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They are nofollow, but can still be very valuable links, especially if the video goes viral and people want to click to your site. Any non-spammed or non-dodgy-paid link helps to broaden your link profile.
Here are a couple of useful links from Distilled:
http://www.distilled.net/blog/social-media/youtube/youtube-seo/
http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/getting-links-and-seo-value-from-your-youtube-videos/
The SEOmoz recommended company list is a good starting point. Have you read Google's advice on hiring an SEO?
I guess you may have already read these:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-recruit-an-seo-the-seo-industry-leaders-reveal-their-secrets-14183 http://searchengineland.com/attributes-to-look-for-when-hiring-an-in-house-seo-41852 (may be a bit outdated by now)
Make sure it's someone who keeps up to date with this ever changing industry and ask them how they keep up-to-date.
And perhaps the best, most established SEO will pay multiple times over for your unborn children
Google say "server location is irrelevant" if you have the top level domain: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html - this link is newer than the Matt Cutts video. You can also geotarget to Brazil in Google Webmaster Tools.
Hi Michael - that's right - just create each as a new site. As well as the geotargeting, it'll help if you can get a few links from each country to the relevant version of the site, as well as replacing the Dutch address in the footer with a UK and German address, if you have them.
As for .com or .com/nl, I prefer .com because it looks cleaner. Which would be most user-friendly? Personally I think if someone typed in www.headoverheels-fashion.com and it forwarded to www.headoverheels-fashion.com/nl, and they weren't from the Netherlands, they might be a bit confused. I'm not basing that on any science, it's just an inkling. They may think they can get to an English version of the site by removing the /nl?
Have you removed the malicious code? If so, is THFCTalk registered with Google Webmaster Tools? If the code has been removed you can file a reconsideration request in there. If you haven't, you can also see which pages are affected. All websites should be registered with Webmaster Tools (and the Bing equivalent)! You can set up alerts so Google e-mail you about any major problems they find.
Here are some links that should help you, whatever stage you're at:
http://25yearsofprogramming.com/blog/20071223.htm
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/04/my-sites-been-hacked-now-what.html
P.S. I hope Harry stays and Spurs win the title (from a Stoke fan)!
In normal paginated results it makes sense to have the page number first for pages 2+ as page one has the highest SEO value - you want to show Google that that is the most important page for the topic term. Adding the page number at the start of the title tag for pages 2+ gives an indication to the search engines that they're not quite as important as the first page. I imagine this will more often than not be the case for forum postings too, though there's always a chance the best content will be posted pages along the thread.
I'd forward http://www.headoverheels-fashion.com/nl/ to http://www.headoverheels-fashion.com - your title and meta description are in Dutch so it's obvious it's a Dutch website in the search results.
I prefer using subfolders rather than separate sites as its easier to manage and the link equity all goes to the same domain, instead of being spread around. It's still possible to geotarget Google Webmaster Tools to the subfolders. I think Google's advice is pretty good on this: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en
As well as any duplicate index.aspx pages, you should make sure that www.domain.co.uk and www.domain.co.uk/ are not loading as seperate URLs and that one 301 redirects to the other. The same with or without the www.
I don't think it matters which you choose too much, as long as you're consistent across the whole website. I'd go without a stroke; people are more likely to link to you without typing the stroke at the end, so I think you'll get slightly more link juice to the chosen URL if you don't include it (saving a 301 redirect from the '/' version). As a personal preference, I also think a URL looks neater without the '/'.
Here's Google's advice: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.html
Have a look at this and the link in the description:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mY9h3G8Lv4k
I haven't had any problems when following that advice.
I was going to suggest Influence, and Don't Make Me Think is a good one, so that makes me think I should read the rest of your suggestions. I've just been dipping into Out of the Ordinary by Jon Ronson and it seems quite interesting. I didn't even buy it for myself but it looks like I might end up reading it!
Provide content that people want to read, that is better than anything above your website in the SERPs. Or fill a valuable niche that hasn't been taken yet. Are you guest blogging for the sake of guest blogging and building links? If so, they're not good reasons - take a look at this: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-real-benefits-of-guest-blogging
I'm a bit worried about your comment "what would I do next after the guest blogging" as none of the tactics are things you should do in patches and then move on to something else - that won't look natural to the search engines. You need to commit to a mix of tactics over time.
This mammoth post is very useful too: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-noob-guide-to-online-marketing-with-giant-infographic-11928
Rand does a great job with this issue here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday
This is worth a read too: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html
Every situation is different but it can be more beneficial to host everything on a .com with subfolders for each language - e.g. www.somewebsite.com/es, www.somewebsite.com/fr etc. Each subfolder URL can be geotargeted in Google Webmaster Tools. This would be much easier than maintaining 5 separate websites.
I don't agree with Zsolt - if you have a .fr you wouldn't need to host in France as the .fr covers it, the same with .de, .it or any extension. Some people prefer to click on a website with their native domain extension in the URL, probably more so with e-commerce sites (something to do with trust, easy shipping and so on) - so that's something to take into consideration. I can't remember if Rand mentions this in the above video.
Interesting, but like you, I hope they don't make something like this permanent. Increasingly we're being treated like we're stupid and can't do anything for ourselves.
Here in the UK there's no sign of it. I've tried UK specific county names as well as the Georgia then guitars combo originally mentioned, in Chrome and Firefox.
I get all sorts of strange adverts that don't fit my interests or searches at all - for the last two or three weeks I've been getting a Muslim dating website in Ad placements on my work and home PC - both have different Google accounts. I haven't searched for religious terms, dating, or anything at all I can think of that would be related.
The loading speed of any website will vary.
I use the following to test speed:
Also check out this article: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/15-tips-to-speed-up-your-website
Are there any errors in particular you want to spot? http://validator.w3.org/ will pick up HTML validation errors, Xenu Link Sleuth will find crawl errors (as will the SEOmoz crawler, and Google and Bing's Webmaster Tools).
There's some good advice here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35291
I remember reading a really useful article about hiring an SEO company, I thought it was here on SEOmoz, but I can't find it. This looks helpful though: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2066873/Selecting-an-SEO-Firm-The-What-How-and-Who
I'm interested if it's just me that gets frustrated by this?
I've just Ctrl + clicked a few links to open them in separate tabs and then realised that none of them had opened. I know it's been like this for a while.
It's a usability issue as it goes against expected norms, and now I have to right-click and then click "Open in new tab" on each link, which is more time-consuming and frustrating.
More and more websites seem to be losing their Ctrl + click on links ability (JavaScript often breaks it). I don't know if there's a Mac equivalent...
Anyway, I hope that doesn't seem like I'm too angry. It just frustrates me a little and I hope it gets fixed. 
Edit - I've just realised these are getting blocked by Chrome's pop-up blocker - but why? It's only an issue on a small number of websites.
It's not an error, just a 'crawl notice'. Canonical's can be problematic if used incorrectly though, more information here:
Oh, and the trailing slash of course - thanks for the reminder!
If you think it's a software error you might be best contacting support directly. Have you checked for similar errors in Google and/or Bing Webmaster Tools?
In the majority of cases, each individual page on a website should be targeting unique keywords. If I was you (if it's not too late) and you're getting traffic and conversions from it, I'd keep the homepage optimised for "business coaching" and target the other pages with another term (for your example page, maybe something closely related to "business coaching"). Read up on keyword cannibilisation.
The search engines will rank whatever page they think is most appropriate for a particular term. So if you have been committing keyword cannibilisation that could explain why. The homepage probably has a higher Page Authority than the subpage so this will naturally give it a boost over other pages targeted to the same phrase.
If you don't want the homepage to rank for that term, replace the term on the homepage with something else and hope for the best that the other page will permanently replace it. Also keep the Penguin update in mind with regards to any link building and over optimised onpage tactics.
It's not OCD, it's good practice!
If the duplicate has been indexed, you could try using the link: operator with the URL in Google search.
Do you have Xenu Link Sleuth? If not it's free, and don't worry if it looks dodgy, it is kosher. You could crawl the whole site with Xenu. Once the crawl is complete right-click on the URLs you have as duplicate content and it'll show the pages that link to it.
It's not essential but still useful to have the canonical tag, it doesn't redirect but tells the crawlers the preferred address if you have more than one page/address containing the same content. It's particularly useful for duplicate content like print versions, or results pages based on query strings.
What you've actioned could improve the rankings to your homepage as before, the search engines will have seen the two addresses as separate pages, therefore competing against each other. When the redirect comes into effect the page authority and other metrics of both will be combined into one.
I'll add these links to EGOL's post:
To get a quick overview, read Google's guide on hiring an SEO: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35291
And the SEO Basics section here: http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/www.google.co.uk/en/uk/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf
If you want to get into more detail SEOmoz's Beginners Guide to SEO is great.
I agree that ideally SEO should be a continuous process, but certain issues can be rectified or improvements made to websites that will have a positive impact long after the initial time it takes to make any changes.
My advice would be to ask a couple of questions here on the Moz forum to see if we can help you out.
If you do decide to hire an SEO, Google has some advice here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35291?hl=en
There has been an error with the Q&A system so hopefully they'll catch up on the backlog soon.
It can depend on numerous factors - does the site have lots of pages or not many? Does it have many backlinks? Is it updated often? Does it have content worth crawling (i.e. not 'thin')? If these other sites that were linking to you don't have many pages, don't have many backlinks, are not updated more often and/or have poor content, Google might not have crawled them to see the link has been removed yet.
I am assuming you're talking about backlinks though, and not errors within your own site, but the same still applies. If you are talking internally, have you looked at Health > Crawl Stats? You can see how many pages Google crawls on your site per day, so if you know roughly how many pages you have it might give you an idea. Also if you mean internal links, have you marked them as fixed?
I have seen sites that have an average crawl rate of around 10000 pages per day take a while (a few weeks) for WMT to update, but then again - there is more to crawl so more to be missed!
It shows up at the top for me on Google UK and Google Italy. Are you searching without personalisation?
Have you checked your Analytics to make sure there hasn't been a drop in traffic for the homepage? You could also see if you have any messages in Google WMT that might point to potential problems.
Last year Google said bad links to 404 pages wouldn't hurt your site. Could that still be the case in light of recent Google updates to try and combat spammy links and negative SEO?
Can links to 404 pages benefit a website and pass link juice? I'd assume at the very least that any link juice will pass through links FROM the 404 page?
Many websites have great 404 pages that get linked to: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=http%3A%2F%2Fretardzone.com%2F404 - that was the first of four I checked from the "60 Really Cool...404 Pages" that actually returned the 404 HTTP Status! So apologies if you find the word 'retard' offensive. According to Open Site Explorer it has a decent Page Authority and number of backlinks - but it doesn't show in Google's SERPs.
I'd never do it, but if you have a particularly well-linked to 404 page, is there an argument for giving it 200 OK Status?
Finally, what are the best practices regarding 404s and address bar links?
For example, if
www.examplesite.com/3rwdfs returns a 404 error, should I make that redirect to
www.examplesite.com/404 or leave it as is?
Redirecting to www.examplesite.com/404 might not be user-friendly as people won't be able to correct the URL in the address bar. But if I have a great 404 page that people link to, I don't want links going to loads of random pages do I? Is either way considered best practice?
If I did a 301 redirect I guess it would send the wrong signal to the crawlers? Should I use a 302 redirect, or even a 304 Not Modified redirect?
It can happen, based on your past searches and clicks.
I always search in Google Chrome Incognito mode while not logged into anything. You can also turn off personalisation: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/54048?hl=en
Google have been adding brand names with a colon to the start of some title tags for a while now (2+ years I think), along with other title changes.
They don't always show your chosen meta description either, especially if it's not considered to match the searcher's intent. However, I've just looked at the source code of your homepage and there's no meta description there.
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35624?hl=en "...we may try to generate an improved title from anchors, on-page text, or other sources. However, sometimes even pages with well-formulated, concise, descriptive titles will end up with different titles in our search results to better indicate their relevance to the query. There’s a simple reason for this: the title tag as specified by a webmaster is limited to being static, fixed regardless of the query. Once we know the user’s query, we can often find alternative text from a page that better explains why that result is relevant. Using this alternative text as a title helps the user, and it also can help your site. Users are scanning for their query terms or other signs of relevance in the results, and a title that is tailored for the query can increase the chances that they will click through."
P.S. While looking at your site I noticed a 404 error resulted in a page full of adverts with no relation to your content, so that might be something you want to check out.
I think you should add hreflang - you should do everything you can to indicate what country your content is targeted to. Do you have local addresses/phone numbers/currency on each website? These are all signals that can help.
How long has each domain been geotargeted in GWT? Are the sites all the same age? Do they have links from the relevant countries? Maybe Google is taking some time to catch up, or maybe there are reasons why it thinks the FR homepage is more relevant in Germany.
If you 301 redirect everything correctly to its new URL you should be okay.
Which article was it?
I wouldn't worry about whether a link is dofollow or nofollow*.
I'd look at the blogs who might be reviewing your product to see if they're likely to send paying customers to your website. Do people engage with the blog, for example? Do they leave comments and share the content? Has anyone mentioned buying a product on the blogger's recommedation? Does the blogger have many Twitter followers who interact with them? In other words, Is the blogger influential?
I wouldn't miss out the smaller blogs though - if you see a great-looking/well-written new blog, the blogger will probably be overjoyed with a free sample and appreciate your support. Who knows where that could lead one day?
*A caveat or two - just don't do anything to excess. It might look unnatural if 99% of your links are from blog product reviews. So try to keep a varied link profile. And don't ask for anchor text - these days it's best for anchor text to be the URL itself or company name.
This isn't usually a big problem, especially if you use rel="next" and rel="prev".
If you wanted to remove the duplicate content warning in Webmaster Tools you could add the page number at the start of each title tag from page 2 onwards. I like having the page number in the title tag as a signal to website visitors.
Hi Carlos,
If the blogger is giving the links because it's their own editorial choice then it shouldn't be a problem, but by saying "I have been actively pursuing bloggers for my site in order to build page rank." isn't that a violation of Google's terms on link schemes?
"Any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site's ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines."
These two videos are related and might be worth a watch:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGieiNe6RL4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSEqypgIJME
Does he benefit from the images ranking so highly? I haven't seen many studies where image clicks result in good traffic, especially in terms of revenue if it's an e-commerce site.
It seems a strange way of doing things. Are you saying the images don't match the text content of the page? The context an image is placed in can help it rank, so it seems strange that these images are ranking based on their historical context. Google reads CSS so should see that the images are hidden. Unless you're blocking Google from seeing the CSS which is now against Google's Webmaster Guidelines: https://plus.google.com/+PierreFar/posts/TLeHSDRwjhB
If you're not blocking Google from the CSS, all other things being equal, then 301 redirects of the page and images could be enough, though I wouldn't be surprised if the rankings drop as from the information you've given (and assuming they're relatively competitive keywords) I'm surprised the rankings have remained for so long! The best way to preserve the image rankings would be to have the images on a page with relevant content.
In 2011 Matt Cutts said there isn't a limit. 500-600 sounds A LOT. If I was in this situation I'd just 301 the domains that have the most traffic and best links.
Are you redirecting each page on the other websites to the matching page on the chief website?
I would go with responsive. From experience, a separate mobile site might be easier to setup in the short-term but will cause more issues in the long-term (I haven't ever worked on anything like a video editing website, but I would imagine it wouldn't create many other issues).
Have you looked into why no one has purchased from a mobile device? I've seen conversion issues on mobile that don't impact the desktop version of websites - sometimes checkouts that don't work at all on mobile. But as you said, most of the traffic comes from desktop browsers so it could just be that.
Although separate mobile sites will still benefit from Google's mobile update (if they're mobile friendly), Google do recommend responsive over a separate site e.g. here in their starter guide: "Google recommends using RWD over other design patterns." https://developers.google.com/webmasters/mobile-sites/
There's also a useful white paper from Google here: http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en//intl/ALL_uk/think/multiscreen/pdf/multi-screen-consumer-whitepaper_research-studies.pdf
Some companies/websites have already used open data to great SEO effect. If some interesting data can be presented in a unique and interesting or useful way it has a great chance of attracting interest.
I clicked on the Chile link and these ideas came to mind immediately:
I did have a link listing some awesome presentations of public data but it seems to have disappeared. Here are a couple of cool uses I remember:
There are lots of good Google Maps Mashups using public data - Google [google maps mashups] to see!
Cool. It's advisable to add canonical HTTP headers to the PDFs too, if you can.
Google now class subdomains pretty much as part of your main domain: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MswMYk05tk - so you will be getting some of that rank juice.
I'd think that the major search engines wouldn't have a problem knowing that an HTML version of a page is preferred over a PDF. However, you can use canonical HTTP headers to make sure there are no problems with duplicate content: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-advanced-relcanonical-http-headers
If you use Google Analytics you will be able to track the subdomain. You can do it as part of your existing profile or by setting up a separate one: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/gaTrackingSite (ensure this is the version of Analytics you have installed).
There's a short guide here on getting more data about PDFs through Google Analytics: http://moz.com/ugc/how-to-track-pdf-traffic-links-in-google-analytics-open-site-explorer
Adam - remember that PageRank was only updated every few months (these days, even less) - can you be sure if those earlier links were already taken into account before the Wikipedia link was added? Also, maybe followed links came from websites that scrape or otherwise use Wikipedia's content?
I agree that Wikipedia links can be valuable though. It's an edited resource, and it's likely your content will be linked from a page that's relevant to your content, which helps. I've seen decent levels of engaged traffic from Wikipedia links.
If all you do on Wikipedia is add your own links though - you could end up getting banned from it. Rather than just adding links you should be adding value to the page content as a whole - pieces of your research could be really helpful to readers of the Wikipedia page and lead to more traffic to your website. It will also look less suspicious if you add other trusted links and make good contributions to edits on a number of pages. Wikipedia doesn't like biased content either.
I wonder if a Google Panda penalty has removed your pages. A lot of your content is showing as duplicates across other websites: example 1, example 2
Looking at your links, Penguin could have had an impact too. You have lots of "low-quality" links from pages like this: http://www.zobyhost.com/crear-nueva-cuenta.php - some of which are also responsible for your duplicated content.
However, there was no Penguin update reported in June 2013 - the closest is May 22nd: http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change
Finding the reason
Are you able to identify an exact date that traffic dropped in your Google Analytics account? Is it only organic traffic that had a big fall-off? If you can identify a date, does it match any algorithm updates here moz.com/google-algorithm-change ?
What to do
If your website was demoted due to an update of Google's Panda algorithm, you'll need to make sure your content is unique and high quality, amongst other things. There's a guide here: http://www.ventureharbour.com/panda-recovery-a-guide-to-recovering-googles-panda-update/
If it was demoted due to certain links (possible Penguin-related), there's a guide to spotting low quality links here (Step 3): http://moz.com/blog/ultimate-guide-to-google-penalty-removal
You could also take a look at Google's Quality Guidelines (there is some duplication with the above links) to see if your website complies with them: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en%233 ?
To add to this, Google have a good primer: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35291?hl=en
There is some good info e.g. "No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google".
For one e-commerce website, in place of the proper meta description, Google is showing a 318-character-long mix of snippets from the homepage content for the domain search (e.g. [example.com]). A brand search returns the correct meta description - as do the keywords the homepage ranks for.
I know Google changes the meta description if it doesn't think it's relevant, but this one (there is only one) is and has (as far as we know) shown until now, and I've never seen such a mix of text in the SERP, and so many characters - it's picking up random text from bits of anchor text e.g. "privacy policy", title attributes from links, labels from radio buttons and more.
The home page W3C validates apart from a couple of basic things like missing alt text. The only things that might be related that don't are some custom meta name tags added by the CMS - but I wouldn't think this would make any difference to whether a meta description is displayed properly or not?
I've recommended we wait until tomorrow to see if Google fixes this on recrawl, but does anyone have any ideas if it doesn't? The homepage doesn't feature much standalone text, so I was thinking if we add a few extra words it might encourage Google to pick from that if it doesn't want to use the meta description. The text would have to be useful for users and fit in with the design of course, which could be awkward...
twitter.com is recognisable enough, but keeping the www. makes a URL more recognisable, especially if you're using a domain extension that people aren't familiar with e.g. one of the new gTLDs:
example.photo
or
www.example.photo
Some CMSs and forums automatically linkup text when it has the www. prefix, so you might be slightly more likely to get clickable links if you keep the prefix.
Advantages to not having it - shorter URLs, and programming-wise it's unnecessary.
Often it's down to personal preference - do you prefer the prefix or not? If you'll have subdomains it might look nicer if you keep the www. prefix for your main site.
To avoid duplicate content issues make sure you 301 redirect your non-preferred domain to the preferred, or canonical to your preferred domain if 301s are not possible. You can also set your preferred domain in Google: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/44231?hl=en
I've just bought a new .uk domain and haven't decided whether to www. or not yet!
The last two points seemed a bit drastic:
The US is a much bigger market than the Netherlands so it's more difficult to rank for anything. Your issue could just be that.
You seem to have covered most things but you haven't mentioned the rel hreflang tag: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en
Is your server hosted in the Netherlands? I'm thinking out loud, but it shouldn't matter if everything else is set up correctly. How about a US-based phone number? Every signal you can send should help. Are there any customer reviews on the Google page?