Yeh, at least 12 SEO years, if not 20, the way stuff changes.
I would imagine it hasn't changed a lot though, because SEOmoz still says that alt tags appear to carry a surprising amount of weight.
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Yeh, at least 12 SEO years, if not 20, the way stuff changes.
I would imagine it hasn't changed a lot though, because SEOmoz still says that alt tags appear to carry a surprising amount of weight.
I think this page answers your question way better than I could: http://www.seomoz.org/qa/view/24587/are-linked-images-with-an-alt-tag-equivilent-to-a-anchor-tag-with-anchor-text-in-terms-of-seo-value
I do not think you will experience any drop in rankings due to embedding a flash video on your webpage. I certainly have not seen any ranking drops on pages with embedded videos. Remember, page speed is a very small signal in Google's ranking algorithm and Google encourages the use of web videos (Video sitemaps, etc.).
I would start by identifying the specific pages you want link juice to go to most, and those that you don't need juice to go to. That should give you a starting place to see what links to reduce or cut.
100 isn't really a hard and fast recommendation any more. I do not think your page has too many links to be user-friendly. From an SEO standpoint, see these resources:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-many-links-per-page/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6g5hoBYlf0
I don't think you necessarily need to reduce your links on the page. However, I would definitely limit links to less important pages so that you maximize the link juice that flows to your important pages.
Just answered a nearly identical question the other day that you may find useful: http://www.seomoz.org/q/google-s-algorithm-on-file-size-use-iframe-or-not
Ah, yes, I believe that does refer to onpage factors aside from keyword usage and relevance factors. See http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#on-page-non-keyword-ranking-factors
"Page Level Keyword Agnostic Features" sounds like it refers to onpage factors that aren't related to keyword relevance/targeting. Where are you seeing these terms? Are they in an SEOmoz tool?
Depends on who you ask. I've never done it. I have had colleagues that did, but didn't report any benefit from it.
Well, 55% isn't that bad of a bad bounce rate, so don't get too discouraged. I think you can definitely make some improvements, though, as noted above. Also, I would encourage you to focus more on other metrics, such as conversion rate, conversion funnel abandonment rate, etc. Best of luck!
Yes, I've seen this more than once. There are two causes I'm aware of:
Google hasn't updated its index and is showing an old version of your page.
Google is getting the title from elsewhere, such as DMOZ (they can and will do this in some cases).
Just wanted to second basically everything Cyle said. Your design is great, but your sales copy and messaging are very generic and vague - you need copy that grabs visitors attention and tells them exactly how you're going to help them get what they want or need.
As Cyle said, conversion/bounce rate optimization is not a quick fix - it's working with a lot of different factors and testing changes to improve results.
Based on the below two facts, I would put the snippet length for your videos in your sitemap:
Google can crawl the videos and may know that the actual length doesn't match what you are saying it does.
Google has a published policy for newspapers that have paywalls and don't allow free full access at http://googlenewsblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/update-to-first-click-free.html Basically, "We will crawl, index and treat as "free" any preview pages - generally the headline and first few paragraphs of a story - that they make available to us. This means that our crawlers see the exact same content that will be shown for free to a user. Because the preview page is identical for both users and the crawlers, it's not cloaking."
Michael, answering your question fully will require analyzing your site, and probably your traffic and GWT data. If you can post your site url, I'll take a brief look at it. If you can put together a traffic data graph showing your drops in traffic and how they coincided with what changes you were making to your site, that would be helpful, too.
Unfortunately, there are no specifics any of us could give you in that regard. The results (number of visitors) you'll get from x number of links depends on many factors, including your keywords, onsite optimization, link quality, etc.
The best way you could estimate would be to take each keyword and determine:
How many exact match searches are their on Google for this keyword each month?
If we achieve a #X ranking, what CTR could we expect?
The answer to those two questions will tell you how many visitors you might expect from the keyword.
Then you'll need to analyze your competitors keywords and estimate how many and what type of links you'll need to achieve the ranking you want.
Together, that will give you a very rough estimate of how much traffic you might expect from your link building efforts.
When I looked at your site, changing the criteria changed the listings on the page, so each page was unique. However, I'm guessing 100% of the listings can be accessed by just clicking through the pages of results without changing the criteria?
If you decide the best approach is to block the different versions of search results pages, I would consider using the canonical meta tag to specify the canonical (main) version of the page.
Having duplicate content within your own site is not as big of a deal as duplicate content from another site.
Since you can't use meta tags, you'd have to use robots.txt to keep Google from indexing the PDFs. Nofollowing the links won't necessarily get or keep them out of the index.
However, if people are linking to your PDFs, blocking them with robots.txt means you'll lose all link juice pointed to them. Something to consider, at least.
There is some correlation, because a few of the same relevance factors affect both organic SEO and Adwords Quality Score. However, optimizing your Adwords Quality Score is a whole "different ball game" from onsite SEO - many additional and different factors to consider.
I would suggest starting with the Google Adwords help center: http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=10215
For additional help, Perry Marshall is a good source of Adwords expertise.
I wouldn't worry too much about it. I would expect Google to discount the duplicate links, but not penalize you. I have had my articles picked up and syndicated across spammy site networks and get a bunch of links before - I don't think it helped me much, but it didn't hurt either.
Just focus on getting more high quality links to improve their link profile and give them a greater variety.
Can you share the site you are getting that error for?
You might also want to email help@seomoz.org
Well, Google typically shows a mixture of web and Places results for local queries.
To get ranked among the web results for the second city, just adding a page to your website could work. To get ranked among the Google Places listings, you are going to need an office in the second location and create a Google Places listing for it.
Google seems to indicate that Pilotenausbildung is the correct version and the others are misspellings. I would optimize for Pilotenausbildung, but also make sure you sprinkle the other two versions in a few times onto your page.
Manuel,
I can think of a couple good options:
Use meta tags to set page to noindex,follow so search engines won't index the page, but they'll pass the link juice on to other pages on your site.
Let the page get indexed, and use the canonical meta tag to ensure that only one version is indexed.
"so have started using AJAX to stream in the content google was previously picking up for meta descriptions"
Do you mean you are using AJAX to display some of the content on your page so Google won't use the content as the snippet in the SERPs?
"since the day of that change our bounce rates have gone up significantly"
What are you using to measure bounce rates?
"Is it possible that doing this caused Google to treat our site differently"
By Google do you mean Google Analytics or Google organic search?
In summary you are saying that you made a change that influenced what text Google shows as SERP snippets (only for some pages) and that has caused your entire site's bounce rate to increase?
There are non-public databases that many online yellow page-type websites get their data from. I don't know where to find a list of them, though. Sorry I can't be more help. Maybe someone else will chime in with suggestions.
Are you sure this site is the source Google Places is using to add the location? Another possibility is that this site and Google Places are both getting their data from the same source...
The site doesn't appear to be fully functional, that's for sure. Hard to say - maybe it is an abandoned or unfinished website, or maybe they just have some broken features. It almost looks unfinished to me - like they started building it and didn't finish.
I can't give you a definitive answer, but I can offer some input regarding page speed.
As far as I can tell (and see) page speed is NOT a big factor in Google's algorithm, but a minor one. Google and Matt Cutts have both stressed that it is less important than other factors, and that "fewer than 1% of search queries will change as a result of incorporating site speed into our ranking".
I'm not saying you shouldn't pay attention to site speed, but don't stress about it, as it's not one of the biggest factors.
I would shy away from using an iframe for a couple reasons, including a) Google is starting to read flash and b) using a iframe could look a little suspicious.
Hope this helps!
Yes and Yes! You can certainly get two pages ranked for the same keyword.
Check out these resources:
http://andybeard.eu/1376/google-double-indented-listing.html
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/draft-whiteboard-friday-getting-indented-listings
You've got the right idea. Just be very certain that the url used in the canonical is the correct url for each page.
You will need to programmatically add the canonical tag to every page on your site (just make sure you do it correctly!) so that every page has a tag indicating which is the canonical version of that page (the version without the setCurrencyId variable in the url).
Here are more details on the canonical tag.
Another possible solution would be to use GWT to instruct Google to ignore that variable in the URL.
A lot of the power of video marketing lies in providing content that users are going to love, rate well, share, etc. I'm not saying you shouldn't promote an advertisement video, but you lose a lot of the power of video marketing.
Is there something you find yourself needing to do, but there is no tool to help you do it? A task you do all the time you're sure could be done easier with a nice app?
I'd love to hear about it! If we like your idea, we'll create it and make it 100% free (for linkbait, of course!).
According to this post, the data is updated once per month: http://www.seomoz.org/qa/view/37288/how-often-does-open-site-explorer-update-links
Hi Terrie,
Here are my thoughts:
It's basically an advertisement for your company, so I wouldn't expect people to share it or spread it virally. PPC may be your best option to promote it.
I agree with your suspicion that your video takes too long - way too long, in fact. I would suggest hiring someone who can help you create a higher quality video (i.e. footage and editing), also. I believe a more professional video would be much more effective marketing tool.
Congrats on jumping into video, and hope this is helpful!
(No, I am not posting this thread to help me create linkbait. grin)
Great seminar! Just got back from the drinks and networking at Muriel's (was that a cool location or what!?) and thought I'd start a discussion thread on here, since I don't see one yet.
What was the biggest thing you learned/got from this seminar?
For me, it was all the tips and tactics to create and promote linkbait.