Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi there,

On the campaign setup, you are given 3 options there:

subdomain, root domain and subfolder.

Try to change the setting to root domain so that only the mywebsite.com will be crawled and analyzed.

Hope that helps!

Hi Michelle!

Here are the steps on how tell Google when your site had moved:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=83106

Just follow the steps there and you'll be fine.

Cheers!

Hi there,

Have you tried to Ping your sitemap?

Google:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

Bing:

http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

It normally takes days (even weeks) several days, weeks, or months for the search engines to show any results. You can check from time to time though..

Hi Mememax,

I think your idea of providing Google Places support for local businesses with no website is a really good idea. But linking them to your site might be tricky. I havent seen any google places listings which are hosted on a only one, and non-related, website.

For one, if the listing is being searched and people will want to learn more, will you be able to provide those details in your site? Also, pointing them all to one domain is kind of risky.

Maybe you can offer google places and website support. Then include your link as the host on either the google places or site. That would mean more links for your site. Just a thought...

Hi there,

As far as I know, Google places (Google +) do not have the multiple users function. Google says only one gmail account can manage a claimed Google Places.

An alternative method is transfer your listing between Google places accounts:

http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=17104

Hope that helps...

Hi there,

Bing is all about good, original contents, authoritative inbound links and well structured webpages. If you want to be optimized in Bing, you may want to focus on those.

Here are some useful information on Bing optimization.

Search engine optimization on Bing

How to build quality contents

Hope that helps!

If its organized and really simple like the footer here in SEOMoz (check below), then keep it. If its just 5-6 footer links, I dont think it would take up a lot of link juice.

Plus footer links, (not considering SEO and Google) are indeed useful for site navigation purposes.

Hi Kristian,

Global footer links are not anymore recommended to have on websites as they used to.

Aside from what you mentioned about link juice being passed on away from the more important pages, footer links are, most of the time, devalued by search engines and they also get low CTR.

Still, a lot of sites are still using them as resource for link placement.

So I guess it still depends if you have a really nice organization and layout as a footer (like this: http://shopper.cnet.com) then keep it. If not, it might just be a waste of your time.

Cheers!

Hi there,

Having .com or not having .com on the title do not really make that much of a difference. If you think you have a unique title, then the best thing to do is to just optimize that title without the .com

For example. Amazon.com has the .com on their title, but Google, Yahoo, Ebay do not have. But they are all branded names just the same. So i think its a matter of branding your title or name.

Hope that helps!

Cheers!

Hi there,

It is possible that your site will be searchable for the keyword "breast cancer" and if someone searches for "Breast Cancer Foundation AND breast cancer".

But for that to happen, you need to optimize that keyword first. You need aggressive and targeted optimization since it is a very competitive keyword. And if you do a sample search on Google using that keyword, you'll see that there are a lot of other sites that are ranking for that.

You asked if you will get a backlink for both "Breast Cancer Foundation AND breast cancer". A backlink is when someone links to your site. For example, if the foundation added your link in their site, then you'll get a backlink for that. If you're not linked in any authority or good sites, you wont get any backlink.

Cheers!

What I'd recommend are:

1.  you could set your author and tag pages to be 'noindex,follow' - so search engines will still visit them, and follow the links through to the posts, but not actually index the potentially duplicate content on those pages

2.  make sure that your category pages are just showing excerpts of your posts, instead of the actual full post.

3.  determine your canonical url structure and stick with it

There's a really good blog post that covers this topic actually:

http://www.kidnapcustomers.com/how-to-make-a-website/wordpress-seo-duplicate-content-noindex-nofollow/

(Moz staff edit: see my answer below for resources that currently work -Dan)

Also - the Wordpress SEO plugin by Yoast is really good for helping to deal with these kinds of issues.

Hi there,

I asked this same question last week and got really good opinions from some of the members here.

Blog commenting can be risky if you'll just use it to optimize your keywords. However, if done right (written properly and with value), this is an effective way to build keywords, and credibility, online. If you're giving out comments that are useful, sort of like this Q and A here, then readers actually listen. Plus Google will also see how authoritative you are and will probably credit your site for it.

Here's a case study of one SEOMoz member, who have found out how blog commenting can still be effective Post Penguin. This might help you decide whether to still pursue that strategy.

Cheers!

BBB is one of those things that most business people have a strong opinion about (either for or against).  From a pure SEO point of view, I consider it a very strong link.  Here's why:

• From a pure SEO link perspective, the directory has a very high DA and MozRank (by far the highest MozRank of any of the directories recommended by SEOmoz)

• the directory is exclusive.  You have to be a business owner to get listed.  This prevents someone from listing 5 or 10 near-spammy sites, which crowd some other directories.

• they are very exclusive about linking out.  It's kind of annoying, but if you don't pay them again next year, you're link will be gone fast!  It ultimately ensures that they are not linking to businesses that are no longer operating.  This increases the overall trust of the directory.

• the average consumer feels warm and fuzzy seeing a BBB banner, and viewing the businesses profile on the BBB website.

I think I paid something like $300 or $400 for it, so maybe the price varies depending on your region and business type?  In any case, I'll continue to renew with the BBB every year.

Stay away from domain names containing brands.  After your hard work in building up the site, it can just easily be claimed by the brand holding company.  You'll need to turn over the domain to the brand holder without any compensation.  Even worse, you could be subject to a huge fine.

You can learn more about the process by which a brand holder can seize the name here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Domain-Name_Dispute-Resolution_Policy

Rand wrote a whole post a couple of years ago about when to go domain vs subdomain vs folder.  It covers things pretty well from a technical SEO point of view:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites

When I read your question, it really seems more of a business strategy question, rather than a technical SEO question.  The one consideration is that - would franchisee's take a stronger ownership in their business and their territory if their business was represented by an individual domain name, rather than a sub-folder on a main website.

If you could see people going out and networking, and putting a domain name on a business card, they could probably acquire a lot of local business links in this way (Chamber of Commerce, etc) that would in the long run boost the brand awareness of the main franchise.

Giving each franchisee their own domain name might also help with local rankings, if you can get a domain name that includes both the business function and location in the name (for example PittsburghRugCleaning.com) - since exact match domains still get a boost over other domains that don't.

On the other hand, putting everything as a subfolder or subdirectory would be much less work from a hosting side of things.

Article Submission was a good tactic years ago but I think that the recent Google updates have limited their effect on getting good rankings. That doesn't mean that it can't work. Some folks are still doing it and have observed that article submission works sometimes for a few months. This tactic sometimes work in the short-term but an algorithm change can wipe your rankings achieved through submitting an article to a bunch of article directories, article portals, article resource sites, etc... Then, there's the issue of duplicate content  and the submission sites can essentially cannibalize the traffic that you could have earned.

Google is getting smarter about content analysis so the classic or traditional forms of article submission are fast becoming old hat. We should now focus on real authentic alternatives that can get readership and trust over to our site.

In recent months, I have been focusing on guest blogging as a way to help build up my company's brand, earn recognition, and perhaps get some quality great links back to my sites. The time i used to spend on traditional forms of article submission are now being redirected into doing something authentic.

What an interesting choice of career path Aidan.

SEO is like a religion as what most people in the industry say, and so you have to provide a strategic plan of your own.

Providing them a summary of what you have accomplished, from the tools/methods you've used (analytics, keyword research tools) to results (SERP placements and conversions) could show how serious you are with your work.

You have to constantly update yourself through forum sites or SEO blogs with the latest news and issues, especially when another Panda or Penguin update strikes.

There are a number of blogs out there from SEO practitioners and experts that can guide you through just like here in SEOmoz.

So good luck with your new endeavor!

Hi Titan -

I'm not an SEOMoz employee - so I can only speculate here.

From the blog post on Raven Tools - they made the comment that the reason they decided to stop offering the rank tracker is because they failed an audit for the Google Adwords API.  Google gave them an ultimatum - either stop using scraped data, or lose access to the API.

From what I understand, SEOmoz was recently faced with the same problem, and they chose to drop the access to the Adwords API, instead of giving up access to the scraped data.  This is understandable, since SEOMoz's tools focus exclusively on SEO - while Raven offers a a wide range of services - some SEO, some PPC, some Social Media, etc.

So, I would be surprised if SEOMoz would stop offering the rank tracker.  Though I really have no inside knowledge about this at all.

I think the SEOMoz rank tracker is an internally developed tool.  Raven tools, and a lot of other SEO tools in the industry used a company called Authority Labs.

http://authoritylabs.com/

Rank tracking is the only thing that they do, and from what I've seen, their data is a bit better overall, if you're just looking for rank tracking.  They also do daily monitoring of keywords, which is a bit overkill from my perspective - but could be useful if you're in a very competitive niche.

It's an interesting idea.  There's a very popular blog in the SEO industry that is 'do follow'.  He is very interactive and the comments there are generally good.

Here are some considerations:

• outside of the SEO industry, how many people really understand the difference of 'do follow' vs 'no follow'.  If you're topic is something niche and very technical, the fact that it's 'do follow' may potentially have 0 impact on the type of person that you really want to have leave feedback.

• be prepared to be a firm moderator for the comments.  I think you'll often find yourself on the fence you'll see a comment with marginal value.  I would try to set the bar higher on which comments you approve.

• Facebook comments might be useful.  Since Facebook comments show up on a users wall, and can generally be viewed by friends who might be in the same industry, it might be a good way of generating more discussions.  We've used Facebook comments for a few sites, and have had very little problem at all with spam comments.  The downside with Facebook comments is that the content is stored on Facebook rather than your own blog (though there are some plugins that attempt to address this by download the comments to the blog).

• The SEOMoz profile system is kind of cool.  Once a user has generated enough 'points' - their profile link becomes followed.  I sometimes wish there was a similar system for blog comments.  Maybe there is?

There's actually a tool inside of Google Webmaster Tools that lets you specify how they should handle crawling your URL parameters.  It's under 'configuration -> url parameters'.  It should tell you there if they are having any trouble to crawl your site or not, based on the parameters in your URL.

Google has actually just released a video about this topic today - and it would probably be worth reviewing as well:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/08/configuring-url-parameters-in-webmaster.html