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Thanks for the response. This is a definitely work around, but for Products / Offers only.
This doesn't help when applying Microdata / Schema to "global" site specific parameters, such as Author or Organization.(http://schema.org/Organization)Any one have any ideas of how this should be handled on a global level that doesn't involve turning the Microdata On / Off?
I have a quick question regarding Microdata / Schema.org files that are not hosted on secure connections.
I receive a receive a security error from my e-commerce site because the code references the schema over HTTP instead of HTTPS.<div< span="">itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Product"></div<>This is not the first time I have run into this issue. We also use MRSS schema for an RSS feed from yahoo and the same thing happens.<div< span="">xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss"></div<>The problem mainly lies in the fact that these schemas are not hosted over HTTPS. If you add HTTPS to the beginning of both you will get a security error.Just wondering if anyone else has dealt with this or similar issue and what the "best practices" are around this?Is it ok to obtain the schema directly and then host it on our server, over our secure connection?Thanks!
The white hat in me knows that the answer to this question is most likely that the company bloggers should write under their own names, else the very concept of AuthorRank is undermined. Yet, I've had these questions for a while now and I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts on the issue. Hoping this sparks some good discussion.
On a recent post in /r/SEO I mentioned that I used SEOHosting.com in the past, and it was met with several warnings that this could result in deindexation or penalization. I just wanted to know if there is anything to back this up.
I did some digging on my own and it looks like some of the private blog networks that got shut down recently were using SEOHosting.com, and they were speculating (screenshot of pertinent parts included below) that this is how Google was able to track down their network and shut 'em down. But I've also heard a lot of speculation that the smartest way for Google to map out these networks would be to create tons of content, submit it all, and look for patterns - which has me wondering what role, if any, SEOHosting.com played in taking down the private blog networks earlier this month.
Is using SEOHosting.com a legitimate concern? Is it a threat even to websites that meet Google's quality guidelines? Is it especially a threat to those that don't?
Any thoughts you guys have would be greatly appreciated.
The SEOmoz Web App is showing me that every single URL on one of my clients' domains has a duplicate in the form of the URL + :80.
For instance, the app is showing me that www.example.com/default.aspx is duplicated in the form of www.example.com:80/default.aspx
Any idea if this is an actual problem or just some kind of reporting error? Any help would be appreciated.
Quite simply, you can't access someone else's analytics data. Well, not without their username and password, or an extremely talented hacker, at least.
There are a few ways (think Alexa) you can estimate traffic - some of them are better than the rest, but all of them are imperfect. When you compare a website to another and use these metrics in a relative sense, however, they can be useful. Try looking up the estimated search volume of a competitors' brand names compared to your brand name using the Google Keyword Tool. This won't give you an accurate traffic estimate, but it might just help you figure out who's getting the most traffic and where your website falls in the market.
This is exactly the kind of situation that rel="canonical" exists for. Product color is one of those classic examples SEOs bring up when explaining canonicalization. Don't trust Google to figure things out on their own - make it clear to them that these pages are related and should be treated as such.
Most strategies that work well for dominating your brand name SERP usually rely on piggybacking off another website's massive domain authority, optimizing the on-page factors as much as possible for your brand, and running a small linkbuilding campaign towards these webpages to give them a page authority bump and a backlink profile with targeted anchor text.
Sources that work well for this type of campaign are :
Additionally, make sure you have Sitelinks properly set up, as this can sometimes make your website the only search result above the fold.
Another amazingggg strategy that I read somewhere last year is to always keep a generic, can-be-released-whenever press release written and ready to go. Get a negative blog writeup or some bad press that's appearing in your search results because it's at the top of Google News? Release your PR and push it out of the way. So. Effing. Smart.
Will it cause harm? Not likely. If Google suspects the links aren't kosher, it will probably just ignore (or "devalue") the links.
As to whether it is a shady or manipulative practice - debatable. From my perspective, I don't quite see how it is all that different from a company linking to its partners, suppliers, or customers. The link represents a business relationship, and that relationship has value. If I have a client in the position to get these kinds of links, for me it's a no brainer - get 'em. At the very worst, they have no impact SEO-wise, but help with branding and referral traffic. Google's perspective may differ.
As to why the practice might not be working out so well for you - do you run linkbuilding campaigns for the websites you develop? Does anybody? Do many of the websites share a C class address?
A bunch of links from websites with weak backlink profiles or the same C class addresses won't take you very far.
BONUS - a few linkbuilding tactics guaranteed to work:
Nope, and you won't find that kind of tool anywhere, the reason being that each page on your website probably ranks for hundreds of extremely long-tail keywords and keyphrases.
The best way to see the information you're looking for is to take all keywords that sent you an organic search visit for a given time period in your analytics and run them through a rank checker. You can then cross-check this data with the Google Keyword Tool to figure out which keywords are getting significant traffic.
This can be a great way to spot "low-hanging fruit" - keywords that you are ranking for naturally and are sending some traffic, but might just need a little push to get your page to the #1 spot.
I have nothing but respect for you and your opinion, EGOL. I've said that countless, countless, countless times. And obviously I believe in the power of content, and that's always the first recommendation I make to anybody - as I did above, by recommending content-based link building strategies.
Don't get me wrong, your response is not bad advice - not by any means. But I do have my qualms with it.
A. It's kind of misleading. We get it - your content is amazing and it attracts back links. My qualm here is that I don't think that's something that everybody can replicate easily. In order for that to work, you need either a strong community, significant influence on a social network like Twitter, the good fortune of working in an industry that really embraces social bookmarking and blogging, or a lot of elbow grease.
Even if Joe the Plumber writes an amazing resource guide to fixing any plumbing problem in the world, he's still going to have to market it to bloggers (that he doesn't have connections with), on his social media profiles (that nobody follows), and on social bookmarking sites (where nobody cares, because it's not a picture of an adorable kitten). He's still going to have to work hard to get links to that content, by networking - which IS link building and IS hard work. Just creating great content isn't quite enough, and to suggest so is misleading.
B. It's kind of lazy. Take the above poster, for instance. We both recommended that the right approach here is to write great content - you by saying so directly, and me via recommending content-based link building strategies and linking to the Professional's Guide to Link Building. But as you can tell, speed of link acquisition and cost minimization are key concerns for the original poster. Whose response do you think provided more value here?
I just kind of feel like if all you do is recommend that people write great content, and you don't qualify that by saying that you're still going to need to market that content, or by tailoring your response to fit the concerns of the original poster, at what point does this advice lose its value and just become more noise?
I don't mean to disrespect you in any way. I've seen you give amazing, amazing advice more times than I can count. And I know your time is valuable, and like the rest of us, you do this for free. And I respect that. I just felt as though I should share my opinion on this, because I know that for every thumbs down this post gets, there are going to be 20 people who completely agree with what I've said, even if they don't have the balls to say so publicly.
Sorry for hijacking the thread, OP - I just can't help but speak my mind. And for those that don't know me, I'm not some random jerk off the street that's complaining about writing great content. I try really hard to help out everybody I can on these forums, and I mean well. All I'm trying to do is make the SEOmoz Q&A boards a more helpful place.
Generally speaking, there is no way to automate linkbuilding and get high quality links. The links that you really want to be getting are from relevant, authoritative websites in your niche. There are a number of ways to get these high quality links, particularly content-based link building strategies. Any links that can be automatically built, such as directory submissions, forum profile backlinks, and blog commenting, are typically of minimal value.
That's not to say that you can't scale high quality link building, however. Ross Hudgens wrote a great post a while back about scaling SEO by eliminating pain points. Some of the advice in that article is greyhat, or borderline blackhat, but the general message is very valuable. Obtaining high quality backlinks is always going to be a time intensive process that requires hard work and creativity, but you can certainly make the process smoother, easier, and more efficient.
There are a number of other great resources around the web that discuss scaling link building:
T - Just like Gyi, I do my best to keep all of my clients in the loop about what our options are, exactly what we are doing, how it is being done, and the results we have achieved (yes, even when they're negative, although thankfully those situations have been few and far between).
A - Quite simply, I just be myself. Yes, sometimes this means that when I'm explaining something to a client, my response might be a long, drawn out extended metaphor about fantasy football or hip hop, but either way, at least I'm being me.
G - This starts with my time here on this Q&A board, and on other outlets like Quora or SEOchat. Likewise, everybody in the industry has that friend or family member that has a billion questions, and I do my best to be patient with those requests as well. I can't tell you how many times an innocent happy hour has turned into a full blown SEO strategy session.
F - I try to get to know all of my clients personally. I don't want to be the guy that drops in once a month with an invoice. I'm the guy that's invited to the company holiday party and drinks the Vice President of the company under the table.
E - I try to be flexible. This is a big one when it comes to working with the team members of my clients. The last thing you want is to have a client's programming or PR team think you're stepping on their toes, so you need to remember to see their viewpoint, and consider their job. The world doesn't revolve around SEO (as much as we would like to believe it does), and in the business world, sometimes you have to make compromises and work in situations that aren't ideal. At the end of the day, we're all just people on the planet Earth, and you need to be able to have some give and take.
E - I try to go above and beyond, be it with the information I give out for free on forums like this, the blog posts I create to help educate people, the work I do for my clients, or even the proposals I create when I'm talking to a prospective client. Being exceptional pays dividends through and through. I've converted people I gave free advice to into clients countless times, and by working hard and offering a great product, I've managed to enjoy a high customer retention rate. Work on every campaign as if it is your own!
This is an extremely difficult question to answer without spending some time on your website and figuring out exactly what you are doing wrong, so the most I can do is point you in the right direction with some articles that have proved very useful:
In general, the biggest issue causing problems for most websites is duplicate content. Not external duplicate content (your content on someone else's website), but rather internal duplicate content (multiple versions of your content on your website). The rel="canonical" tag is going to be your best friend if this is the case.
TopSEOs is a scam at worst, and a waste of time and money at best. It's the modern day version of those "Who's Who" books - you can pay to get in, so the rankings are essentially meaningless.
Aaron Wall took the company to task a few years back: TopSEOs.com: A Review of the Top SEOs Paid Rating Service
And if you want the official SEOmoz opinion, here's a tweet of Rand's endorsement of the abovementioned blog post.
I wouldn't use spaces in my image names, just because they will get parsed out into "%20", and that will make the URL path longer and uglier.
Option B is the better one of the two. The most important thing to remember here is to just be descriptive. You're already on the right path.
Here are a few great articles on SEO for images. I think you might find them useful:
My short answer, which is also included in my YOUmoz post that got published today, 15 Smart Ways to Find Guest Posting Opportunities, is to do both.
Posting on a number of blogs helps build a large quantity of relevant, high quality back links. Some part of SEO, however big, is indeed a numbers game. You want to get as many external root domains linking to you as possible.
Posting on one blog, however, can help you build a following within their community. Particularly for A-list blogs in your niche, you will find that if you write multiple guest posts, stay active on the comments section of your guest posts, and interact with their community via social media, you will get (at least) as much benefit out of the branding and traffic implications of your guest posting strategy as you will out of the link you built. The SEOmoz knowledge base has a great thread on this exact topic.
If I had to pick just one, I would go deeper into just a few blogs, assuming that these blogs truly are authority websites in your industry. I understand that it can be difficult to have the time to create all of this high quality content, so you will need to prioritize, and so you may opt to focus on a few authoritative blogs at first, and then expand outwards.
Shamless Self-Promotion: If you're looking for ways to scale the development of high quality content, check out one of my recent blog posts, 3 Ways to Outsource High Quality Content Creation. Having the time to consistently write great content can be tricky, and these are the methods I use to help me out.
Probably not. I've tried it all, from paying for social bookmarks to just submitting content and hoping for clicks. What I've found is that if your content is truly quality, it's not going to need links to pick up steam and get shared. A little nudge to your Twitter followers should be sufficient. If an article sucks, buying 100 thumbs ups or diggs isn't going to really get it any exposure. These things tend to balance themselves out - high quality content always rises to the top.
OSE has a tough job - they have to crawl every corner of the web, index it, and make the results available to thousands of users a day. It's natural that some links get left out, particularly if they are located very deep on a domain with thousands of links (directories, for example). You may be able to get these links noticed by building links to these links.
A better idea, however, is to just build higher quality links. Focus on obtaining links from relevant, authoritative websites in your niche. It's better to build one great link every day than a thousand mediocre ones.
2/17/2012 I see companies struggling with linkbuilding all the time. Huge law firms and e-commerce sites paying bottom-of-the-barrel “SEOs” to create Squidoo lenses and blast social bookmarking links once or twice a month. Real estate companies pumping out poorly-spun articles by the hundreds. I'm talking about unfathomably awful content; the type of stuff that makes a conversation between Snooki and Deena seem insightful.
10/4/2011 It is an unfortunate, but ultimately unavoidable situation for any independent professional: something went wrong, and now you need to break the bad news to your client. In the SEO world, this can happen for a multitude of reasons. From a situation as simple as you being late with your deliverables due to unforeseen circumstances to much bigger problems, such as loss in rankings because of algorithmic changes, or worse yet, penalization of a client's site, there are dozens of things that can go wrong in any given project or campaign.
9/2/2011 Guest blogging is a great way to build relevant links to your website from authoritative websites within your niche. Bloggers are always in need of content, and many will jump on an opportunity to add great content to their blog that their readers will enjoy. The most difficult part of using guest blogging as a link development strategy is the very first step - identifying guest post opportunities. From the head-smackingly simple to some lesser-known gems, below is a breakdown of the best strategies to find these opportunities.
