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So today Google have updated their Webmaster Guidelines and they have drawn particular attention to their update relating to Link Schemes. http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356 Unless you have had your eyes closed and your fingers in your ears since February then most people are aware of the types of link schemes that the updated is refering to but there is one area that isn't so black and white for me. "Here are a few common examples of unnatural links that violate our guidelines: Widely distributed links in the footers of various sites" We are a design agency and we design and build lots of websites for our clients. It is pretty standard practice for agencies to add a credit to the footer of websites and we pick up a lot of work from people that see a site that they like and click through the footer link to our site. Our footer credit is standard on all of the websites that we create:- Website by Teapot Creative Only the 'Teapot Creative' part of the credit is anchor text so we are only linking using our brand name with no intention of manipulating search results. Is this going to hurt us? or will the fact that we are only linking using our branded term and without any SEO intent keep us in the clear? Thanks.
Ade.

Hello Fellow Mozzers, I would really appreciate a little help as I have been banging my head against a wall for the last few hours trying to create a .htaccess RewriteRule. I have around 300 URLs that I need to 301 redirect following a site re-build, they are in groups of similar urls but infortunately not broken down in to folders. Here is an example of a few URLs:- https://www.domain.co.uk/chamaecyparis-lawsoniana-ellwoodii_2.htm
https://www.domain.co.uk/chamaecyparis-lawsoniana-ellwoodii-200225cm-6670.htm
https://www.domain.co.uk/chamaecyparis-lawsoniana-ellwoodii.htm
https://www.domain.co.uk/chamaecyparis-lawsoniana-ellwoods-gold.htm
https://www.domain.co.uk/chamaecyparis-lawsoniana-lemon-queen.htm
https://www.domain.co.uk/chamaecyparis-lawsoniana-yvonne-200cm-66.htm All of the above URLs need to redirect to a new URL:- http://www.domain.co.uk/chamaecyparis-lawsoniana Here is the RewriteRule that I currently have but it isn't working:- RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(.*)_chamaecyparis-lawsoniana$ https://www.domain.co.uk/chamaecyparis-lawsoniana [R=301,L] Anyone have any suggestions? Thanks
Ade.

I have just been building a website for a client with pages that contain a lot of text content. To make things easier for site visitors I have created a menu bar that sticks to the top of the page and the page will scroll to different areas of content (i/e different Div id anchors) Having done this I have just had the thought that this might inadvertently introduce duplicate content issue. Does anyone know if adding an #anchor to the end of a url will cause a duplicate content error in google? For example, would the following URLs be treated as different:- http://www.mysite.co.uk/services
http://www.mysite.co.uk/services#anchor1
http://www.mysite.co.uk/services#anchor2
http://www.mysite.co.uk/services#anchor3
http://www.mysite.co.uk/services#anchor4 Thanks.

Hi, We recently took on a new client that had been hit by the recent Google updates. After having a really good look at their analytics and their link profile it looked like they had been hit with over-optimisation of anchor text. Over the last month or so we have been working to remove a pile of links that contain their main keyword starting with the easiest to remove and the lowest quality. At the same time we have been building links using sematic keywords and junk anchor text in a bid to dilute the ration of main anchor text within their profile. We have a timetable of tasks drawn-up which we are working through, at the end of the timetable when all tasks were complete we planned to write a very nice reconsideration request to Mr Google. I have logged in to Google Webmaster Tools this morning and I have noticed that the 'Unnatural Links' notice has been removed from that domain. Does anyone know if this signifies anything? We haven't sent a reconsideration request to google yet. Thanks.
Ade.

Hey Fellow Mozzers, I have recently been approached by a new client that has been issued with an 'Unnatural Link' warning and lost almost all of their rankings. Open Site Explorer shows a ton of spammy links all using main keyword anchor text and there are way too many of them to even consider manually getting them removed. There are two glimmers of hope for the client; The first is that the spammy links are dropping off at a rate of about 25 per week; The second is that they own both the .com and the .co.uk domain for their business. I would really appreciate some advice on the best way to handle this, should I :- Wait it out for some of the spammy links to drop off whilst at the same time pushing social media and build some good clean links using the URL and brand as anchor text? Then submit a recosideration request? Switch the website over from the .com domain to the .co.uk domain and carry out a 301 redirect? Switch the website over from the .com to the .co.uk without doing a redirect and start again for the client with a clean slate? I would still register an address change via Webmaster Tools. Add a duplicate site on the .co.uk domain. Leave the .com site in place but rel="canonical" the entire domain over to the .co.uk Any advice would be very much apprecited. Thanks
Ade.

I wondered if anyone had any opinions as to whether LSI plays any part in the ranking of a direct match domain? For example :- would www.search-engine-optimisation.com be more likely to rank better for search terms such as 'SEO Services' or 'SEO Experts' than www.some-random-domain.com Does having 'Search Engine Optimisation' in the domain name mean that you would rank better for 'SEO'?

Hi, I know that this topic has received a lot of attention recently (Not all of it good) and I am not normally one to re-open a can of worms but the whole 'Camper Mens Shoes' fiasco has got me thinking. If you're not familiar with the story then you can get the highlights of it here - http://martinmacdonald.net/the-curios-case-of-camper-shoes/ My question is this - Say that you had a domain (Domain A) that was ranking well for a competitve keyword and that it had a good backlink profile. If you used rel="canonical" on every page of Domain A to point to a duplicate site on a different domain (Domain B) , would Domain B then rank well in place of Domain A? I know that this probably doesn't have much practical use but I am trying to get a better understanding of the effect of using rel="canonical" Would the result of doing the above mean that Domain B would rank well without having any links pointing directly to it?

Hi, I know that this is a 'How long is a piece of string?' type question but at what point should the ranking value of site A pass over to site B following a domain 301 redirect? I have shifted a domain over to a new URL, same hosting server, same IP address. I haven't made any URL changes or any content changes other than to change the site logo to match the new domain name. Domain B is basically an exact clone of domain A. I have redirected Domain A to domain B using the following line at the top of the .htaccess file:- Redirect 301 / http://www.newdomain.com/ I have submitted a sitemap for the new domain via google webmaster tools. It looks like the original domain as been completely indexed by google following the redirect as all rankings have been dropped from the results and there are no results for a site:olddomain.com search. Surely the rankings should have switched over at this point? Any help would be much appreciated.
Ade.

Hi, I am just wondering what the best practice is for marketing a business in two separate countries? I have a new client that wants me to create their website targeted at the UK market which for me is normal but they also want to target Australia (Probably couldn't get any further away) My initial thoughts are that the business would need two separate websites. The first one in the uk and the second website hosted on servers in Australia with different content. Is this correct? or does anyone have any advice which may simplify getting this thing off the ground. Thanks in advance.
Ade.

Hey, I have just started working on a site which is a video based city guide, with promotional videos for restaurants, bars, activities,etc. The first thing that I have noticed is that every video on the site has two possible urls:- http://www.domain.com/venue.php?url=rosemarino
http://www.domain.com/venue/rosemarino I know that I can write a .htaccess line to redirect one to the other:- redirect 301 /venue.php?url=rosemarino http://www.domain.com/venue/rosemarino but this would involve creating a .htaccess line for every video on the site and new videos that get added may get missed. Does anyone know a way of creating a rule to rewrite these urls? Any help would be most gratefully received. Thanks. Ade.

Hello fellow Mozzers. I am just having a brief look at a potential clients website before speaking to them tomorrow and whilst looking at the source I noticed that they don't appear to have a clear definition for their Doctype. All the have at the top of each page is I have to admit that Doctypes aren't my strong point but I know that they are normally slightly more descriptive than this. Can this have any effect on rankings? or is this just an issue for W3C validation? Thanks 🙂

Hi, One of my clients has a CMS website offering Health and Safety training. When the courses have been run they automatically drop off of the system which is great for the front-end of the site but this leaves pile 404 errors for the URLs. I am trying to put a .htaccess redirect in place that will redirect back to the main category for that course i/e : http://www.domain.co.uk/courses/highways/6-NRSWA/27-nrswa-operative-sept-11.html will redirect to http://www.domain.co.uk/courses/highways/6-NRSWA I have spent a looooong time hitting google for a solution but can't seem to come up with anything. If at all possible I would also like to be able to post a php variable via the redirect url so that I can display a message on the category page saying that the course is no longer available be please select a different course. i/e: http://www.domain.co.uk/courses/highways/6-NRSWA?course=not-available Any help on this would be most gratefully received.