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I wouldn't think you need to worry. Matt Cutts covered this a little while ago (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1lVPrYoBkA) - basically he says that with each redirect, the url looses a little link juice, and when it runs out, google will stop following the rabbit hole; but for just a few chained 301's there's no problem.
I don't have any insight into this, but am interested what people in the know think...
Google not indexing Yahoo Directory listings makes 100% sense to me - they don't like taking signals from paid links, Yahoo directory is one of the biggest paid-only link directories. It wouldn't take many manual reviews for Google to entirely devalue every Yahoo Directory listing.
Also, I don't think you should be worrying about your PR all that much - part of the reason it's updated so infrequently is because the big G doesn't want webmasters to obsess over their pageranks... SERP rankings however, are updated as often as they need to be, and so are a far better measure of your SEO success.
We focus our article link building on non-networked sites / blogs. The reason being that there are loads of very-spammy articles already on most sites that are part of such networks, and they tend to need a monthly fee.
Contacting bloggers / journos directly takes a lot longer than a submission to spinning/posting service, but tends to be a) free, b) high(er) quality, and c) the articles stay online as long as the site does. We tend to find sites/pitch articles inhouse, then outsource the actual writing to freelancers for £10-15 per hit.
Some great resources for finding blogs/journos that are open to guest bloggers:
Watch #journorequest
Use the twitter tool to find blogs using a keyword who have recently posted about other guestposts they've had - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AvrsfAmTCtRudFRnMFE5RTlGZ0RzNkdzT3NreEFwd2c
I've got a question about localising the website of a nationwide company.
We're a small dance school with nationwide (40 cities) coverage for around 40 products. Currently, we have one page for each product (style of dance), and one page for each city; the product pages cover keywords like 'cheerleading dance class' while the city pages target the 'london dance classes'-type keywords.
To make 'localised product pages', I feel like we should make a page for every city/product combo 'London cheerleading classes' - but that seems like a nightmare for both writing sexy & original content, and link building/social stats. The other thing I can think of (which I refuse to do because it would look stupid & flag the page as keyword stuffed) is filling the page with the keyword phrases which are appropriate for every city.
Is there another way to let google know 'this page is appropriate for these cities...'? We do currently list the cities a product is available in, but it doesn't seem to help local rankings very much. Would this just be a link building job, using hyper-targeted anchor texts (inc. city names) for each product? How do the pro's tackle this problem?
I've got a question about how search engines declare that they're mobile browsers...
Our website is based on wordpress, and uses the caching plugin W3TC to send a different site template to mobile useragents - i believe from the HTTP useragent string; (the same content is served on every page whether it's a desktop or mobile - just different themes).
After having this mobile site online for a few months, we're a little confused as to why google still shows the instant preview of the desktop version for mobile users, and it doesn't show the little mobile phone icon in our SERPs for mobile devices (it's as if it doesn't realise the mobile site exists).
I was reading today that the "old" method of serving different content based on the browser is to use the HTTP useragent string; and there's a "new" object checking method which is more robust (although I can't find a lot of information about it).
Can anyone explain the "new" method? Would this be the reason that google is so far ignorant of our mobile site?
My company is looking at outsourcing part of our SEO - some supplementary link building to boost some deep links. What does the SEOmoz community think of outsourcing link building? Every company that I've researched seems to employ very low quality techniques, which ends up with a bunch of spammy/sidebar/links page/comment links.
Are there companies that specialise in high quality link building? We would definitely be looking for people that would do things like write engaging guest posts, etc, rather than spamming our brand across the internet. Are there any lessons that you've learned that you can share with me?
Thanks guys...
The 'names' of the pages weren't really my concern, but the fact that the name is used as the anchor text in every navigation menu - meaning that a page might have 100 internal links, and 90 of them contain the anchor text "x Hen Party" -- you don't think this is a big deal?
For the past few months I've been working on a new site launch, but have been left with a couple of annoyances from my predecessor.. I've got a couple of questions about best practise (and if it's worth changing now).
For reference, a good example page is http://polestars.net/hen-party/life-drawing-hen-party/
The (external) web designer has insisted that wrapping the logo in an H1 tag (with the same branded H1 text on every page), and using an H2 for the actual title of the page is fine. I really don't believe him, but at the same time, feel like maybe google is smart enough to discern the theme of a page in this structure. Is it worth having this changed so that the actual title is the first H1?
Page naming convention
Another annoyance that I've been left with is the fact that every product page is named the same "burlesque hen party", "life drawing hen party", "whatever hen party"... It looks a little weird, but my real concern is that as we now have 60 "hen party" links in the navigation menu of a bunch of our pages, this may be seen as keyword stuffing - is this a real concern, or am I overthinking it?
I don't have any insight into this, but am interested what people in the know think...
Google not indexing Yahoo Directory listings makes 100% sense to me - they don't like taking signals from paid links, Yahoo directory is one of the biggest paid-only link directories. It wouldn't take many manual reviews for Google to entirely devalue every Yahoo Directory listing.
Also, I don't think you should be worrying about your PR all that much - part of the reason it's updated so infrequently is because the big G doesn't want webmasters to obsess over their pageranks... SERP rankings however, are updated as often as they need to be, and so are a far better measure of your SEO success.
We focus our article link building on non-networked sites / blogs. The reason being that there are loads of very-spammy articles already on most sites that are part of such networks, and they tend to need a monthly fee.
Contacting bloggers / journos directly takes a lot longer than a submission to spinning/posting service, but tends to be a) free, b) high(er) quality, and c) the articles stay online as long as the site does. We tend to find sites/pitch articles inhouse, then outsource the actual writing to freelancers for £10-15 per hit.
Some great resources for finding blogs/journos that are open to guest bloggers:
Watch #journorequest
Use the twitter tool to find blogs using a keyword who have recently posted about other guestposts they've had - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AvrsfAmTCtRudFRnMFE5RTlGZ0RzNkdzT3NreEFwd2c