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You can use the Moz Crawl tool to identify Duplicate issues. You can get the same report for a competitor that you get in your campaign. http://pro.moz.com/tools/crawl-test

Yes it will.

This is fairly new to me so I'd like to know the answer to your question as well..

From the brief research I've done, I've read somewhat conflicting info. I've read that you could implement the rel=alternate tag on the geo-targeted page/subfolder that contains the dupe content. This will tell Google which page is the preferred version but for people searching in the targeted location it would return the geo-targeted page. (If its in a different language, you'd include the hreflang tag as well)

On the other hand, I also read that you cant geo target different countries if you have a country specific domain. So for example, website.ca is dedicated to serving canada results, and therefore cant geo target US. You can only geo-target when you have international domains (.com, .net, ,org etc.) I'm not sure how true this is, and cant find a source that explains this in detail.

If someone has experience in implementing geo-targeting with success (languages/locations/country specific domains etc) i'd also appreciate some clarification.

Greg

Nothing wrong with contributing to other websites! The problem comes up when you start scaling it up and do it to much! (quality decreases and footprints start to appear)

Instead of looking to "build" links through groups of webmasters that exchange content (My Blog Guest), why not find websites related to your industry manually that have blogs and reach out to the webmasters or editors?

You could look at what they've been publishing in the past and visualize what type of content they'd love to share with their audience and then pitch your ideas to the editor and see what they say. It doesn't have to be directly related to the service you offer as long as its in the same general industry.

Just remember, with guest posts, the intention is to write awesome content for a given website and its audience, not to try and sell anything or deliberately do it just to reference your site. Keep the website's audience in mind first and you should get your articles published on great sites!

Greg

Do you mean the Knowledge Graph? http://moz.com/blog/the-day-the-knowledge-graph-exploded

This is a tricky one and don't have an exact answer for you.

In my opinion, G+ plays a part in triggering the knowledge graph to display when searching for the brand name, but more importantly it needs to be an established and known brand first.

I wont go into details on how to "build a brand" but the jest is to make sure your back links are primarily (or a good percentage of them are) branded terms (this as well as many other factors)

Once Google recognizes your site as a brand, the knowledge graph should appear with all the info Google knows about it (Google + info etc) 
http://moz.com/webinars/online-reputation-management-branding-for-serp-domination

http://www.localseoguide.com/google-plus-takes-over-google-knowledge-graph-for-brands/

http://moz.com/ugc/brands-google-plus-and-the-knowledge-graph-a-love-triangle

Greg

How many links have you built to this site? Can you confirm that the links are live? Are the pages were the link exist indexed?

If you've been building links to this domain since January, the DA surely should have gone up by now. The DA is only measured by links pointing to the site and page speed doesn't influence this at all.

Check your webmaster tools account and see if Google is reporting on any links pointing to the site. If not, i'd audit the links you've built. Perhaps you linked to the wrong domain or those pages simply haven't been indexed yet.

Greg

Agreed,

As long as each of the location pages are unique but all contain the word "trip" you'll be fine.

Have you considered taking it a step further and researching what people search most for each location?

Example:

Atlanta Trip vs Atlanta Tours vs Atlanta Holiday vs Atlanta Vacation etc.

Obviously it would need to match the intent of the page, but you could further improve the page by matching what people search for most for each location in the URL and Title. (If "trip" is a common term for all locations, then use this across them all)

Greg

Strictly speaking, any form of duplicate content is frowned upon and in theory, if a link exists on a page with content identical to another website, that link would be less valuable.

If each of your descriptions in listings were unique to some extent, i'd guess the value of the link would be somewhat better.

I don't think you'd run a risk of getting penalties though as the dupe content doesn't originate on your site, (unless the description you plan on using is identical to content somewhere on your site)

I think the only negative to using the same description across multiple sites would be the value that passes with the link.

(I don't have any evidence for this though, just a theory)

Greg

Just use the Main domain URL.

I don't think individual pages are a factor. If you include the post URL, Google i assume only looks at the domain so either or, it doesn't matter, It just needs to confirm that your a contributor to a given domain.

To my knowledge, you have to do both for it to take effect.

You should include the rel=author tag on the post AND include the "contributor to" link in your G+ profile (Link to the website were you contributed)

Greg

I agree with Phillip,

If your site is established and ranking well for brand terms, then making this change shouldn't effect the over all branded rankings, especially seeing as your not taking the brand out completely.

The keywords should ideally be the main focus of the page, thus having your keywords in the front of the title should boost rankings for those targeted terms.

I have always used and recommended using: Main Keyword | Secondary Keyword - Brand Name

On a side note: Something i recently started noticing (I don't have any resources to refer to) is that quite a few of our competitors don't use the "Keyword | Keyword - Brand" formula, instead they use "Great [Keyword] deals from leading [keyword] suppliers - Brand Name" and they seem to be ranking really well. (More descriptive words that entice users)

Perhaps Google is starting to prefer "natural" looking titles (including stop words, adjectives etc) and not putting much extra value on "optimized" title tag formula's (Keyword | Keyword - Brand) This is just a thought and haven't researched it much.

Greg

Its your logo thats causing the issue.

Notice that its supposed to link back to the home page, instead its linking to the page your on and its including /index.html at the end of the URL.

Not sure how the header image is set up, but have a look at that, it will fix your 404 errors.

Greg

Your campaign does the checks automatically. You cant force it to re-scan. However, you can use the moz crawl tool and export the CSV document to confirm you've fixed the issues.

All the info is identical to the weekly moz crawl, only without diagrams and charts etc.

http://pro.moz.com/tools/crawl-test

Greg

IMO Alt image tags shouldn't play a part in over optimization i wouldn't think. If anything, reduce the amount of times the product name is mentioned in the content.

If i were to further improve the alt image tags however, i'd suggest including descriptive words as well as the product name:

Original: Blue Shoes

New: Shiny Blue Shoes for Boys

This way, your not laser targeting each page for a certain keyword and instead mixing it up a bit for users. It looks natural this way and your images should still rank for the keywords.

Greg

Yes, there is a way.

Use the Rel=canonical tag on your duplicate pages. Essentially you'll be telling google: "This is page B, which is a duplicate of Page A, please use Page A when displaying results in the SERPS"

Insert the code on the head of your page. Example:

Page A: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394?hl=en

Hi Mathew,

There was an interesting discussion on this subject on another question thread here

There was no definite yes or no to your question, some people experienced the penalty being passed over and others didn't. In theory, if 301's passed penalty, webmasters could 301 all their "dead" sites to competitors and this would be a mission for Google to control should the 301 pass over the penalty.

Based on Rands comments in that thread, he believes 301's dont pass on any penalties and it may be due to other factors that contribute to the low rankings on the new sites since implementing the 301.

My suggestion would be to go ahead and do the permanent redirect. As you say, you cant afford loosing return customers. Let us know how it goes.

Greg

I've been playing around with a few excel plugins trying to get the visit count for over 350 different URL's on the same website.

I cant seem to find a function that can do this. Can anyone advise a work around or a way i can achieve this?

Greg

IMO. Google wont ever penalize someone for providing relevant and useful content to a website. The only time it would become an issue is when the site you guest blog on, is no different to a link exchange website built only for the search engines.

If you provide a great article to a site that actually serves a purpose and naturally link back to your site (contextual links that support the message in the article), then you have nothing to worry about. If you submit your "guest post" to a site no different to the old school article directories, then you're doing it wrong and Google will pick up on this.

When they say guest posts need to contain a no-follow link, this applies to "sponsored posts" were you pay a fee to get your article published. This is no different to a paid link and if its paid, you need to no-follow.

With a niche like yours, find creative ways to create content that's not directly related to your website. If its gambling, think about related entities. "Board games, Bingo nights for Seniors, Card games etc. There are loads of websites that talk about these subjects that may be interested in guest articles that you can use to legitimately link back to your gambling website (without a bad neighborhood)

Greg

Great insight John, thanks for the words of wisdom.

What are you thoughts regarding sub-domains? You could have also created a sub-domain and geo targeted a specific country for each.

Example:

www.website.com (Global)

uk.website.com (UK Only)

au.website.com (Australia Only)

I'm not sure if sub-domains or new domains have more weight than the other, but it makes sense to keep the site and brand as a whole intact rather than creating new domains and just geo target each for their respective country/audience.

Greg

The take away i assume you should have got from that article is that blogging is both a part Social and SEO.

1. Google is attracted to fresh content. The more you blog, the more Google visits your website which in tern adds more content to its index resulting in more organic search traffic.

2.) Blogging on your site is a great way to engage with your customers and visitors on your site. The same way you engage in Social media. Blogging and sharing the content on social platforms is essentially a part of your social strategy.

In a nutshell, creating blog posts oftent increases the engagement you have with your audience (on social channels as well as comments on your blog) and at the same time improves the over all SEO of your site.

Hope that helps!

Greg

Hi Lisa,

When viewing posts per tag, the content on that page is identical to the content on another page which is triggering the dupe content.

The general rule of thumb is to no-index your tag pages. If you're using wordpress, Yoast SEO plugin allows you to set the no-index tag automatically.

Greg

I have always been under the impression that by connecting pages to their parent pages as described in a.) below is best practice and makes sense to me.

a.) yoursite.com/category/sub-category/product/

b.) yoursite.com/product

But then i also understand the importance in terms of link juice being spread out across so many sub pages, and by using Example b.) you keep the link juice in tact.

Your thoughts on this?

Greg

Moz doesn't just look at the text of a page, it also looks at the template and how "similar" it appears compared to other pages.

Here's a quote from Dr. Pete:

"Our system currently uses a threshold of 95% to determine whether content is duplicated. This is based on the source code (not the text copy), so the amount of actual duplicate content may vary depending on the code/content ratio."

Here are a few articles you can read to get a deeper understanding.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-block-redirect-or-canonical

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-illustrated-guide-to-duplicate-content-in-the-search-engines

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/rethinking-duplicate-content

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/fat-pandas-and-thin-content

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-illustrated-guide-to-duplicate-content-in-the-search-engines

Greg

Thanks Matt,

That's cleared it up.

I was always under the assumption that the publish date displayed in the serps was the date it was found and indexed.

Thanks again,

Greg

Thanks Mat,

I'm still not 100% clear on this.

Were it says "published 3 days ago" in the search results. Is this the date that google first found the page? Or does google get this from the published date set in the article?

Example: If i publish an article today, and say it was published in 2010 will Google display "Published 3 years ago" ? Or would it show the date Google first found the page?

Greg

Here's the scenario.

I create a page called "ABC" and it gets published and found by Google lets say on the 13th of April.

on the 15th (or 14th) i decide to update the URL, page Title, and content. (Redirect old URL to new URL as well)

Will Google still show this page as being published on the 13th? or would it update the publish date according to the new URL?

Greg

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1.) Your sitemap isn't indexed by google (I cant find it in the search results) site:http://villasdiani.com/sitemap_index.xml

• Include a link to your sitemap on your home page footer (preferably site wide)

• Submit your sitemap to Google in Webmaster tools to confirm its been indexed.

2.) Come to think of it,  because your archive template pages target the same keywords, perhaps you can actually check that option to no-index paginated pages as there is no need to index them. (all paginated pages target the same keywords creating whats called "cannibalization" which essentially means your pages are competing with each other)

While your at it though, be sure to also update the title tags for these archive pages.

IE: "Beach Villas" could be "Kenya Luxury Beach Villa's"

When you edit the page, you should see the Yoast tool near the bottom with an option to include a Title Tag.

Good luck!

Greg

The examples you gave aren't duplicates so don't worry about enabling that option.

All the "rentals" pages are using the archive template. Essentially its just a template like any other template you have set up. Usually archives list historical articles and posts and are generally no-indexed but your archive template is set up differently.

2 things i noticed.

You don't have a sitemap on your home page and nothing here: http://villasdiani.com/sitemap.xml

Your archive title tags im guessing are generated automatically, you might want to change the title tags on all "rentals" pages and only include the main descriptive keyword.

I hope this helps.

Greg

• 1 Daniel

Instead of asking for something, stand out from the crowed and GIVE them something.

Link to them in one of your posts, share something of there's on your FB profile, engage on their forums and add value to the conversations.

Helping someone without asking for anything in return is a great way to build a lasting relationship. In time, they will link to you without you even having to ask, even if you ask, at least you wont be another random in their email inbox. After engaging with them, at least they would know who you are and might respond positively to your emails.

Just remember, its not about "building" links anymore. Its about earning them!

Greg

The reason for this option is to avoid duplicate content from being indexed.

Could you give an example of one of your category pages?

Greg

Its not bad at all in my opinion, especially if its a sub domain.

All its going to do is pass on SEO value to your root domain.

If you'd like to keep the link juice on your blog intact, you could make the menu links no-follow.

Greg

I've actually just finished listening to a podcast about this entitled "Fail proof content"

Essentially, instead of thinking about what to write in the hopes that someone links to the content, why not instead look for content that is already being linked to from websites in your industry.

For example, you could have a look at competitor sites, or even sites that are in your general niche (web hosting, web design, user experience etc etc)

Pop them into opensiteexplorer and export the backlink profile. After this, you can try and identify what content people are linking to. Once you've identified what they have on their sites that people like, you simply do the same, but even better.

Once the content is up, you can reach out to websites similar to the ones who linked to the competitors content and suggest they link to yours, (or just make them aware of the content without asking for anything)

http://pointblankseo.com/fail-proof-content

Some link worthy content + rich snippets and good on page SEO will surely help you compete with your competitors

Greg

Thanks Tom,

I've noticed a few sites doing this lately. Mostly with a separate directory or "resource" page. I assume its because they don't want people to leave their website? If they were trying to avoid link juice from parsing, surely they would just make the link no-follow?

Here's another example: This one doesn't have such a long URL though..

http://www.embajada-sudafrica.cl/instituciones-comisiones.htm

Hi All,

Noticed this link in opensiteexplorer. Its not marked as no-follow, but not sure if this link would pass any value?

http://goafrica.about.com/od/southafrica/a/selfdrivesa.htm

Click on any external link, it takes you to a "preview" page from within the main website.

Is this a false positive? As in it shows as a follow link, but when you actually click it, it doesnt redirect to the website.

Any thoughts on this?

Greg

I think I've answered my own question..

We cant get local listings for each branch location as we need have a G+ profile for each etc, but can do rich snippets and other markups that will separate these pages from the rest of the serp results.

Hi All,

Something i'm trying to understand about Google local but cant find precise info about what we are thinking of doing.

We are located in City A, but also provide our services in almost every city in our country. We broker the service to branches that don't have their own local websites and want to take advantage of being listed in each city by marking up the address of each branch on each of our specific branch pages.

All our pages are currently marked up using the physical company address. Would their be any issues marking up separate branch pages to the corresponding branch address, and then taking advantage of Local results in many areas around the country?

In other words,

Is it possible for a single website to mark up separate pages for different locations and take advantage of local results for each?

Thanks in Advance

Greg

I've always wondered about that...

I think that especially for commercial terms, you would want to diversify your anchor profile were possible.

But then you have a case were the brand name is not commercial, in this case i would think using your brand name in your anchor is best.

I remember cleaning up our link profile by changing commercial anchor text to just using our brand name which helped, but then what about the exact match domains? Does this apply for them as well? Is it possible to have a "brand" with a term like "Cardiscount.com" without Google mistaking it for a commercial term?

As you say, mix and match is the best approach just a bit confusing building a brand when the brand itself is a commercial term.

Greg

Pages and Domains are read differently with these tools i imagine.

Your domain has "internet marketing" but your page might not.

If you would prefer NOT to have the keyword in the PAGE url aswell as the domain (for user experience reasons), i wouldn't stress about it as the keyword IS in the URL..

Its just a case of the tools reading the page URL and not taking the domain keywords into consideration.

Greg

I think what the OP wants to do is create a few micro sites with the main objective of getting links to his main website.

OP, its not worth the time and effort. If the microsite serves a purpose other than simply linking to your site from within the articles then go for it. If your hoping to see an improvement in rankings by doing this, its not going to be worth your while.

Greg

http://www.seomoz.org/pages/search_results?q=link+building.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/whiteboard-friday

http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo

The above URL's will get you started. Link building is not a simple as submitting a link here and there. Its better to understand the process as a whole and your view on link building will be less daunting.

There are many different ways to go about building links and wont bore you here. Just take your time and soak up as much knowledge on the topic as you can. (then come back here and ask more questions!

Greg

I havnt tested or tried it yet, but here's your answer.

http://seogadget.com/links-data-excel-seomoz-api/

You'll need excel + SEO tools for Excel.

I'll give it a bash a bit later and see if it works.

Greg

Hi,

If your title tag is too long, or if it contains to many similar words (or repeated words/phrases) Google will use what it thinks is better.

Keep your title tags short and descriptive and don't include too many different keywords 2 at most in my opinion.

Greg

Mozbot usually crawls once every 7 days and takes a day or two to complete the crawl.

Give it at least 7 days.

On the bottom right under "Crawl diagnostics" for your campaign, it should say when the next crawl is scheduled.

Greg

I like the 3 organic traffic metrics in SEOmoz PRO:

1) Organic Search Visits
2) URLs Receiving Entrances Via Search
3) Non-Paid Keywords Sending Search Visits

They rock - especially for a high-level view of SEO / Organic performance.

Is it possible to setup these metrics as custom reports directly in Analytics?

Does anyone have these reports setup?

Or maybe there are similar custom reports that give a similar high-level view?

I would leverage the domain name and create a sub domain. Its still the same company, but with a different service so a sub domain would work best imo.

I would milk the sister domains, but don't wait for a ban. Work out a way to avoid the duplicate content flag by either linking to the original content, or by using unique content.

It will take much more time and effort, but worth it if you want to maintain the traffic coming from those sites.

• Greg

It might not work so well in the long run.

Your HTACCESS file will get very big slowing down the redirect process. I cant say how long it would take, but the bigger your htaccess file, the slower the redirects.

Try to get your targeted keyword in the front of the Title tag if possible. Your example above doesn't dilute the page as it doesnt compete with any of your other page (blue paint, green paint etc), it just adds some enticing copy to encourage clicks.

When you are faced with a challenge of either using a highly searched exact match term like "Red Paint" but feel that it doesn't read well in the serps, go with what users would prefer.

Example:

Best for SEO :

Red Paint at Great Prices - CompanyName

Best for SEO + better click through's:

Quality Red Paint at Great Prices

Use the first example as much as you can, (the exact match keyword) and use the second example when the exact match keyword doesn't make sense or doesn't sound enticing.

You want your title tags to be as specific about a page as possible. Only include the most relevant keywords in you Title tag. Synonyms are welcome, but not keywords unrelated to the page.

In the case mentioned above, a page about "Red Paint" should have a title tag with ONLY

"red paint | redish paint | blood red paint" etc.

Greg