings. Having looked at your site, there are some issues that might have caused a penalty but I couldn't say for sure without more info.

So, have you been tracking your rankings within the PRO Dashboard? Have you noticed considerable drops in rankings for your main keywords? If so then this could indicate a penalty.

Have you setup Google Webmaster Tools? If so then have you received any messages from Google regarding a penalty or other issues? This will give you a clearer picture as to whether you have been penalized and why.

Having looked at your backlink profile, I can see several issues that could potentially have caused some problems. Firstly, your anchors have been massively over optimized with commercial terms. This was a massive factor in the recent Penguin update which Ryan has kindly given you a link to. You also seem to have a lot of spammy links from fairly obvious link farms which could also be causing you problems.

Finally, your on-page optimization could be significantly improved, I won't list all the issues here.

Anyway, I hope that's given you a few ideas to get started on.

Adam.

Hi Alan,

From the sounds of it, I believe you are missing the crucial element of adding the reference before the -site: operator.

For example I want to search for all references of [seomoz] minus results from the actual site (seomoz.org). Therefore, my search would look something like this:

seomoz -site:seomoz.org

Hope that helps.

I believe

allinurl:fit OR fitness OR crossfit OR health OR strength OR shape OR workout OR muscle OR sixpack OR bodybuilding

should work.

Hope that helps,

Adam.

Hi Nathan,

Personally I think it is good practice to use canonical tags for all pages (even those without duplicates).

Although you may not have duplicates of these pages on your site, other sites may try to scrape the content of your site including its pages. As you have the canonical tag on these pages, any content scraper will also add the canonical tag that points to the page on your site. Therefore it is a good idea to have the canonical tag as a preventative measure also.

Hope that helps,

Adam.

You absolutely should not make the links nofollow. Google does not mention making the links no follow and as far as I know, I don't think the guys at SEOmoz would recommend you to make the links nofollow. This is because you would miss out on link juice to these inner pages by making the links nofollow.

Here is a link which will provide you more information about using rel="next" rel="prev"

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/video-about-pagination-with-relnext-and.html

Hope this helps,

Adam.

Hi Pete,

Personally, I always try to encourage site owners to incorporate their blogs on their domains rather than create a new domain. This way your blog will benefit from the domain authority of your existing site and your existing site will benefit from the (hopefully) fresh, updated content of your blog.

Hope this helps.

Adam.

Many have their own views on whether exact match (or similarly broad match) domains are still worth getting.

Personally, I would always advise to go for brand domains and work on building your brand. This is because Google is attaching much less importance to exact match domains, although some may argue this point with evidence to the contrary. The recent Penguin update also had an effect by hitting sites with over-optimised link building practices due to over use of keyword anchors.

Ultimately if your company is called 'GreatestCompanyInTheWorld' then you should get www.greatestcompanyintheworld.com rather than www.broadmatchkeyword.com

Yes if I were in your position I would contact all the sites that you created reciprocal links with and have them remove your link from their sites. It is not enough to just remove their links from your site. Once you have done this you can then concentrate on gaining good quality links to replace the links you've had removed.

Finally, you can prepare you reconsideration request to Google. Check this link for tips from Google on how to prepare your request:

Tips on requesting reconsideration

Adam

You are right that PR is not 'the be all'. You shouldn't worry too much about it and should really be focussing on other more important factors.

Pagerank (or PR) is really just a mathematical formula, which you can read more about here. In order to get a larger ranking, you essentially need links from pages with higher PR. For example, if you wanted to obtain a PR of 2 you would need 3 links from a PR3 page. You can find various charts around the web that highlight PR requirements.

Having looked at your site in opensiteexplorer.org, it is clear why your PR is not higher. Although you have over 1,500 links, these links are from only 12 different c-classes. This essentially means that you only realistically have 12 different links due to the way Google treats links from the same c-class. Also, as Darin has rightly pointed out, the majority of these links are pretty poor quality with not much PR themselves.

If you are adamant about improving your PR, you will need to obtain links from sites/pages with a higher PR. However, I wouldn't recommend adopting a strategy based on improving pagerank. You would be much better off improving the quality of your site with content that people find useful enough to link to.

Hi Nikolaj,

Having crawled your site there are no major issues I can see.

If you're targeting for your local city which I assume is Odense, you need to include it more on your homepage. I could only find 3 instances of the word Odense on your homepage which is probably not enough.

I did a backlink check and there appears to be no links to your site. Of course there may be some links which aren't showing up in the tools I'm using but this is an indication that you have nowhere near enough links.

I'm not sure if you already have done it, but you could benefit from listing your business in Google places.

Hope this helps,

Adam.

Hi Mike,

I've just done a quick crawl of your site with Screaming Frog and I can already see quite a few issues. I won't bombard you with all of them but I'll list a few things you can start with:

1. Your URLs are a bit messy. There seems to be a pc subfolder somewhere in the site architecture. You may want to remove this folder so that you do not have /pc/ within your URLs.
2. All your pages seem to be contained within a /store/ sub folder. You may wish to change this so that only the store pages are contained within this folder and the rest of your pages are contained within the root. This would remove the unnecessary /store/ from all of the URLs.
3. Your home page goes through a messy chain of three 301 redirects to the eventual page http://www.wheelchairparts.com/store/pc/home.asp I would remove these redirects so that your home page reads http://www.wheelchairparts.com/ - much neater and user/search engine friendly
4. Home page title is too long (>66 characters) and is stuffed with keywords. In fact all the page titles appear stuffed to the brim with keywords. I would change these to be more appealing with your keyword included only once.
5. Some of your meta descriptions are too long (>156 characters). I would consider modifying these too be within the character limit.
6. Consider removing the Meta keywords tag completely. It is unnecessary and you seem to be spamming it anyway.
7. You have several duplicate pages. E.g. http://www.wheelchairparts.com/store/pc/viewCategories.asp and http://www.wheelchairparts.com/store/pc/viewcategories.asp. You will need to fix this issue.

Anyway I think that's probably enough to get going with for now. Hope that helps!

Adam.

To be fair, your programmer probably doesn't have a huge understanding about SEO and has probably just misunderstood something he has read somewhere.

Yes h1 tags can be over optimized and can have an effect but the simple answer is, don't over optimize the h1 tags. Just because some people abuse them isn't a good reason to exclude them. In fact, I would actively encourage you not to exclude them as they are an important part of your on-page SEO strategy.

You need to go to the 'Research Tools' tab, then click on 'Crawl Test'. Simply enter the url of your competitor then you should receive an email within a few days containing a CSV file which should contain all the info you need. You can run 2 crawls a day.

Hope this helps,

Adam.

Hi Al,

Using hidden text is considered black hat and has been identified as spam by most of the major search engines.

Best practice is to use the alt tag for images. There is no need to have a hidden h1 tag and this could even harm your site if you continue to use hidden text.

Hope that helps,

Adam.

I just setup custom google search engines in Chrome and adapt the search parameters to remove all personalization from searches.

Works for me!

It is never a good idea for anyone to copy another site's content. Regardless of the connection between companies, I would always advise on creating unique content for both sites. As you are the original creator of the content, you shouldn't face any penalty but the independent retailer could face duplicate content issues, if they copy the content from your site.

I would certainly advise against the independent retailer copying your content. However, it would probably be more beneficial and suitable to have the retailer link to your site instead.

Hope this helps.

According to sitemaps.org:

Q: <a id="faq_sitemap_location" name="faq_sitemap_location"></a>Where do I place my Sitemap?

It is strongly recommended that you place your Sitemap at the root directory of your HTML server; that is, place it at http://example.com/sitemap.xml.

Although it probably won't cause many SEO issues having your sitemap hosted elsewhere, I would always go with what is strongly recommended. Hope that helps,

Adam.

Streamline is right that you should keep the 301 redirects in place so that any links pointing to the old pages pass value through the redirect to the new pages.

Is there a time frame after which Google does not need a 301 any more? For example if A is 301 redirected to B, does Google know after a while not to serve A any more, and replaces any requests for A with B?

Simply put, no. If you remove the 301 redirect then any requests for page A will return page A and not B.

How about any links that go to A?

These links will now be passing all their value to page A.

Or: Is the only option to have all links that pointed to A point to B and then the 301 can be removed after some time?

If it is possible for you to change all links that point to A, to then point to B, then maybe. However, it is very unlikely you will be able to do this and it will be extremely time consuming.

In short, your best option is to leave the 301 redirects in place as best SEO practice.

This is not a major issue as long as you include the rel="next" and rel="prev" for the paginated content.

You can read more about this at Google here:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/video-about-pagination-with-relnext-and.html

Adam.

We would really need more information to answer this such as what position in Bing and Yahoo is the site? What keywords you are targeting? Has your site dropped in rankings or always positioned low?

There could be a number of reasons why you are not ranking well. Without more info it would be hard to give a better answer.

These types of critical acclaim or testimonials are not really considered duplicate content. It is no different from quoting from a book. Google is clever enough to know that this is not duplicate content and if you are still considered about possible duplicate content issues then you could slightly rewrite or shorten testimonials to make them more unique e.g.

"Great wine.......thumbs up from me!"

original testimonial would read "Great wine, really fruity flavour and subtle notes, thumbs up from me!"

It is possible to evaluate a site and suggest areas that may have caused it suffer with the penguin update. However you should be very careful about which firm you choose as many not so reputable sites are cropping up offering such services. If you want to use an seo firm then I suggest you take a look at the SEOmoz recommended companies.

To be honest you probably don't need someone to tell you what's wrong, with a bit of reading and self analysis you will be able to find what has happened and more than likely it will be down to your backlinks.. Your money may be better spent hiring s reputable SEO to help fix the problems rather than tell you what the problems are.

Adam.

Of course I should also add, if you really want G Site Crawler, you could run a virtual windows on your Mac and carry on using it that way. I run windows on my mac using VMware Fusion:

VMware Fusion

As I said below, you do not need unique titles for these pages. When using pagination on a blog i.e. blog?page=4 and blog?page=5 you cannot avoid having the same page titles. Yes you should have unique page titles wherever possible but this is a case where it is not.

Again, you should make sure to use rel="next" and rel="prev" which you can find out more information about in the link I provided.

There is no penalty for having a large number of internal links and yes every single link on the page (not just the ones within the article) are being counted.

The general guideline is to have no more than 100 internal links per page. This is because the more links you have on a page, the less link juice will pass through these links. It is important to note that the 100 links is only a rough guideline and for some sites it may not be possible to have less than this. Of course, if you can reduce the number of links on the page then it would be good but to reiterate, you will not get a penalty for this.

Adam.

I'm massively in favour of keeping these domains rather than using a 301 redirect. Although you can gain some short term benefits from the link juice passed on with a 301 redirect, you are much better off in the long term by keeping the domain and creating links to your site from the domain. Here's why:

1. If you 301 redirect the domain, no new content will be created on that domain and in all likelihood, no new links will be created for that domain and you may even lose links. Whereas if you keep the domain, you can continue to build new content that attract more links.

2. If the domain is in the same industry and has good rankings in search engines then why not capitalise on that opportunity? Now you can have two sites that rank well generating more sales/conversions for your single business.

That's my thoughts,

Adam.

Hi Ilya,

Are you sure you haven't disabled your public profile by accident? I ask because even when I search linkedin ilya elbert, I don't see your linkedin profile. - Ignore that, just checked again without personalized search and I can see your profile on the bottom of the page.

I can't say that I've ever heard of anyone having their linkedin profile penalized in google search before. Sounds a bit strange to me.

Adam.

Hi Cesar,

There is no need to be so worried. You certainly haven't shot yourself in the foot here.

I don't think you quite understand what the 'Content Keywords' section of GWT actually means. It is not a reflection of your rankings for each of these keywords. It is a representation of the most common keywords found across your pages that the Google crawler has found. The significance ranking is just an indication of how often the Google crawler has found each keyword. If your content changes over time then of course the list will also reflect this as the crawler visits your pages.

If you feel there are keywords missing then this could be because Google could not crawl all of your pages and therefore you should check the crawl errors section of your GWT. IT could also be because Google has excluded words that it determines to be boilerplate text or common words.

You can find out more information in the Webmaster Tools help center:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35255

Hope this helps,

Adam.

Hi Anthony,

You could try some of the online freelancing sites such as oDesk or Elance. I know you can find experienced bloggers with SEO backgrounds on those sites.

Hope that helps,

Adam.

Hi Mat,

I monitor most of the SEO blogs via a feed reader and I think perhaps this article posted on the 25th October on Search Engine Watch could be the article you're looking for:

If You're Only Measuring Links, You're Wasting Time by Adria Saracino

Adria is the Head of Outreach at Distilled so could be why you thought it was written on their blog?

Hope that helps,

Adam.

Hi Avi,

I have also used youtube videos on sites without using the scheme.org video markup and they have been showing up in serps as well. There's an interesting article, where this was tested by an SEO who also concluded that you don't need the scheme.org markup for Youtube videos:

http://www.reelseo.com/embedded-youtube-indexed-google/

Considering Google owns Youtube, I guess it's no surprise!

Adam.

Hi Jasper,

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. It really depends on what your intent with the pages is and which page is ranking higher.

If the most relevant page and the page you want to rank higher is indeed ranking higher then you don't really have a problem. Look at it from this point of view, if you can dominate a whole page of google with your pages (very, very unlikely to happen) it increases the chances of users visiting your site.

It is only really an issue if you are deliberately targeting the same keyword for different pages and want to rank for the same keyword on separate pages. If you are targeting different keywords for each page and they are ranking well for the keywords you are targeting, then it isn't a huge problem that they happen to rank for the same keyword.

Of course, if this is the only keyword that the two pages rank for or the page that is ranking higher is not the page you want to rank higher, then you do have a problem concerning keyword cannibalisation. In this case you will need to analyse both pages to see what is causing the problem. For solutions to the problem you should read Rand's article.

Hope that helps,

Adam.

As far as I can tell, there does seem to be a few issues.

First, I'm not quite sure why you are specifying canonical urls. They are used to specify a preferred version of a set of similar pages. The pages you have put canonical links on do not have similar pages.

Second, your implementation of the canonical link is incorrect. You should put the link in the section of the non-canonical versions of the page. However, seeing as you do not seem to have similar pages, you should not be including the canonical link anyway.

Hope this helps.

Hi David,

Yes, there has been a whiteboard Friday for the last couple of weeks. Just check under the SEO Blog.

July 13th - 8 Rules for Exceptional Slide Presentations

July 6th - Leveraging the Power of Slide Decks to Boost your SEO, Social + Content Marketing

June 29th - Getting Started with Guest Posting

Hope that helps,

Adam.

Google autocomplete and the 'searches related to' field can be manipulated, however it is against Google's TOS to do so. Rishi Lakhani wrote a very interesting article on the subject over a year ago now. In it he shows how he managed to manipulate these results.

Hope that helps.

I have had a question from a retailer asking if they can take all our content i.e. blog articles, product pages etc, what is best practice here in getting SEO value out of this?

Well firstly, there is no SEO benefit to either party here unless the retailer provides a link to your site. This can actually cause damage to the retailer's site with regards to duplicate content issues. Forget about canonical tags here, they are not designed to avoid duplicate content issues when copying someone else's content.

My advice would be to advise the retailer to create their own unique content rather than copying your content. They can provide links to product pages on your site but they should try to create unique descriptions for the products rather than copying your content.

With regard to other retailers copying your content, they do so at their own risk as Google could decide to penalise these sites (assuming they haven't already done so). It is best practice to create unique content rather than copying other people's content.

Hope this helps.

Hi Tim,

I generally prefer to go with the subfolder option (mysite.com/blog) rather than the subdomain (blog.mysite.com). The reason I prefer this option is because having the blog in a subfolder means that it will benefit from the value of the root domain. In other words, links that are obtained by the root domain will pass that value to the subfolders. However, a subdomain is treated as a separate site and therefore not much value is passed via the root.

Rand provides an excellent answer in a previous Q&A of a similar topic:

subdomains vs. subfolders

Hope that helps,

Adam.

Am I missing something here because it looks like they already are using Wordpress when I look at the html. Also the code looks a mess because they have minified it, nothing wrong with doing that. It helps keep the file size down which Google likes!

You can implement a meta refresh as follows:

This will delay the redirect to domainB.com by 10 seconds. It will pass some link juice but not much. It is not best practice to do this because, as you rightly state, Google does not like this type of redirect (due to spam abuse) and the loss of link juice.

I would suggest you just 301 redirect to new site and run a 'welcome to our new site' page on the new domain for the first few weeks while people adjust. You'd be surprised how quickly people adjust to new sites.

Adam.

I'm sure you have many more links that OSE doesn't show. However, this is beside the point. Like I said previously, PR is a mathematical formula that depends on the PR of your linking pages. You may have many thousands of links but if they are all from pages with a PR of 0 or -1, then your PR will not improve. It's not just about the volume of links but the PR of those linking pages and the number of outbound links on those pages.

It is not unusual to see a drop in PR. Google has evolved over the years and the way it treats links has also evolved. It is likely that a number of the links you had when your site had a PR of 1 were treated differently by Google after an algo update and were therefore devalued.

Ultimately, you shouldn't be chasing PR and definitely you shouldn't be building links with the aim of increasing your PR. Focus instead on getting your site to rank well for the key terms that drive traffic to your site.