Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Glad to hear it and do post again with any additional questions

-Andy

Hi Ruben,

Some services will get that many reviews daily, so I wouldn't have said that 8-12 in a week was a problems.

That said, I always tend to err on the side of caution, so perhaps drip-feed them over a 2-3 week period if you want to make sure you are safe.

-Andy

Hi,

There are no real rules around this and if you haven't said 'welcome' to others, I might be tempted to avoid doing so this time. People won't be following your Twitter account in order to have you welcome them; it is more about what you have to say and offer.

Keep up with the level of Twitter activity and if you wish to engage with them, watch out for their Tweets and start by commenting and re-tweeting what they say. It is a nice way to ease into making more contact with them.

Andy

Link juice isn't passed equally through all links, but does trickle through at some level. Exactly what this is, is something of an unknown though. Perhaps someone can add a little more clarification on this?

I would say that adding another good quality link would make little (if any) difference and it is not something I would hesitate doing myself.

However, there comes a point where a page full of links will have a negative effect, but with just a few well targeted ones, I would say you would be fine with that.

Regards,

Andy

I have been doing this a long time now and have never come across anyone who endorses this as a technique. To me if it smells even slightly of desperation or 'grey hat' then I steer well clear.

You can  rest assured that Google will get what the page and site are about without having all of these multiple links to the same pages being thrown at them - in the same way they say not to keyword stuff because they don't need to keep being told

Regards,

Andy

I use Google Chrome and just open an Incognito window that clears all cache, history, sign-ins etc.

Shift+Cmd+N on the Mac

Andy

Ria gave a great URL to read there, but unless I missed them, it's missing a few points, like:

• Do you feel you have been hit by any penalties? Show stats and dates of concern.
• Do you have a monthly budget you are trying to work to?

There are a lot more that I would ask, but these are ones I couldn't miss.

-Andy

Hi Bridget,

Is there a plugin that you have installed recently for structured data?

Google did say a little while ago that spammy markup could be handed as a penalty, but it's a little difficult to know what is doing it.

Just took a quick look at your homepage in Google's structured data testing tool and this is what it shows (this error is repeated 3 times).

| author | A value for the author field is required. |

This might be something as simple as disabling the author option, but it's a bit hard to say without testing.

-Andy

Hi Robert,

You are going to want an escrow service of sorts, perhaps someone like Escrow.com or Agreed.com. I do recall someone saying that Sedo offer domain brokerage, but again, you would need to have a look.

I hope this gives you a few places to look at.

-Andy

it is down to Google as to how long they would consider it a problem, but the thing to do here is to request a reconsideration of your site.

This is done through your webmaster tools and gives you a chance to tell Google what you have done.

Bad reputation caused by the site in the past can only be rectified by doing some reputation management

Have a look at this from Rand - makes some interesting reading and will answer just about every question you have.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-vs-bing-correlation-analysis-of-ranking-elements

Regards,

Andy

If they are category pages, then yes, I would move them. However, there seem to be an awful lot there. Probably more category pages than I have seen on a blog. I would be looking to change this, if it were mine, and present it in a usable format, rather than lots of links like this. There also appear to be different links on each page, that doesn't show consistency with the categories on offer.

I also couldn't find these categories from the menu structure anywhere?

-Andy

It is up to Google Zack and there is never a guarantee that they will show, but you would like to think that they would be adopted at some point.

What I would also suggest, is having a look on the Google forums for help as well.

-Andy

Hi,

Have you followed the guide to getting yourself included? Have a read of this:

https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/40787?hl=en-GB

This will tell you everything you need to do to get yourself included.

I hope this helps.

-Andy

Matt Cutts has been quoted recently stating that perhaps they give too much rank to keywords in domain names, so tread carefully as this could change.

Regards,

Andy

To give you an idea, I did a test to see if Yahoo still uses them, and they do - however, Yahoo say they don't place much stock on them but they could be the difference between you getting above a competitor or not. However, Google and Bing don't use them at all.

Personally, I don't bother.

Regards,

Andy

Hi David,

Well, if you use a tool that can change the name of the bot that comes after a site, then you can't do anything about it. However, I do know that SEMrush is causing problems for some hosts and the likes of Heart Internet, they block access to the SEMrush bot on all of their servers.

To be honest with you, it is quite difficult to block everything and time consuming and unless you have some secret formula to keywords that are magically drawing in more traffic, then I wouldn't worry about it too much.

Take Accuranker. I use this for tracking and part of setting up, is it will find new phrases that I perhaps haven't been using or looking at before. It doesn't get these from either SEMrush or Ahrefs. All of this information is available from many sources.

I would honestly spend the time making your pages as good as they can be. Look at your cometitors. Are they winning? How are they doing it? Fight back against them rather trying to hide yourself from view.

-Andy

Avoid spinning content at all costs. By all means read articles, understand them and re-write them from scratch, but don't copy snippets or sentences otherwise you run the risk of coming under the watchful eye of the Google Farmer algorithm - and you definitely don't want that!

Regards,

Andy

Hi Bob,

Is there a reason that you want to also target G+? I hear many differing reports on successes people have on here, but if you know there is a good community that you want to break into on there, then go for it.

In terms of best articles, where do you start - Facebook marketing is a huge subject with so many guides on how to get the best from it, but most agree that Videos get the best successes.

Are you looking to promote a particular brand or is this just something you need to gather more information on?

-Andy

You can't ask Yahoo to do anything about it. Each SE will have their own algorithm which will mean results differ. You optimise for one, another will suffer.

My advise is just carry on following standard guidelines for a well designed site, keep it fresh with good, strong content and be active in Social Media, as the SE's do use Twitter and Facebook as metrics.

Good backlinks are always going to help, but you need to have something good there for them to want to.

Regards,

Andy

Personally, I optimise for Google and do very well in Bing and Yahoo without having to try. There are subtle differences but at the end of the day, they all want the same thing.

The same for all of my customers - there is such a small amount of traffic that comes from them, that I am not going to potentially ruin Google rankings in order to get slightly better ranking in the other two.

Andy

138 audits competed to date and counting.

Private Message sent

-Andy

Amen to that!

In terms of writers, it depends what market they are in. You might find some that are specific to their industry (or maybe not). I have heard good things about Copify and know a few places that deal with them.

In terms of additional activities, the next best bang for buck will be to ensure all pages are targeting phrases correctly (meta, titles, etc), but you are likely to get the most from a solid link-building campaign. Have you also thought about creating them a Wikipedia page?

It's all about the content at the end of the day. The more content you can get out there for the products, the better off you will be. Just be careful not to spin content. Keep it as clean as possible

I am always cautions about adding microsites for SEO benefits as these can come back and bite you hard when you least expect it.

Personally, I tend to steer clear of doing this and would opt to keep adding content to your existing site. It doesn't all have to be on the same page, but link out to a few niche articles you could write.

Keep it straight forward and you will have no problems

Regards,

Andy

Hi,

Alexa is a bit of a funny one really, but have a read of how they work out rankings here. Someone needs to have the Alexa Toolbar installed in order to contribute to the stats seen. I am pretty sure this hasn't changed.

It has never been a good source of useful stats for me.

-Andy

You can also read what Google suggest on how to tackle this problem here

Basically, you can add a rel=canonical tag to both a PDF and HTML documents to help overcome this issue.

Andy

Everyone is always going to have different approaches Brian

But just in terms of budget, Matthew's client has around £15k per month, which sits very firmly in the 6-figure region.

Like yourself, I can only speak from experience of what has worked for my clients. Diversity is what makes the world go round

A number of years ago it would have been an absolute no-no, but I have seen some sites rank for a some low-contention phrases recently, but to be honest, I wouldn't like to try and SEO a complete flash site. There is just so much around best practice that you can't do.

Going social to get mentions, +1's, shares, likes, Tweets, etc, could help to a lesser degree, but really, unless you are wanting to go down an unethical path, it's never really going to happen.

Andy

There was a school of thought a number of years ago that thought that Google would ignore the fact that there were no spaces between two words - and for some phrases that are not as highly contested, you might find this is still the case - but I can't think of any occurrences of anything that I am working with now where concatenated words will yield the same or better results - separate the words wherever possible.

Andy

Thank you both! You are both SEOmnipotent. See what I did there?

I might pinch that

With the links, something else you will probably need to do, is perform a disavow of the ones you don't want to be associated with. Google would eventually get round to them all, but i'll bet that with a bit of digging, you won't just find the links from the network the only issues.

And thank you Egol

-Andy

Move on or find one who takes bribes

To be honest, I have had no job getting sites in there for a long time now. Plus, it isn't the authority it once was.

Andy

Hi Geraldine,

Have you had a look at traffic in Analytics and confirmed that it is the final purchase stage that isn't happening? Or is it that traffic to pages aren't moving through to the product pages? Is this a new problem, or is it something that has just started? Have there been any changes to the site recently?

In these circumstances, I find that using something like Crazy Egg also helps to diagnose what is wrong as this will give you a heatmap of how the page is being used. This can be quite an eye opener!

-Andy

Unless the content can be re-written into something useful, I wouldn't bother publishing it. It will do you no favours to have content that no-one wants to read. You want visitors to be excited to know you have produced something, not groan and look away

As David said, you will get nothing for doing this, unless it were a re-banding exercise and was unavoidable.

Stick with what you have and just write more great content as that is where the big benefits will come from.

Andy

I asked Rand this exact question about 2 weeks ago - it might happen at some point, but they have lots going on to get the site done first.

Here's hoping it will happen

I tried to become an editor some time ago and never went anywhere - this was mainly down to the fact application mails bounced.

Hi,

Brand is very important to Google now, and you need to shout about it as much as you can and it can help with a number of factors, especially now Google has said that Brands will gain dominances in the SERPs for related searches.

Rather than turn this into a huge thread, have a read of this article, which looks at many aspects of what Google is doing to branding now:

http://socialmediatoday.com/georgestevens48/1317336/google-rewriting-page-titles-time-brand

-Andy

Ignoring everything else (elephants included), from a users point of view, if someone is in the US and sees content on a UK domain, they are less likely to click on it.

I would go down the route of a .com and then find content to make it worthwhile.

You also don't need to wonder where best to point GWT - UK or US. From a positioning point in the SERPs, remember that a .com is generic whilst a .co.uk is UK-centric. Even if it was a part of a .co.uk, I don't know how well it would rank in the US. There are so many factors to take into consideration.

Andy

Hi Raphael,

Basically, if you are only loading in results based on when someone lands on a page, and showing results that are not pre-determined, then you are right, there is nothing really here for Google to do anything with in terms of SEO. However, done right and this shouldn't be a problem and just write some great content for the page that Google can see.

Presumably you will be using an iFrame or similar?

Andy

It's a waiting game sadly - there is no extensive reporting available for us that shows where we were, etc, or has any history. You would need to use something else as well if you want to see a timeline.

Regards,

Andy

If you are noticing a slip Colin, it might help to see if this coincides with an algorithm update. Rarely will a site drop in the SERPs for no reason, and having a blog isn't going to do this on its own.

Have you had a look for issues that might relate to Panda or Penguin? How much SEO have you been doing? Do you think you might have been trying too hard?

It can also be because other sites are performing SEO while you have just been writing blog posts, you might have missed an update that required some additional work.

There are so many possibilities why this can be, but it is always worth starting with a look at the ones that cause the most issues.

Andy

This is a subject where you are going to get a lot of disagreement and I think that the guy who insists on having HisBigAssCompany on the front end of the title tag will argue a lot louder and longer than I do. 

Amen to that

I don't agree at all with having brands at the front - not needed, but when Google appends it with this, there isn't a lot you can do, sadly. If you see a Brand: <title></strong>, then you know Google have been doing their thing.</p> <p>-Andy</p></title>

No problem at all.

As for a chain of redirects, this isn't how Google will see it. They even say that a redirect from one page to another is fine... it's when you get into the realms of 'page a --> page b --> page c' that it will become a problem.

A temporary redirect when used for a permanent move is a little dodgy to say the least and should be corrected. Also, what is the chance of 20 people hitting the same page at exactly the same second? And even if they do, it just means they each wait half a second rather than 22ms - I can see no problem with that whatsoever. Even at half a second, this is still very fast.

You can still cache pages through htaccess if you want - doesn't mean you have to ignore caching just because you do things the right way

Andy

I have seen this issue before and it turned out the tracking code had been accidentally placed on 2 different sites. Is there any possibility this could have happened?

Can I also suggest you give people a bit of a warning that this site is adult in nature and definitely not safe for work!

Andy

The only other tool I use regularly is called SEO Ranking and it is an iPad app and also for the iPhone. It helps to be mobile with these things

I am sure there are lots out there - perhaps others will be able to chip in with some additional info?

Regards,

Andy

"In my opinion the PR services have been infiltrated by a lot of spammers who wear suits to work."

What a fantastic way of putting this Egol

There is no guarantee Google will do this. The advice is work on Brand, but you can't guarantee they will change anything.

-Andy