Here are some good reasons to keep authorship intact: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/4-reasons-why-you-shouldnt-remove-an-ex-employees-relauthor-tag/59385/

Yes. Use every signal you can to inform the search engines of the target location.

I'd more than likely go for something different on each page. Make sure you're describing the page content accurately in the title.

You don't need to include your brand in any of the titles. Some people believe it's better to have the brand name, some don't. Amazon for example - they're a strong, well known brand - so it makes sense to include the brand name as it can encourage click throughs from Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). For a business like yours I wouldn't think it'd make a big difference either way. As you're targeting local customers, it could result in extra exposure for your brand name if you include it, though the longer a title tag the less emphasis is given to each keyword in the SERPs - so that's a small reason not to include it. If you go back to what I said about thinking about the user, then you'd have the brand name on the homepage and about page for definite, but other pages - it probably doesn't matter so much. As you noticed on another thread, sometimes Google will add your brand name anyway! You could also consider how people's bookmarks display, but again I'll say - don't worry about this too much!

In terms of your question about speed, there are a few resources you can put your URLs into that will give  you feedback and recommendations. Here are 2:
tools.pingdom.com/fpt/
http://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

If you follow someone on Google+, content they share will be biased higher in your search results, if you're logged in to Google yourself and don't have personal search results disabled. That's the only definite. Here's more: http://moz.com/blog/using-google-plus-to-appear-in-the-top-results-every-time-whiteboard-friday

As for showing other social signals on OSS - they're a useful metric to know, and will probably become more of a ranking factor in future. Shares from established Facebook/Twitter accounts with lots of followers will probably carry more weight.

See Moz's Ranking Factors survey for more info:  http://moz.com/search-ranking-factors

"I have an about page with the url "www.heartwavemedia.com/about" and the SEO title San Francisco Video Production | Heartwave Media | About"

I'd say the URL you have already is perfect. For the "SEO title" (title tag) I'd go with "About Heartwave Media" - the unique part of the title tag should be at the start.

Think about what is best for the human visitors to your website, and not the search engine crawlers. People expect an "about" url to be at www.example.com/about or www.example.com/aboutus - it's also memorable and easier to type in. I've always said this is the best way, and Google is getting smarter at ranking content that is useful for searchers: http://moz.com/blog/be-the-result-that-google-wants-to-rank

If every URL on your page had "san-francisco-video-production-" in it, it's not user-friendly, and it looks spammy, so to Google it's definitely going to look spammy, either now or at some point in the future.

Also be aware of keyword cannibilisation. You want search engines to know your website is about video production, but you don't want to confuse them over which page they should rank highest. This is an old article but still relevant: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-solve-keyword-cannibalization  It's fine to mention "video production" and variations of that theme throughout your website, but be aware of the cannibilisation issue. If you think it's most important to rank for "San Francisco Video Production" then that should be your homepage title, arguably with your brand name at the end.

You could look somewhere like elance.com, peopleperhour.com (UK-based) or odesk.com. Check for good feedback and employ someone who is preferably a native speaker of the language. Alternatively there are probably loads of good copywriters and copywriting companies who will have samples of their writing online - there are quite a few when I search for [copywriting london].

It doesn't look serious, just something your domain registrar/host implements - you need to set a custom 404 page to remove it. Type www.heatwavemedia.com/ with a couple of additional characters to the URL and you'll see.

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 often find searching for the URL directly on Twitter and the Facebook public posts search is the best way to find out.

If you use Google Analytics you could go Acquisition > All Referrals and click on e.g. facebook.com to see a list of referring URLs. "/" (the homepage) will probably be most of the referrals but there might be some group or page URLs in there. Acquisition > Social > Network Referrals is another route.

Do the blog links help to answer or provide further information on the question? If so I'd say it isn't a problem as long as it isn't done to excess. 100s of links from one website sounds like a lot so you should be careful depending on what quality and quantity of external links you have elsewhere.

Yahoo Answers links are nofollow so you won't be getting much (if any) link juice from them.

There's no substitute for hard work. How about concentrating on your best converting products to start with, then that 10,000 will seem less daunting. Also, it might make more sense to test changes on a smaller range of products first - if you make changes en masse and they don't work you could end up doing the opposite of what you want to do.

• Customer reviews can add good long-tail content, so you should encourage and display those.
• Unique and descriptive product information is very helpful - you should keep the default descriptions and duplicate content down to a minimum.
• Rich snippets and social meta tags (http://moz.com/blog/meta-data-templates-123) can help increase click-throughs.
• Linking to related products is a good way to keep people on your site and helps indexing too.

Have you looked for any SEO companies or individuals local to you? If you find someone, Google has some advice on what to look out for here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35291?hl=en

You could post a job on a website such as www.peopleperhour.com and www.elance.com and invite applications.

If you're willing to post your link publicly, you could get some free help here...or maybe we could help you anyway. The first questions I'd ask are; is your blog registered on Google Webmaster Tools, and if so, are there any messages regarding a penalty in your account? Do you have many pages with duplicate or little content?

On top of Dana's answer, it's worth looking here - http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change - to see if your traffic started dropping again after any particular updates.

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

A national business has one HQ. it's possible for customers to visit.

Could there be any disadvantages to listing a national company on Google Places for Business? I'd see it as an advantage as they'll have a greater presence for local searches. From what I understand it won't affect the organic rankings of the company as that's a separate algorithm.

There are already some discussions about this in the Q&A, but nothing I can see that's recent and concrete.

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.

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!

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

Cool. It's advisable to add canonical HTTP headers to the PDFs too, if you can.

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:

• Data on traffic accident statistics - perhaps a car insurance firm or road traffic safety campaigner could present that data on their website, with further research into why certain locations are accident hotspots and what could be done to improve the safety.
• "Consumer Prices of Fruits and Vegetables" - a travel website could present this as a guide for backpackers visiting Latin America - for new visitors to a country it's always difficult to know what you should be paying for products.
• "Polling stations in Santiago" - a political candidate looking for votes and increased publicity could have an interactive map for voters to find their closest location.

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:

• Live London Underground Map - Page Authority 64, 231 referring root domains, 6000+ Facebook likes, 5600+ Tweets. You can track worldwide flights too - it's scary seeing how close so many planes look over major cities: http://www.flightradar24.com
• Hills Are Evil phone app - Overlay Media created an app to help people with "restricted mobility find the best and easiest route between two places" - it overlays gradient and even surface (e.g. cobblestones) data onto Google Maps.

There are lots of good Google Maps Mashups using public data - Google [google maps mashups] to see!

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

You could try peopleperhour.com and elance.com

You can add canonical HTTP headers to the PDFs to avoid any duplicate content problems: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-advanced-relcanonical-http-headers

If you think these PDFs are really valuable, and e-mail addresses will be useful to you, then yes - you should ask for an e-mail address to download them. If you don't take that route and they're indexed as part of your website, make sure you have a few links to your websites within the PDFs so you get some value if people rehost them.

Make sure your branding and website is obvious on the PDFs whatever you do.

I wouldn't bother unless it's a really well-known or well-respected brand within the cruise industry, but then I'd still expect the company name to be visible in the URL or title tag, so not too important. In these situations I try to think from the searcher's point of view - if I'm looking for a cruise - is the brand name important? As I said, not if I haven't heard of them before. George makes good suggestions - if your prices are good then that's likely to drive more click throughs than a brand name, in the limited space you have.

It's also worth bearing in mind that Google may not use your meta description at all if they don't think it matches the searchers intent or content on the resulting page.

Don't worry about it - I've done far sillier things.

If the rest of the content on each of those pages is unique and valuable I don't think you should have a problem. I did something similar with the meta descriptions on a website about a year ago as that was the only way at the time to programme them in the time available, and they weren't picked up as duplicates in Google Webmaster Tools (Search Improvements > HTML Improvements).

If you have the resources to make each description completely unique I'd say go ahead, but otherwise I wouldn't worry too much about it as long as the same cut-copy approach isn't taken with the rest of the content on the page.

There are a load here: http://wpml.org/showcase/

Are they showing as duplicate content within Moz Analytics? As long as the search engines don't see it as duplicate content you shouldn't have a problem. Here are some things to check for:

• The content should be localised as best as possible (e.g. the differences between US, Canadian and British English).
• I'm not sure it's possible with your sites, but things like contact details and local currency can help send the right signals to Google etc. - so the address and phone number if you have a HQ in each country.
• Each site should be registered separately with Bing and Google Webmaster Tools and geotargeted to the relevant location.
• Use the hreflang attribute if you're not already (triple-check to make sure it is set up properly): https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en - you can set Canadian English (en-ca) and Canadian French (fr-ca) - the language always comes before the country.

As you mentioned your terms and conditions, I noticed a lot of companies are using very similar wording to yours, so that could be an issue of duplicate content that features on completely different websites. You could rewrite the t's and c's, though I wouldn't see any harm in noindexing those particular pages.

Perhaps a competitor or hacker are trying to displace them from the search results? One of the 'spam' results has "2,427 links to this URL from the past 32 days" according to Open Site Explorer - have you checked to see if any of that anchor text is the company name? I don't have full access to Moz at the moment so can't see.

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/just-discovered?site=www.yolo2.cwsurf.de%2Findex.php%3Fpage%3DUser%26userID%3D4146%E2%80%8E

301 redirecting entire identical sites to different pages sounds extremely dodgy, just to the homepage was bad enough.

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?

If your pictures get shared more than links then it's still worth doing - it could lead to an SEO benefit as it's spreading your name around, and maybe Google will begin to associate you as an authority in the world of photography. Perhaps people will put your name into a search engine after seeing one of your photos, or maybe you'll have a Jeff moment! That would be cool.

I read somewhere that photos get liked and commented more on Facebook than links because with links people are clicking away from Facebook, so when they go back they forget to interact again. I can agree with that - and that people are sometimes unwilling to click away from Facebook. The same probably applies to Google+.

I'm an amateur photographer myself so maybe I should see what's going on with photography on G+...

I don't agree that 2 separate websites is the best way. It would mean double the costs and effort - would there need to be 2 logos because there are 2 websites? It's definitely not "strong branding". It could be potentially confusing to customers and you'd be competing against yourself. Would it stop at 2 websites if another market opened up?

Which is the biggest market?

I wouldn't be sure about calling yourselves horseridingcostarica.com as a horseridecostarica.com already exists - so if you're giving the URL out/printing it on leaflets etc. there's more potential for confusion e.g. as the latter is already established, Google AutoSuggest might autofill the latter URL as people are typing and you're giving business to a competitor.

I've also noticed a "Horse Trek Monteverde" on TripAdvisor and a standalone website with the same name - I'd guess that's you? My gut feeling is to go with your company name (although you're small, are you well established?), though not knowing your company name I can't be 100% sure (for example if it's difficult to spell).

Edit - and safeserps makes a good point - what if your business expands? How big do you aim to be?

And I've heard of Monteverde! I'm hoping to visit Costa Rica in the next few years.

Thanks for pointing that out - I had no idea. In the video Matt Cutts says subdomains are "likely" to be treated like subfolders. The change was also confirned here: http://www.seroundtable.com/subdomains-google-webmaster-tools-13960.html

I wonder how other search engines treat them? More research required...

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

I wouldn't do anything that could look spammy, and I'd say that might. The traditional way to use an acronym is to place it in brackets directly after the first mention of the written out term i.e. "Yesterday I bought a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich (BLT)" and then use the acronym for the rest of the article. Write for your audience though - do they know what a BLT is? If so I might use

BLT

in the title. Have you done any keyword research to see which would work best?

Saying all that, Google is getting better at recognising synonyms. If I type BLT into Google, I get results for Bacon, Lettuce, and Tomato too - Bacon, Lettuce, and Tomato is bolded in the search results, so Google know they're often the same thing.

Edit - I've just had a thought - using an acronym might not be the best example of different phrases. Check this out: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/what-is-latent-semantic-indexing-seo-defined/21642/ and http://moz.com/community/q/latent-semantic-indexing-does-this-help-rankings-relevance

You used to be able to search for synonyms in Google using the tilde ~ but they dropped the feature earlier this year.

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.

It depends on how your content is translated - is it auto translated or a high-quality translation by a native speaker of the language? Google have said that auto translations can be a really bad experience - so in this case your translated content could be ignored, and maybe your sites could be penalised if it looks like you're generating the content to spam links. If your translations are good quality, you should not have a problem - but you do need to send the correct signals to the search engine crawlers.

• Markup your content or sitemaps with the hreflang attribute. Note the 2 values when targeting particular countries e.g. hreflang=”fr-fr” if your content is for French speakers in France and hreflang=”fr-be” for French speakers in Belgium. The language and country codes are linked from the above page.
• You should also have a Webmaster Tools account for each TLD, and geotarget the domains to the relevant country.
• Country-specific addresses, phone numbers and currency on each translated website can all help send the right signals about your content too.

Google's advice is here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192

In answer to your question, I'm not sure, just make sure you do everything properly to avoid potential problems. I'd say it won't be 1 or 4.

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.

With regards to links, The Rising Tide Lifts All Ships, assuming your blog is on the same domain.

It is possible for sub-pages to rank above the homepage for your lead-terms - http://moz.com/blog/how-to-solve-keyword-cannibalization - though it doesn't happen too often and I wouldn't like to comment further without seeing the site in question.

Jeff's answer is good with regards to the sub-domain/folder debate but,

"My recommendation is to go with the subdomain, and there are a whole lot of articles that back this up:"

I think he meant subdirectory?! That would be my recommendation anyway.

One big problem with uploading static HTML files is that if you redesign your site and want historical content to match the redesign, you'll have to update every single HTML file.

There are also lots of high-quality Wordpress blogs so that's not really an issue. www.mydomain.com/blog/ is the way to go if you can. Whether to have it on your Australian or international site depends on which audience the content is aimed at.

I wouldn't think it'd be a problem if you have good, unique content on each page. There are a few things to be careful of. This is a really useful post from Rand, a few years old but still mostly relevant: http://moz.com/blog/ranking-for-keyword-cityname-in-multiple-geographies

Have you checked www.imageworkscreative.com on Google Webmaster Tools to see if there are any important site messages?

You have a lot of links to your homepage with the exact same anchor text - I notice it's in the footers of your client's websites, which isn't a good idea when it's done to excess. 'custom web design' is one of the phrases and that's a term you mention, so it's possible you've fallen foul of the Penguin update, especially if you had a sudden drop in traffic/rankings.

I haven't used it myself, but this Google Penalty Checker has been recommended by some of my favourite SEOs who work/contribute here at Moz: http://fruition.net/google-penalty-checker-tool/

If you have suffered a penalty there are plenty of online guides on recovering, let me know if you need pointing in the right direction.

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?

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

That site is a great help! It's pretty close for 75% of our sites, which is the best I've seen. And there's a wealth of other information on one handy page too.

Thanks. I just tried that one a few minutes ago and it didn't have the data for the sites I was looking for, even sites that have 50,000+ visits a week. That must still be too small...

Google's Display Network Ad Planner used to be the best for this (although was often still way out), but the data for the sites I used to check has disappeared. Does anyone know any other sites that provide half-decent estimates of traffic?

trafficestimate.com, Compete and Alexa are way off.

I'd be interested in paid services too.

Thanks.