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I thought it was a useful answer, it's pretty much what I'd say.

I don't know of any studies into whether it improves CTR.

The sole skull & crossbones looks quite effective, but the descriptions and titles with the stars look spammy to me, so I probably wouldn't click them. I'd say be subtle, perhaps add something that might be enough to catch the eye without putting people off clicking. Remember Google can change the meta descriptions and titles if their algorithm deems they're not appropriate for the search - another reason not to go overboard.

I can see this getting to the stage where everyone in some SERPs has added a load of symbols to try and get noticed - that's when Google might add it as a negative ranking factor, or just not display descriptions and titles that use it.

You can geotarget folders in Google WMT, you just need to set up a new site for each folder. Duplicate content is not a problem, as long as the two separate areas of the site are geotargeted properly. Be aware of the language differences between the two countries and if you're from the US get a native-UK speaker to check the UK part of the site or vice-versa. UK-based links to the relevant UK pages will help a lot - and an advantage of having both locations on one .com is that all links will help towards it, rather than getting less benefit by link-building to two completely separate sites.

The one thing I'm not sure of is the potential issue you mention of setting the .com (with no sub-folder) to target the US, and .com/uk to the UK - it might be worth using your private question for the month if you haven't already to see what the SEOmoz folk know. Another option for the UK would be a sub-domain, like  uk.somewebsite.com

I made a post here with some links that will help you if you haven't seen them already: http://www.seomoz.org/q/multiple-country-site-versions-and-hosting

I definitely agree with James regarding native speakers. I don't think separate TLD's should always be used though - check my post here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/multiple-country-site-versions-and-hosting

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.

Matt Cutts stated that only in 1 out of 100 searches does page speed show a noticeable change in rankings, and there are only 1 in a 1000 sites which have slow speed as a big issue: www.youtube.com/watch?v=SO4YuDAkplU

I have a page on one website which has on-page SEO close to perfection for a relatively competitive term, and a few relevant links coming in. There was a query in the SQL on the page that slowed it down - I think the load time was about 4 or 5 seconds. After a few weeks (it wasn't an important page and I knew it would be an interesting test) I fixed the problem and got the load time down to around a second. The following day the page jumped from nowhere (not even the top 20 pages) to page 4 on Google, so that must have been one of the 1 in a 100.

1. I think a canonical loses a similar amount of link juice as a 301 redirect would, so 100% of the juice would not flow back to john.long.com

2. If Google sees the canonical link is different to the content of the page it is on, Google will ignore it - Matt Cutts has said as much.

Check this out: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/rel-canonical-html-head/

"If they are only going to be visible in the SERPS and you know they are going to be cut off then they will never see the words after the cut-off point."

That's not always true, but I see you question it later on - I have seen a few examples where people have used long meta descriptions with the intention of the SERPs displaying something different depending on the search made. Here's one I've just found: http://sharkseo.com/whitehat/meta-descriptions/ - though I've just done a search and I got the same meta description ("Dave is a freelance SEO consultant...") for both suggested searches.

If Google doesn't think your meta description is appropriate there's always a chance they'll replace it with something else on your page or the description from DMOZ.

You should definitely not add the ellipsis yourself, what if the length displayed is changed for example? I'd just ensure your first 155ish characters are well-written in a way that entices users to want to click through.

I don't have time to write out an answer but here's a useful link: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/pagination-best-practices-for-seo-user-experience

Google have recently introduced support of rel="next" and rel="prev" too: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html

It's not something I've looked into much, but importantly, will search engines still be able to crawl all your content as easily as before? If so, there's the argument that it makes the user experience easier as they don't have to click through pages. It could make it more difficult for those who click through pages and might remember and want to go back to something on an earlier page number they remembered.

Is it important that the user knows how far through the content they are? If so I wouldn't recommend infinite scrolling unless you have a message informing them e.g. "viewing 58 of 240" .

If you haven't considered it you might want to keep your header and/or footer visible at all times so for one reason at least, the user has an easy way out.

Make sure it doesn't significantly slow the page load speed down too.

Definitely don't automatically truncate them. It doesn't matter if they're longer than 70 characters, it just means search engines will show an ellipsis after the 70th character on their results pages. Check out the 'SEO Best Practice' section here: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/title-tag

I still think it's better to have exact match. The Google Adwords Keyword tool shows far more searches for office refurbishment over office refurb for exact, phrase and broad in the UK (and globally) - both with 'High' competition.

Unless you're a really well known brand in your target market I don't see it as a problem if your brand is cut off at the end of the title tag on search results.

This video should be a great help: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday

Depending on the type of site/competition it might even be possible to rank well in other countries with the current setup, by building links from these countries for a start. Assuming otherwise though...from what I've read (I'm not speaking from experience) I'd recommend sub folders, as James mentions. As well as adding them to Webmaster Tools make sure you specify the language in the Doctypes and meta language (e.g. I think Australian English is au) and adjust localised spellings. You might want to get a native of each country to check over everything - even the search terms the client wants to rank for elsewhere might not mean much or get much traffic in another English speaking country. Get some links from each country too.

Check out this blog: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-business-of-seo-perception-vs-reality

Matthew posted some **invaluable **links in the comments so be sure to look out for those.

There's a good overview here: http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/15-smart-ways-to-find-guest-posting-opportunities

I'd say it has a negative effect on SEO as SEO is also to do with user experience. moneysavingexpert.com used to have a pop-up that appeared just after the site loaded and blacked out the whole of the rest of the screen - I found it hugely annoying; just as I'd started to read the content it disappeared and I had to close something to continue reading. If I didn't already know the site was genuine I would have thought it was dodgy and pressed back or close straight away.

I'm not 100% sure but I think it was the owner of daniweb.com who said she introduced something similar to encourage people to sign up to her forum. Her bounce rate increased dramatically so she took it off as soon as she realised, and the bounce rate recovered. Bounce rate is something that can be measured by the search engines, along with other metrics related to user experience that will be taken into account when calculating the ranking of a page.

Alan's idea, to do something more subtle, is a good one. If it was unique and done really well, you might even get extra links because of it, rather than potentially less links as Matt Cutts suggested in the video Ryan linked to.

Cool - have you figured out what the problem might be yet?

Check out the free Xenu Link Sleuth and this post: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/xenu-link-sleuth-more-than-just-a-broken-links-finder

I haven't used it myself (yet), but Screaming Frog could help as an alternative, though the full version is paid. This post compares the two: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/crawler-faceoff-xenu-vs-screaming-frog

Does your homepage show (in Google's index) under different URLs? E.g.

• www.website.com
• www.website.com/
• website.com
• www.website.com/index.html

That would split the authority over the separate URLs. You should redirect any differences to one standard URL and all of your links should point to the exact same homepage URL if possible.

Is your homepage linked to on every page on your website? How about those service pages? Your internal link structure goes a long way towards showing which pages are the most important.

PageRank updates infrequently. There's a possibility the value of your internal pages has been updated, but the homepage hasn't. Have you checked the Page Authority in SEOmoz PRO?

You say you have links from "relevant directory submissions and blog comments" - as it's a new site you might not have a varied link profile, so the link building could look unnatural. A spike of links from directories, for example, doesn't look natural - so Google might not give the links as much weight as they would have done had the links been built over a longer time period.

Do you have any/more outbound links on your homepage? Are you selling links?

It could just be down to the fact that the site is new. The authority of the homepage should naturally build over time if you continue to concentrate on building a relevant link profile from varied sources.

It's good to see this is sorted - another option is to check Google's cache for anything else that's missing. It's saved me on a couple of occasions!

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.

Do you mean keyword cannibalisation - where different pages are targeting the same keyword? You have numerous pages where the main key phrase in the title tag and elsewhere on-page includes "oak furniture" for example.

I don't have much experience with CMS's so apologies if my question sounds a bit dumb, is it not as simple as selecting a default size and font like Arial or Helvetica?

Again, if you think it will benefit the human user. I'm hesitant to give more specific advice when I haven't seen the site in question. You can always take advantage of image alt attributes if you're not already.

EDIT - if you're talking about The Furniture Market, the navigation links on the left and top would definitely be better as text.

If it's out of date you should update it, definitely. Fresh, relevant content is important to the user and the search engines (depending on the type of content, sometimes very important - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-query-deserves-freshness). Just make sure you don't mess with your well-ranked phrases too much, but make sure the text is still readable to the human! Depending on the search phrase and competition an update done in the right way could potentially move you to page 1 - but another note, if you're on page 2, I'd question how much traffic you actually get, unless it's for a phrase that gets millions of searches. Is it a term that's worth ranking on page 2, or even page 1 for?

Not necessarily - the 100 links is just a warning - not an error. I can't speak for SEOmoz but I think that number comes from the days when search engine crawlers weren't so sophisticated; the likes of Google have no problem crawling a lot of on page links now. If it would make it a better user experience to remove some links, then go ahead.

This is an old post - be aware that in most situations it's probably only the anchor text of the first repeated link that counts - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/results-of-google-experimentation-only-the-first-anchor-text-counts - so that's a possibility for improving your link optimisation. Another way to optimise your site using links is to be aware that links in body text have a higher value than those in sidebars and footers - it's a good way to link to other internal content.

I'd say it's not worth it these days; if you add nofollow to a link, the link juice disappears completely, e.g. if you have 10 followed links on a page (and 10 links in total), they'll each get 10% of the link juice. If you make 1 of those 10 links nofollow, the other 9 links will still only get the same amount of link juice - 10% will be lost completely to the nofollow. It used to be the case where the link juice was shared between the number of followed links, but not any more.

Edit - check out this from Matt Cutts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVOOB_Q0MZY

Do you have anything to give away in return? A great e-book for example? A discount on your services? Bands do it by offering a free MP3.

Promote the list everywhere - have a call-to-action signup on your website and any correspondence you send out (online or otherwise).

Here's the situation for the website in question:

The company produces printed publications which go online as a page turning Flash version, and as a separate HTML version. To complicate matters, some of the articles from the publications get added to a separate news section of the website. We want to promote the news section of the site over the publications section.

If we were to forget the Flash version completely, would you:

a) add a canonical in the publication version pointing to the version in the news section?

b) add a link in the footer of the publication version pointing to the version in the news section?

c) both of the above?

d) something else?

What if we add the Flash version into the mix? As Flash still isn't as crawlable as HTML should we noindex them? Is HTML content duplicated in Flash as big an issue as HTML to HTML duplication?

If you have offices in each country, make sure you have the contact details on the site, and add them to Google Places if appropriate. Build links from each of your targeted countries.

Is it possible to add the fr (for French) language meta tag to the translated content? Obviously UK English and American English vary too, so your site content will tell Google etc. it's for a US audience, but such sites can rank well worldwide

There are a couple of older posts worth reading here:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/targetting-multiple-countries

http://www.seomoz.org/q/multilingual-site-separate-domain-or-all-under-the-same-umbrella

http://www.seomoz.org/q/targeting-specific-geographic-areas-use-1-large-com-or-several-smaller-country-specific-tlds

Article spinning is terrible. As is anything that adds pointless content to the web. My mantra is to only add content that is valuable to a user or users somewhere. Take Marcus' advice.

Yes, not forgetting the quotes around the URL. I would still add one, but there are others who wouldn't. More information here:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/complete-guide-to-rel-canonical-how-to-and-why-not (note it's a year old)

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/cross-domain-canonical-the-new-301-whiteboard-friday

Whichever link occurs first in the coding, so if the first occurrence is in the menu, yes - that's the generally held belief - though some have demonstrated ways to get around it (I don't have links, sorry).

In general links within body content are given higher value than links elsewhere, so that's why some SEOs have tried to get around this 'first anchor text link rule'. Google (and other search engines, probably) can recognise the difference between menu's, sidebars, footers etc. and main body content - it's something they're getting better at all the time so I wouldn't be surprised if this changed. But then again it could be easier for people to game so perhaps it won't.

Thanks - well spotted, I was a bit stupid there.

And that does look like an error to me!

Add  rel="canonical" href="http://www.mydomain.com" /> or <link <span>rel="canonical" href="http://www.mydomain.com/" /> (depending on your preferred version - those would be considered two separate pages too) between the head tags of your homepage. This will let Google know of your change and combine the page authority of any stray index.php's left over.</link <span>

You should be careful about uploading a new .htaccess page as you might be writing over something important that already exists, so make sure this isn't the case.

P.S. This is in addition to what First says about changing the links, and if you use IIS you can set rewrite rules in there without having to mess with a .htaccess file.

It is considered as two different addresses, as is www.example.com and www.Example.com. You should add the canonical tag and find out how to specify your preferred version on your server too.

Lots of quality, unique content is good for SEO. The warning will be specific to each page, do you really need so many links on one page? The 100 limit isn't firm, it was a guideline Google mentioned a few years ago, but their crawlers have become much more sophisticated since then. I think there was a suggestion that Google wouldn't crawl more than 100 links per page, or wouldn't pass PageRank on to the 101st+ links - it's not such an issue any more.

Check out this blog: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many

Either add the page number at the beginning or remove them completely, yeah. Rand recommended removing them here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/pagination-best-practices-for-seo-user-experience

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.

What would be best for the user? I think it's about finding a balance between load speed and content without spreading the content too thinly across multiple pages, and being aware that constantly clicking to the next page can be time-consuming. Think about how the forum will be used - will people regularly come back to read one or two new posts? If so they won't want 40 posts loading on a page. Do users often make lengthy or short posts?

Things like signatures and images will slow the load speed down, so take that into account when you come to a decision. Perhaps make signatures visible to logged in users only, if applicable and possible? While 'content is king' faster speeds do have an SEO benefit too.

It's a balancing act, perhaps start with 15 and adjust that over time when you start to get a feel for the content that's posted.

Did the other page rank anywhere?

My view is to not do it - you're just confusing the search engines over which is the most important of your pages for that term. And instead of competing against your competitors, you're competing against yourself.

Take a look at this post from a while ago: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-solve-keyword-cannibalization

Rather than something generic, you could think about the longer-tail for your homepage - something like 'cheap designer glasses' might not be as competitive but could still send a lot of relevant traffic.

Will you get any relevant traffic from the link?

Does it look like a good place to get a link? Is the content worthwhile?

What other sites do they link to? How many? Are they good quality?

Will they place your link whatever it is if you 'donate' or will they only link to related websites? Is there an editorial decision to be made?

Is the link nofollow or is there a chance they might make it nofollow in future? Do you have any guarantee that the site/link will remain there in the near/distant future?

I don't think I would do it but they are a few things to take into consideration. Here's a WBF I just found but haven't watched yet: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-we-bought-links-and-it-worked and there will be useful stuff here: http://www.seomoz.org/pages/search_results?q=paid+links

I should probably have opened the post with this, but here is Google's stance on paid links: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66736

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_localisation#Language_tags_and_codes

Australia isn't listed there but it's en-AU. It's necessary if you want to help Google recognise the sites are targeted to different countries, as Ryan mentions language and spellings differ slightly in various English-speaking countries.

It'll just look spammy. Exact matching anchor text seems to be becoming less effective anyway, and Google is good at looking at the context links are placed in, so if a Spanish link is inserted into otherwise English text that will probably look dodgy. And if you're targeting Spanish search engines, links from other countries have less value anyway.

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/

1 - the absolute path. It's less error-prone. For example, if the rest of the URL was sometimes partly upper case, and other times completely lower case.

True...I must admit I don't like seeing 404 links in my reports that are potentially beyond my control. I also wondered if it breaks some sort of privacy law - there's no privacy policy I can see on the website - perhaps there should be a warning to users of the tool. I must admit it's interesting (for at least a few seconds) to spy on who has seemingly used the tool.

I'll send them an e-mail and update this post with any response.