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Hello Mozzers,
I just launched a website for one of my clients and one of the update requests they had was to add the first link in the navigation again when the navigation drops down.
Here is an example of the navigation now: http://screencast.com/t/K6ooX0I9pe
For example, they would want "About" showing up again, they want this for every navigation item.
I know this wouldn't be right. How would you respond to them?
Around $500 for now. The project I am working on is a family one so I didn't charge them nearly as much as I normally would.
Any insight on the design contests? They seem interesting.
Very good points, I will take everything you said into consideration when going into this web development project.
I have had some experience doing this, like when shooting a video, I find an intern at a local TV station who has access to nice equipment and have them shoot some video for me, it worked out great!
I like the reminder!
This is so true and what makes this designer recruitment process even harder. Finding that balance and even someone that is near my area that is good.
Hi everyone,
I am looking for find high quality web designers that are affordable. I am open to many options.
There are several things I have looked into.
1. I have looked for designers via CSS galleries, but I don't really know how to get in touch with designers or find them. Rand recently talked about this in a webinar, but if anyone has specific insights on how to find people this way, please let me know.
2. I have also looked into website design contests from sites such as:
I haven't used these services and I was wondering if anyone has experience with design contests.
3. I have looked into the option of hiring a freelancer on oDesk or a similar freelancer site. I don't really know the cost, how to find a good designer, how to avoid inexperienced but cheap designers and all the other such roadblocks that come along with freelancers.
If anyone could provide insight into this, it would be greatly appreciated.
Glad I could help! Let me know if you have any other questions.
Email the SEOmoz staff. You can find the help desk here. That is where you will find the "actual" answer you are looking for.
I would go and test this yourself. Go on to Google, log out of your Google account, then type in your search phrase and add: &pws=0 to the end of the URL and hit enter. This will remove any customized results for you and will help you determine the accuracy of the results of the two trackers.
Hi,
1. In terms of LinkedIn, here is a video that will help explain the power of LinkedIn: Linked Influence.
2. Myspace is still there for leverage, but I think the focus of it has moved towards music.
3. Photo sharing, I would recommend: Flickr and Photobucket.
4. I would definitely recommend Foursquare over Gowalla due to its massive popularity. And any features it may lack I am sure it will be developed within 6 months most likely.
5. I would skip the group texting, as this would be just one more thing to manage. I would have people just stick to communicating on Facebook and Twitter.
6. I would suggest Blogger and Wordpress.
7. I am not familiar with Fwix or Whatser.
8. Definitely go with Groupon, but you could certainly try Living Social for extra umpf!
9. Bump has multi phone support, I'd recommend that.
10. I would create offers for both Foursquare and Yelp if that's what the customers use. It would also create additional exposure for the business and helping them get people they would never normally have would make them happy.
11. Slideshare and Hubpages aren't apples to apples, but you should use both.
12. Use both Squidoo and Scribed.
Hope my opinion helps.
Yeah, that would definitely work. If you can get good content on each of the domains and develop them to be great sites, then you will have some nice leverage in your niche, in many markets.
You have to remember that OSE isn't an "actual" search engine. They are doing their best to crawl the web with over a trillion links counted and crawled. I would give them several months more, you have to remember, not even Google updates their information frequently. So, OSE is a luxury in itself. What I would recommend would be instead of counting the links you have built, I would go build more, that will do you the most good.
-Alex
The most effective social media solutions would be: Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Myspace, Foursquare, etc.
These are the ones you would want to incorporate into your package.
If you could, clarify your question further so I can provide a better answer and so other people can join in too!
-Alex
I would use your robots.txt file to prevent them from crawling the specific strings / pages. Go into your Google Webmaster Tools and you can see all the information Google has on your site and any issues, you can also specify robots.txt information in there. That would be the best route as Google is obedient with what is on the robots.txt file. If you want more information about robots.txt, go here.
You've already invested in the domains, my as well leverage them. What these would be good for is to rank for the "exact matches" as exact match domains still to this date do well in the SERPs. I would hire a Filipino or someone for around $200 USD/month. Train them a little bit, then let them install wordpress, maintain the sites, build backlinks, etc. This would be my suggestion for the domain usage. You can also most likely buy more IPs from your hosting provider. So in essence, just try and get these sites ranked for the exact match terms and funnel the people to your "money site". Lastly, if you are really worried about the "spammy" look, add "nofollow" to the links.
No problem, let me know if you have any more questions.
-Alex
You could check your server stats on who is accessing your site, this should tell you what bots are going to your pages when. I don't know what control panel you are using for your site, but if you are using Cpanel, I am sure there are tutorials online to help you find this information.
That the bot isn't picking up or counting internal links, or the count is just of external links and it is follow vs. nofollow?
An alternate way that I often do competition analysis is using Market Samurai, its only $97 for a great tool.
If there is a discount here at SEOmoz, you would find it in the PRO discount area, which can be found here.
Otherwise the Expo Plus Pass is free if you register before hand and not at the door. More information can be found here.
Here is the Google training for Google Analytics. Take a look at this link: http://www.google.com/analytics/education.html
I haven't experienced them before, but their average review when you type in "Blurbpoint Review" on Google is around 3 to 3.5 stars. I have seen their ads on Facebook and such. Just trying giving them a call. My typical saying is: "If its too good to be true, it probably is."
That's my opinion. Take it for what its worth.
Hope that helps.
Not always, use the robots.txt to be 100% sure.
No problem, glad I could help. I am in these Q&A forums to make sure people get their questions answered, so please let me know if you have any more.
Not a problem, let me know if there is anything else I can help you with, or if you have any other questions.
Hey Alex,
First off, nice name 
Anyways, hyphens have shown to not be of any benefit in the search engines. It has really been exact match domains (with no hyphens) that have done the best. It won't negatively impact you, but it won't help either.
What I would do is focus on building a brand. In a recent blog post by Rand here, he had a presentation going over ranking factors and it has been concluded that exact match domains don't have as much importance as they used to.
I would focus on building a brand. If you look at the SERPs today, you will see that brands are continuing to show up, as they have trust with the users, which that is what Google is looking for.
Now to become a brand in Google's eyes was covered in a PRO webinar, which you can find here. This will ultimately be the best solution for you.
That's my opinion, let me know what you think by replying to me.
I look forward to hearing from you.
-Alex
You can use the search line on Google: site:www.example.com
This will tell you what Google has indexed on the site.
If you are looking for a specific sub-folder, then use: site:www.example.com/forum
Hope that helps.
If you don't want it to be discovered by the search engines cause it has too many links and such, block it with the robots.txt. It will still obviously be visible to the users on the site, but the search engines won't crawl it and possibly penalize it.
I would recommend that you have him lower the amount of links to other pages on and off site. This includes the possible redundant links that are in the header navigation and side navigation. Lower the amount of links on the page/site and you should be golden.
Not a problem, let me know if you have any other questions. I am here to help.
Google doesn't like "cloaking" type things, showing them different stuff than you show the users will get you penalized. Don't do it.
It's not a MAJOR element, but it could certainly help, I would say focus your efforts in building links. In regards, if you do move them, yes 301 them so any ranking value will get passed over time. Lastly, if you do have breadcrumb nav, you will need to change that.
I would say build a "brand" of it. Exact match domains are starting to show less significants in the SERPs. So I would say build a "brand". You can also learn some indications of that in a PRO webinar that was hosted within the past three months. You can also see some of the more recent ranking factors (including info about exact match domains) in a presentation Rand did in a blog post here.
Hi Anthony,
Adding "rel=nofollow" to the link to the certificate won't affect the load time, as the link is still there along with the badge and such. All that will do is make the link not pass any value to where ever it goes. Secondly, "rel=nofollow" cannot sculpt PageRank any longer. That became ineffective over a year ago with some Google updates. They basically didn't want people to manipulate PageRank on their own sites. So the best solution would be to find a different way to display the certificate/get the point across that your site is secure.
Alex
Everything looks good! Just make sure when you submit to UBL.org you have the same address, phone number, information, etc. This will get you better results, because from Google standpoint if a bunch of local sites/directories are all giving the same information about a business, it must be true (so they will give you better rankings).
Google Places has a very different algorithm compared to the organic Google Search algorithm. For Google Places, you will be optimizing their one Google Places page to get it to show up in the search results. The two main driving factors are reviews and citations, but I will go over an overview of the rough process you should do for them.
Quick definition of Citation: A listing in a local directory, online yellow pages, etc.
The Process
1. Claim and fill out or have them fill out their Google Places page COMPLETELY. Add descriptions, pictures, videos, EVERYTHING.
2. Have them proactively collecting (hand written) reviews so you can distribute them later on.
3. Go to UBL.org (Universal Business Listing) and purchase just the simple/basic package for them. TIP: Being a pro member of SEOmoz you have a group discount code that will give you great deals and instead of the basic package costing $39, it'll only cost $23. When registering at UBL.org use the code: seomoz2212. That's a great deal for you. The reason for this, is it will give you some nice citations all across the internet over the course of several weeks.
4. Collect the reviews from the client. At this point, you should be a few weeks in with the citations and you will be able to start posting reviews (DON'T EVER PUT THEM ON THE GOOGLE PLACES PAGE).
5. You will start posting reviews on the places with the citations (Yelp, Superpages, InfoUSA, etc.). How you will do this is, first scan your image and then post it to a place like Posterous.
6. Go to one of the places where your business has a citation and register an account, (on behalf of the client) and then post the transcribed review on the site with a link back to the original written review, that you posted on Posterous.
That's rough the process. Now we are posting on the citation locations because Google syndicates that to the Google Places page.
I know this may be a bit confusing, so definitely respond to this with questions and lets keep this discussion going.
Hi Mike,
I would say go for it. What this sounds like is three-way linking right? Three-way linking will give you a non traceable link profile which will add additional benefits. The automation part may be difficult, but could work. I'd recommend communicating directly with the webmasters though as it may be against TOS of the reciprocal link networks / systems.
Let me know what you think.
Having outgoing links to authority sites, shows an indication of usefulness for the end user which Google is looking for, because Google wants what's best for the end user. We have heard that from Matt Cutts time after time.
So, furthermore, first, I would just test it, because you don't know till you test.
What I would personally say would be have a mix of both (links to authority and internal links), because if you have been following the SEOmoz blog, the post today (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/facebook-twitters-influence-google-search-rankings) actually talks about ranking factors at the end with a power point, and internal links were still deemed a very valuable part of on-site optimization. So, I would change half of the outbound links to internal links.
Once again, just test it, then you can draw the conclusion yourself for your site and niche.
Not a problem. Let me know your results in a few weeks after you change the appropriate tags on your site. Keep in touch.
If you are listed in the DMOZ directory that could be affecting it, as Google sometimes pulls titles for sites based off of DMOZ. The amount of anchor text links pointing to your site with that keyword really shouldn't affect what the title tag says, but recently tests have shown that it can.
Always keep in mind though, that Google like "brands" because they like the trust that they bring for the users. Although, it could just be another thing Google is testing. My last point on the Title Tag change could be that Google decided that the Title Tags you gave them weren't relevant enough and you know, they could be pulling this from the anchors.
Anyways, the first thing I would try is make it so no robots use the DMOZ directory (also known as the: Open Directory Project) for titles and descriptions take a look at this link I found in a forum for you: http://www.v7n.com/forums/seo-forum/238598-how-can-i-remove-dmoz-description-about-my-site-google-yahoo-search-results.html
Let me know how long this Title Tag change has been going on, and we can test some things to get it back to normal.
Well, first off, you don't have very much content on the pages to start, which could hurt you in the long run. Now to answer your question, I'd say that the content is very similar and in the end one of them will get filtered out and the other won't get filtered (this is all deemed by Google). They will both probably stay indexed, but unless you have unique and different content for both, one will stay in the SERPs and one will be in the supplemental index. That's my two cents.
Agreed. You now have your work cut out for you Jose.
I would suggest that for each model you create different unique content on the page (as each model should have different features and variants). Now instead of adding a new page for each size of each model, have a drop down box (on the model's page) that lets you select the size, so the user can instantly see the sizes available for the model and then you don't have to scramble to generate new content for each size (which would be difficult). This is a win-win situation for the user and for the client. Hope that helps.
Have you thought about incorporating video into your message. This is a great way to keep the visitor on the site and have them do what you want them to do, like fill out a form, go to another page, etc. Video combined with autoplay, works great. After seeing many tests done on autoplay, it actually works. Anyways, suggesting that you add video was a bit off topic, but I thought I'd suggest it.
I would try spinning the articles and then adding them to different web 2.0 properties such as: Squidoo, Hubpages, etc. Here's a PDF of a list of them I found online: http://www.mediafire.com/?1hdlzwhz40n You can add in context links which will add additional value. This will also increase your unique domain count.
This is just Google likely testing the site, you may have heard of the term "Google Dance" this is likely what it is, but also, Google tests their SERPs immensely, so you may just be wrapped up in the test. Hopefully you don't get the shaft. I'd say, just wait a few days and see what happens.
