Hi there,

The special characters on your website URL is changed because URLs are sent over the Internet using the ASCII character-set. That's why the & is converted to %26.

If you're trying to make your site rank, it is better to just simplify or shorten the URL. This is because search engines have problems indexing sites when the URLs contain special characters.

The special characters below are known to be "search-engine-spider-stoppers":

• ampersand (&)
• dollar sign ($)
• equals sign (=)
• percent sign (%)
• question mark (?)

Hope that helps!

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.

Well, because they are 'orphans', you probably can't find them using a spider tool!  I'd recommend the following process to find your orphan pages:

1.  get a list of all the pages created by your CMS

2.  get the list of all the pages found by Screaming Frog

3.  add the two url lists into Excel and find the URLs in your CMS that are not in the Screaming Frog list.

You could probably use an Excel trick like this one:

http://superuser.com/questions/289650/how-to-compare-two-columns-and-find-differences-in-excel

I've had the best luck with expired domains by 'rehabbing' them.  More or less building out a high quality site related to the topic of the domain.  This is on a whole a 'gray hat' area, so use any of this advice at your own risk:

1.  be careful about analyzing and verifying the backlinks of domains.  DMOZ seems to remove links as soon as a domain goes past the expiration date, so don't count on getting that link.  Other directories like Yahoo Dir don't seem to care.

2.  often times a link looks great because it has lots of backlinks.  But those backlinks could have been domains all owned by the same person, and all expiring at the same time.

3.  I've rebuilt some domains that had completely dropped (so completely past the auction stage), and found them to have traffic shortly thereafter.  I've also rebuilt names that I thought were good, and had a great backlink profile, and never had them rank for anything.  So on a whole it's hard to understand why some domains perform better than others.

ahh, I see.  I think there can be cases where it's valuable to pull in a feed.  Perhaps an index of relevant headlines around a topic, or maybe headlines from a users blog posts.  I wouldn't use it as the primary basis of an SEO strategy though.

Also, one tip if you're planning on doing something like this.  It's much better to cache the results of a feed on your server, rather than pulling in a live RSS feed every time a user loads a page.  Given the value that Google places on page speed loading, you would probably have a greater negative impact on page load speed by adding RSS feeds to your site, unless you have a cache system in place.

In general, I think it's good to have RSS feeds for a site.  It's a good way of reaching new viewers, who might only come across your content in a reader or a syndicated version.  Also, lots of social platforms have an option for including an RSS feed - so if you interact on the social platform - people you are interacting with would be able to see some of the most recent content from your site.

Google doesn't count RSS feeds as duplicate content, and is generally smart enough to figure out the original source of the content if it was republished in part somewhere.

You could try adding the pages you want to remove to your robots.txt file.  Since you're not linking to them, and it's very unlikely that Googlebot will index those pages naturally now, this might be a better way of telling it which pages to explicitly not index.

I'm not really sure how quickly this will trigger Google to remove those pages from the index - but they do reference robots.txt on the actual "Remove URLs" page of WMT ---> "Use **robots.txt **to specify how search engines should crawl your site, or request **removal **of URLs from Google's search results ..."

For that technique, you'd want to add something like this for all of the pages you want to remove:

Disallow: /oldpage1toremove.php

That should work.  If it doesn't, then I would probably just submit the requests through the "Remove URLs" tool.

Hi Mike!

Great question here and so for facebook fan page just click  www.facebook.com/insights/ and it will provide details on your facebook edge rank.

I also find SEO quake  really handy that most of the SEO diagnostic tools can be found, even Facebook likes and so I hope you also find tools that could suit your SEO needs the key here is not just being comfortable with your tools but getting the most accurate and efficient results as well.

Hope this helps!

Carla - the answer is .... it depends!

There are various different strategies for buying domains, and attempting to use them for SEO purposes.

The best case would be to negotiate privately with the owner of an existing website, and purchasing the domain and all of the contents of the domain from them.  Businesses merge all the time,  This is regular thing, and Google won't punish or look down on anyone for doing this.  It will be clear that the domain changed hands, probably by updates to the name servers, and whois information, but since the website never expired or dropped from the registry, Google would probably assume this was a merger.

Also, if you do this, one of the best strategies for dealing with the domain would be to redirect individual pages to the most analogous page on your site, to take greatest advantage of the merged site.

It's also possible to buy up expired or expiring domains.  There are different stages in the life cycle of domain name expiration where you can buy names.  If you buy them in what's called 'pre-release' status, the domains will be transferred to your own account before the name dropped out of the registry, so it will maintain it's original creation date.  You won't get the content with the domain, but this kind of domain purchase 'might' have some more life to it.

Finally, there are domains that have completely dropped out of the registry.  The links from these won't have much more life to them.

But in general, if you can buy the domain and website content directly from the original owner, it should show up as a business merger (or even as 'rebranding' in your case, since your website is new), and should be a relatively safe tactic.

Yup - removing those will save you the trouble of duplicate content - since Google by default is crawling those as different URLs.  By default, if you have comments enabled, there's a link at the bottom of posts with that parameter in the url (the same as the blog post url - see here ---> http://noahsdad.com/treadmill-training-progress/?replytocom=22729#respond ).

Noah is cute!

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.

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.

Hi - i don't use blogger, but generally my policy for image alt text is to make the alt text relevant to the article that I'm embedding the image into.  For instance, if I wrote an article about backpacks to consider buying for a trek to the Himalayas, I would probably mention the brand name of the backpack, and that it was for a Himalayas trek.

I don't recall seeing any kind of rule about how long to make the alt text, but based on my usage, my alt texts tend to be between 2 words to a sentence.

Another thing to consider about is that, you're trying to describe why you're using a certain image on the blog you've just posted.  So in that regard, you could use the same exact image on different posts on your site, but use completely different alt text.  Maybe the first post was about a trek to the Himalayas, while the second post was about how to choose a rugged backpack.  In each case, you might want to draw out different characteristics of the backpack, and thus write a different alt text to match the page.

Carla - the answer is .... it depends!

There are various different strategies for buying domains, and attempting to use them for SEO purposes.

The best case would be to negotiate privately with the owner of an existing website, and purchasing the domain and all of the contents of the domain from them.  Businesses merge all the time,  This is regular thing, and Google won't punish or look down on anyone for doing this.  It will be clear that the domain changed hands, probably by updates to the name servers, and whois information, but since the website never expired or dropped from the registry, Google would probably assume this was a merger.

Also, if you do this, one of the best strategies for dealing with the domain would be to redirect individual pages to the most analogous page on your site, to take greatest advantage of the merged site.

It's also possible to buy up expired or expiring domains.  There are different stages in the life cycle of domain name expiration where you can buy names.  If you buy them in what's called 'pre-release' status, the domains will be transferred to your own account before the name dropped out of the registry, so it will maintain it's original creation date.  You won't get the content with the domain, but this kind of domain purchase 'might' have some more life to it.

Finally, there are domains that have completely dropped out of the registry.  The links from these won't have much more life to them.

But in general, if you can buy the domain and website content directly from the original owner, it should show up as a business merger (or even as 'rebranding' in your case, since your website is new), and should be a relatively safe tactic.

ahh, I see.  I think there can be cases where it's valuable to pull in a feed.  Perhaps an index of relevant headlines around a topic, or maybe headlines from a users blog posts.  I wouldn't use it as the primary basis of an SEO strategy though.

Also, one tip if you're planning on doing something like this.  It's much better to cache the results of a feed on your server, rather than pulling in a live RSS feed every time a user loads a page.  Given the value that Google places on page speed loading, you would probably have a greater negative impact on page load speed by adding RSS feeds to your site, unless you have a cache system in place.

Well, because they are 'orphans', you probably can't find them using a spider tool!  I'd recommend the following process to find your orphan pages:

1.  get a list of all the pages created by your CMS

2.  get the list of all the pages found by Screaming Frog

3.  add the two url lists into Excel and find the URLs in your CMS that are not in the Screaming Frog list.

You could probably use an Excel trick like this one:

http://superuser.com/questions/289650/how-to-compare-two-columns-and-find-differences-in-excel

You could try adding the pages you want to remove to your robots.txt file.  Since you're not linking to them, and it's very unlikely that Googlebot will index those pages naturally now, this might be a better way of telling it which pages to explicitly not index.

I'm not really sure how quickly this will trigger Google to remove those pages from the index - but they do reference robots.txt on the actual "Remove URLs" page of WMT ---> "Use **robots.txt **to specify how search engines should crawl your site, or request **removal **of URLs from Google's search results ..."

For that technique, you'd want to add something like this for all of the pages you want to remove:

Disallow: /oldpage1toremove.php

That should work.  If it doesn't, then I would probably just submit the requests through the "Remove URLs" tool.

Hi there,

The special characters on your website URL is changed because URLs are sent over the Internet using the ASCII character-set. That's why the & is converted to %26.

If you're trying to make your site rank, it is better to just simplify or shorten the URL. This is because search engines have problems indexing sites when the URLs contain special characters.

The special characters below are known to be "search-engine-spider-stoppers":

• ampersand (&)
• dollar sign ($)
• equals sign (=)
• percent sign (%)
• question mark (?)

Hope that helps!