Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Great news. A win for the Good Guys.

This may help you tell your boss...

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_do_you_say_i_told_you_so_in_20_languages

I've used submit edge.com in the past, in particular one of their article submission tpe services, I forget which exactly. I used the service to help promote some PA and traffic to a guest blog post I had done.

I wasn't exactly impressed with the result. Most of the links came from completely unrelated niches, blog comments, spammy twitter accounts and really bad directories. I haven't been near a service like it since. Though my blog post did eventually gain some PA and my website got some traffic from the entry. Would it have got traffic and authority without the submit edge service? probably.

I won't be using the service again.

Awesome news!

Check out you analytics account and track where the traffic came from...Has it come from a variety of sources or just a single source?

Maybe another website has just linked to you? or your being found for many more key terms?

Or your ranking well for a phrase your don't know about?

Analytics will be able to tell you.

Build some industry specific info graphics or jump on a meme that you could tailor to your industry.

A good post on creating info graphics

A great post on utilising memes

Have you considered Social networks as a way to get your content out there and build links, whilst also engaging your target audience?

Share links to your great content on twitter with relevant hashtags, check out http://hashtags.org and build a following. Though its not enough to simply blast out links to your followers, you'll need to engage them too.

Check out the white board friday video on building links with twitter

Also, theres facebook which you could use to grab your audience and potentially build links

Linked in if your industry isn't facebook prone.

Flickr and deviantart if your idustry is so inclined.

Create a tumblr blog to highlight your content (one of my favourites)

Pinterest,oh what did I do without it? yes pin some relevant, cool images of stuff you may sell or relevant to your industry and if its good enough people will share it.

There are other ways too but, I could literally go on all day.

Check this out http://www.seomoz.org/article/social-media-marketing-tactics

Theres a lot to digest, but its not rocket science.

Best of luck and if you get stuck, come back and ask some more

Regards

Aran

I personally like the 'Find out why' bit, adds a bit of intrigue and makes me want to click through.

Not sure if its just me but when I scan through the SERPs I generally only read the first sentence or less of the description. With this in mind I would want to put my best statements first to ensure I grasp the audience and lue them in without them reading the whole description.

First of all, welcome aboard. I always love to here of peoples first steps into SEO and the results they get.

My site has around 450 pages, thus its would be a major job for me to amend my page titles. Sites like SEOmoz have thousands of pages, and the vast majority of them are available in SERPs. Now as far as I know SEOmoz do not change their titles, again because it would be a massive job.

Saying that, if I run an offer or a sale on my website I will generally change my homepage title to reflect the fact I have a sale on, in the hope that the Sale text will be updated promptly in the SERPs and attarct a few extra click throughs.

In summary, no I dont think the freshness of your page titles has any positive effect on your SEO. But, It may impact your Click through rate (which I guess in turn could effect your SEO...now were going full circle).

Clear as mud?

Looking at your site I see that your Email a friend script is opening a brand new page and passing through the product ID. To stop the page being indexed you can add the following line to the robots.txt

Disallow: /EmailaFriend.asp

afte the line that looks something like

User-Agent: *

Heres some light reading on the robots.txt file

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/robotstxt

BE CAUTIOUS! if you dont know what your doing seek further assistance as you could do some bad things in the robots.txt.

Whilst the solution above will probably solve your duplicate page issue. I think there is room for improvement here.

Email a friend scripts needn't take the user away from the product they are viewing. You could open the email a friend script in a new window, or even better get rid of the Email a friend button altogether and make your social sharing buttons bigger and more prominent. Also, consider giving the users a Call to Action to sharing the product via the social buttons.

Hope this helps.

Aran

Hi Steven,

I like your site, its clean and fresh and user friendly. Not sure what you have done with regards to link building however it may be worth while to create some guest posts to put on to other blogs and get some nice links coming in.

Unfortunately, your competitors are well established with a long standing clean relationship with Google and some authority links. Try acquiring some links from some of your competitors link partners.

Good luck!

Cheers

Aran

The code above will disallow a directory called emailafriend. Use the following to disallow the two .asp files.

User-agent: *

Disallow: /EmailaFriend.asp

Disallow: /PhotoGallery.asp

Read more about Robots.txt here --> http://www.robotstxt.org/orig.html

"Link juice" is so 2010.

"Link Love" is the way forward...

Love wordpress as a CMS, it can take some tweaking to get it to behave like a Website and not a blog, but once your done its great.

If you do nothing else be sure to install Yoast SEO plugin.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-seo/

Have you tried the SEO plug in from Yoast?

http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/

Hi Cameron,

Your idea wih the logs may not be so great. I would consider the usefulness fo the logs to your users will they help your users? Probably, but not by having to rifle through hundreds of lines of logs.

Why not use the logs to find out your most common tech support issues and make a really good FAQ area?

This way you can preiodically review the logs and keep adding ew items to the FAQ and its going to help our visitors whilst adding great new content.

Regards

Aran

Hi,

There are plug ins which handle 301 redirects so I'd start by checking your plugs section and seeing what is active.

Wordpress uses a HTAccess file to store its 301's and such. However if you are inexperienced with handling a HTAccess file, I'd leave it be ad ask a expert to have a look at it as you can seriously mess up your site.

Agreed Matt, that is scarey. though a years worth of work to deindex one competitor seems like a lot of hard work for little gain.

I'd rather spend the year doing something positive and not being a complete git.

After looking over the site in question, it may not be down to the negative SEO, theres an awful lot that could be improved on that site.

Hi,

I ran the Page Speed analysis from Firebug and your site gets a good 74/100. Not too shabby!

But on closer inspection I see that you have around 600k of images loading from within your style sheets.

You could try better optimising the images to reduce filesize. The main culprit is homebg.jpg which is a whopping 250k (maybe not massive, but I'm old school!).

You could also enable some form of server compression like Gzip (though I see your on Windows hosting) to further reduce load times (though it will increase server CPU activity).

Hope that helps

Aran

I love this type of site, its quick, different and provides a nice UX. Though in my experience, since Google is not going to process the Javascript and thus will be presented with a different view as to what the user will see. Which in the past has been a no no.

Just to note, disabling Javascript on madebysofa.com results in nothing being rendered on screen! thats one thing to avoid, better to display everything than nothing. In other words, display all sections first, then hide parts with javascript.

In summary, I personally wouldn't go for this type of design as I'm not 100% sure what google would make of it. I would start by checking the Fetch as Google Tool and seeing how the page looks. The lack of individual keyword optimised pages and the like put me off. But I like to err on the side of caution and play it safe.

From a usability perspective I'd look at the redirects as a 404 is some what off putting when your trying to buy. It could lead to visitors losing trust and ultimately sales.

In turn, if usbility is effected in such a way then doubtless the SEO will follow.

If you have matching products which have indexed pages with some page authority, then I'd take the time to redirect them.

Your compromise is not bad, it would save a mountain of time which can be devoted to other cool things and its certainly better than several thousand 404 errors!

On reflection, this is the kind of story that is going to gain some momentum in the business/marketing world and will probably generate a bucket load of nice authority links for the site...could this be a double bluff?

either way mr negativeseo might have undone all his hard work simply by boasting about his exploits! I hope so.

Hi,

In your pro dashboard check out Link Analysis. In particular check out the Domain Authority, Domain moz Rank and moz Trust. As you get more links these numbers will grow, the bigger the number the better.

Also, Clicking Links then See more  in Open Site Explorer...this will give you a run down of all the links that SEOmoz have found pointing to your site (along with some helpful metrics).

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/mozrank

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/domain-authority

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/moztrust

These link will help you on your way!

Link Juice is so 2010. Link Love is the way forward

Thanks Marisa, nice cool to get good feedback fom other SEOs, after all we can be a very critical bunch

I'm going to do another you moz post soon as a follow up as I'm still getting some great traffic from my efforts. Though, I haven't yet heeded my own advice and put an hour aside to jump on another meme.

Agreed a Canonical tag will solve your Dupe content issue.

Though I think theres a deeper issue. I will hazard a guess that you already ahve a set of rewrite rules which allow the http://www.domain.com/venue/rosemarino URL to work?

A redirect may get you stuck in a loop if the venue.php is rewritten to /venue/rosemarino

If you had 1000 links coming from a russian porn site, then you may get penalised as it doesn't appear to be a natural link profile.

However one or two links from foreign sites is not a bad thing. If your site is being discussed/linked too in other countries then it should be a sign that its good if not great!

Hmm, i think generic phrases such as 'Refurbished printers' should be tackled by and article or such content. Not product pages, other wise your going to potentially have lots of refurbished product pages all trying for a SERP for the same phrase. (i.e. competeing with yourself! (keyword canabalisation).

Personally I'd go for Title + Model + condition

(Thats assuming you only have one page per product model/condition).

I agree with Kane, in addition to the description, why not produce a transcript of any spoken words in the videos? (not everyone has speakers plugged in).

If its good enough for SEOmoz whiteboard fridays its good enough for me

Hi Paul,

I would have thought that a 301 is going to be a little confusing for your visitors, as they may be browsing the Lancashire part of your site and find themselves redirected to the bedfordshire side. I'd personally prefer to write some content for Lancashire/Bedford.

Understood you don't want to share the URL, but as I have said, difficult to answer the problem without seeing it in context.

Cheers

Aran

I'd go with option 1 personally and look to leverage the content another way...

I love the "Pay with a tweet" idea, there are services which require you to Pay for a download with a tweet. http://www.paywithatweet.com/

This is a great way to get some credit for your work, spread the word socially and attract some links/authority from relevant sites and its all perfectly natural!

Option 2 sounds a little shoddy and difficult to manage.

Option 3 could prove to be dangerous with hundred/thousands of ;links with same anchor text

Option 4 Woah there buddy, this sounds a litle 'grey'.

If you want to be 'Completely clean' go with option 1, ask people to share socially or link to you in return for the content.

Hope thats of some help.

Aran

If your adding new content to you site regularly it may get discovered quicker if your site map is bang up to date.

PLus if your going to do a job, you may aswell do it properly.

Your kind of right, but DA/PA are only guestimates, they don't hold and actual bearing on rank as each niche can vary wildly.

I'd focus on my actual SERPs and number of visitors.

Spammy comments look like spam. Spam is bad. Bad is not good

Get rid. Not sure if carzilla supports comment moderation, but if it does activate it.

Also, try connecting with your target audience via social sites like facebook and twitter and engage them in conversation, tell them of articles and cool stuff on your blog, then you may get some natural comments.

Hi,

I assume you want to do this in code at runtime so you can tailor the page dependant on where the vistor comes from?

In PHP there is a function $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'], this will send the referring url of the visitor. However it is not very reliable and there are many instances where it will contain nothing or incorrect information.

You would then check the contents of the functio results for indicators that they come from a natural search. I.E the referrer contains Bing, Yahoo, Google. This will not differentiate PPC traffic though.

Hope this sets you off in the right direction. (if it does thow a thumbs up my way )

Cheers

Aran

I would possibly look towards a different strategy.

Rather than deleting a page once a product is sold I would leave the page live for a while and put a sold sign on it and offer a selection of similar properties to view. After say 3 months then 301 the page back to a category page higher in the hierarchy. Or don't 301 it at all, perhaps Noindex the page after a given time frame?

I'd much rather present my visitors with a Sold sign and a list of similar properties than potentially lose them to a 404.

Don't think search engine, think visitor

Hope that helps

Aran

Hi Noah's Dad!,

I've been following your blog!

Whilst I'm not 100% sure how to output Facebook comments to your pages. I have just installed Facebook commenting on my website (a very easy job of just pasting in some HTML with a dash of php to retrieve the current URL). Its great as people instantly recognise the comments box and seem happy, almost eager to leave a comment. Plus its not restricted to just facebook users, people can join in the fun with hotmail, yahoo, or AOL user IDs. Plus I believe more ways of authenticating are being added.

There is a plug in for word press (of course, cos theres a plug in for everything) http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/facebook-comments-for-wordpress/

Trouble is that the comments are out put into a iframe, thus Google doesn't pay any attention to them (incas eyour doing this for SEO benefit, which I assume you are). But there is a work around to out put the comments outside of the facebook iframe, though I'm still debating whether to do it as it involves hiding the content (otherwise it would appear twice, once in the Iframe and once outside of the iframe, making for a bad user experience), but since Google may frown upon hiding content on my page, I've stayed away for the time being. (unless someone else has a better idea).

Hope that helps in some way.

Regards

Aran

I'm guessing that Google is taking a harsh stand on the Grammar used in the product description. The description doesn't read well, there are many gramatical mistakes.

In addition to that the only other chunk of content on the page appears to be duplicate content. See the Google search below on a piece of the California Umbrellas text.

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=+California+Umbrella+has+been+known+for+producing+high+end%2C+quality%2C+patio+umbrellas%2C+and+frames+for+over+50+years.+The+California+Umbrella+trademark+is+immediately+recognized+for+its+standards+in+engineering+and+innovation+among+all+the+brands+in+the+United+States.&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a

Hi Nicola,

Try and Install Yoast SEO for wordpress. You can he take control of your title tags and stop wordpress being naughty!

Good luck.

Aran

I'm doing what I always have been doing.

• Seek out very cool niche directories that may actually pass me some traffic.
• Get active in the social sphere
• Update my blog regularly and post on social sites when I do
• Encourage my visitors to review my site (loving reviewcentre for this)
• Guest Post on niche blogs (I try and do at leats 2 guest posts per week and then try and drum up some traffic for them in the social sphere.
• Jump on the occasional meme to score some quick links/social shares

The above strategy has worked for my site getting me to top spot for my chosen keywords. I've just leap frogged my biggest competitor whom has 15k+ links compared to my measley 350+.

Quality not quantity

EDIT: Anyone with a wedding orientated blog offering up some guestpost opportunities, please pm me

You may want to mix up you anchor text a bit and maybe throw in some longer tail phrases. Having too many exact keyword phrases may do you some harm.

Remove auto generated and duplicated content and create unique, relevant and interesting content (free of grammatical/spelling errors). Perhaps consider hiring a writer to re-write your product descriptions.

I do use in my pages, but only when it makes sense to do so.

**Does it help search results? Probably not anymore. But It still represents a useful tool for highlighting calls to action or other text which you may want to attract the visitors attention too.

Then if this increases interaction on the page, then you could say that its helping reduce bounce rate, thus its helping SEO.**

Get Yoast SEO for Wordpress plugin. It solved all of my duplicate page issues.

The issue stems from the category/Tags/Authors links which all host the same article, however the URL differs depending on how you access sit (i.e. via clicking though on a tagged keyword, through the authors link or through the categories links).

best of luck!

Hi Brad,

Ask not what you can do to maximise your SEO, but what can you do to make your user experience better.

In other words ensure that your visitor gets all the info he/she needs.

1. Make sure you link to products in the Video Description so anyone watching can easy find and purchase.

2. Have you considered creating a transcript to go along with the video?

3. Are the videos embedded on your product pages?

4. Have you shared the videos with your social circles?

5. Are the videos correctly branded with your website logo and URL? alot can change in a few years is the branding the same as it was when the videos were produced?

6. Have you considered creating some new videos? You channel may or may not have subscribers who could come back and view your new videos and maybe purchase a product or two.

These are just my initial thoughs on what I would consider doing, I'm sure you have already touched upon these.

Cheers

Aran

I had a similar requirement. After some thought I decided to code my own solution for my site.

I wrote a module for my Cubecart Site that recorded Carts as they were populated and then flagged the carts that were checked out successfully thus leaving me with carts which were abandoned prior to check out.

I got some startling data that jump started some UX testing on my add to cart and browsing processes. After some analysis and chatting to customers I managed to sort a lot of issues and my abandonment rate decreased significantly, though I still see a fair few, however I think a certain amount are unavoidable.

Good Luck.

All in all your store looks the part. Your link profile is healthy. Site speed looks good. (75/100)

I'd tackle your content issues and see what happens from there.

Hi,

I would completely re-write the content, ensuring that the useful info included in the manufacturers content is included in the re-write.

If its a great content thats unique and a good read, what SEO would it need?