Sorry to revive an old thread, but I was considering starting on the Google Adwords course.

Are there better options than the Google one?

Ah brilliant, that's good to know. Thanks Greg.

If I run an OSE report and check the 'top links' tab, I find that 95% of the links are internal pages on the same root domain.

Can I deduce from this that my link profile sucks, and is in need of serious improvement? Thanks.

Ben - The 35% was taken from a small sample, I'm guessing that the actual figure will be much lower. However, it's still worrying.

I'm not too sure when the domains expired, or whether there is a common cause, I'll have to do some more digging on that front. I suppose the more pressing issue is that we do remove them if they are having a negative impact on our rankings.

Are you saying the linking domains will simply fall off once opensite discover they no longer exist?

Hello to all,

I have a number of Linking Domains on our Open Site Explorer Report that no longer exist.

I've run URL checks on just a sample of the list, and found that approx. 35% of that sample are from now dead Linking Domains.

Can someone help? If these Linking Domains are defunct, how can I remove these? Does Google reflect negatively on these dead Linking Domains in our SERPs?

Has anyone experienced this before? What action did you take?

Thank you for that Adam

I read an article this morning regarding keywords on a web page. In the article it said that Google would hit anyone putting keywords on a web page but then hiding them from anyone visiting the website. This makes sense.

What it did make me think about though is the technique I use when building a website. If, for example, I'm building a website for "Acme Cheap Products". In the header of the page, I will have a H1 tag as well as an image tag for the company's logo.

As the logo has the company name on it, I would usually put the company name in a H1 tag as well, and then hide the H1 tag, so I wouldn't have a logo and then a title next to it saying the same thing as the logo.

The question is though, would this sort of technique trigger Google in to hitting my site?

Hi we have had the following statement from a member of our Japan office with regards google displaying search results, would anyone be able to give us a definitive answer on this.

Google remembers previous non-mobile related searches

For example, we already know that we come up on the first page if you select “kaigai keitai” (mobile phone for use abroad) and “UK” where as we don’t for searches where you replace the UK with the US or other countries.

This means that if a customer, for example, does a search just on the UK e.g. using words like UK travel, London, millennium dome, etc. and then does a separate search just using the words “kaigai keitai” that google could show us as a link on the first page.  However, if an individual did a search on Paris, France, Eiffel Tower, and then did a search for “kaigai keitai”, our link might not appear on the page.

I don’t know if we have tested this already, but Google seems to have a very long “memory” and I could see this kind of aspect of Google resulting in us missing significant business from people going to the US, France, Italy, etc.

Any thoughts?

We host a few Japanese sites and Japanese fonts tend to look a bit scruffy the larger they are. I was wondering if image replacement for H1 is risky or not?

eg in short...

spiders see:

Some header text optimized for seo

then in the css

h1 {
text-indent: -9999px;
}

h1.header_1{

background:url(/images/bg_h1.jpg) no-repeat 0 0;

}

We are considering this technique, I thought I should get some advise before potentially jeopardising anything, especially as we are dealing with one of the most important on page elements. In my opinion any attempt to hide text could be seen as keyword stuffing, is it a case that in moderation it is acceptable?

Cheers

We are currently running a A/B test on a landing page using only adwords to split the traffic.

Looking at the figures in adwords has given us a higher number of conversions than the analytics is giving us in transactions.  The conversion rate is also different.

The only visitors this page is getting is from Adwords.

Can someone please help us understand why this is?

Cheers

Al

+1 For Majestic SEO also. Monitoring links with ALM on a daily basis is good for spotting new link oppurtunities and getting a feel for what your competition is doing though. Perhaps that may be considered a little obsessive however

I use Advanced Link Manager for this job. Its pricey, and depending on the size of your project (number of indexed urls) it can take several hours to perform an update. If you pay for some dedicated proxies however you can ramp the update speed up a lot.

This aside, its very detailed and will enable you to keep track on a daily basis. Its also good for keeping track of your competitors links and to identify new link opportunities.

Cool, I have the same problem, looks like you guys are on it as per usual

Since discovered 'Advanced Link Manager' and its proving to be very handy.

Nice bit of Soundgarden on the player there...

If you use firefox, try the 'Google Global' extension.

http://www.redflymarketing.com/internet-marketing-tools/google-global/

We use Open Site Explorer, also recently we have been using Hubspot which has a freshness ranking on the links, but we have found this to be very unreliable just from its analysis of our links.

We are looking into using Majestic SEO and just wondered if anyone had any recommendations of tools that provided this information.

Thanks

Al

Hi everyone,

Thanks in advance for your help, I am doing some competitor analysis and noticed that one of our competitors had a massive spike in the number of baclkinks it received in the past month.

Is there a tool or a method I can use to determine what links they have picked up in the last few weeks, by filtering by age of link?

Many thanks

Al

Thank you for you response, I have heard mixed responses, but generally other people agree with you. I will work on improving the on site country specific optimization to improve conversions!

We have a main sales page and then we have  a country specific sales page for about 250 countries. The country specific pages are identical to the main sales page, with the small addition of a country flag and the country name in the h1. I have added a rel canonical tag to all country pages to send the link juice and authority to the main page, because they would be all competing for rankings.

I was wondering if having the 250+ indexed pages of duplicate content will effect the ranking of the main page even though they have rel canonical tag.

We get some traffic to country pages, but not as much as the main page, but im worried that if we remove those pages and redirect all to main page that we will loose 250 plus indexed pages where we can get traffic through for odd country specific terms. eg searching for uk mobile phone brings up the country specific page instead of main sales page even though the uk sales pages is not optimized for uk terms other than having a flag and the country name in the h1.

Any advice?