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Thanks for that, its always nice to get a second opinion.

thanks

Aran

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Wooden Hangers

www.hangerworld.co.uk

However my question is simply, has anyone noticed any changes? perhaps to indicate a shift in the algorithm?

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Hi all,

Has anyone noticed any ranking changes over the weekend?

I've noticed an almost uniform drop of a few positions across almost all of my chosen phrases. Nothing major has occurred on our site, no messages in webmaster tools. An analysis of our competitors positions (which we track the top 10) doesn't reveal any clues.

Cheers

Aran

You ask for no stories about guest posting, but at present I think this is one of the best weapons an SEO can bring to bear. I have had superb success with guest posting over the past 6-9 months which has resulted in top 3 rankings across all my main keywords.

If you shared your URL, we would be able to make some real critique that may uncover some underlying factors that are hindering our site.

Best of luck with which ever strategy you move forward with.

Hi,

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

Infographics are generally created to relay statistical information in a graphical and easy to digest format. Not sure I see a way of creating an infographic to explain a subject.

Perhaps you could gather some stats on the industry and express those with some cool graphics. There are plenty of tools around the web to help you create the graphic, I've always found this post quite useful http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/awesome-free-tools-infographics/

Best of luck and be sure to post a link here when you have finished it.

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.**

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/

Don't forget Memes!

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/a-small-success-story-inspired-by-seomoz-and-its-contributors

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.

Ah, simple, nice work!

Hi,

On the page (on the test server),  you could use the following code (assuming your using PHP).

**header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");

header("Location: client-site.com/new-page-name.html**");**

?>

Hope that helps**

hi Could you elaborate and explain what is is your want to achieve with the redirect?

Looks like a move to Wordpress is a safe bet then as your system seems very SEO-Unfriendly.

When you do move to Wordpress be sure to check out Yoast SEO Plugin http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/

have you tried using the canonical tag?

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps

You should try the Keyword Difficulty tool http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/keyword-difficulty

It won't actually suggest phrases, but it will provide some indication as to the difficulty to rank.

Hi,

A quick search on Google for site:namebadgesinternational.co.nz shows other pages are being indexed.

I can see a few other issues too, for instance the canonicalization of your domain and homepage, your homepage can be accessed via www, non-www, index.php and though root /

It may be a good idea to log into your Google Webmaster tools account (assuming you have one) and check Diagnostics for crawl errors and similar.

Also our robots blocks /cgi-bin but leaves 404 and login pages open to indexation (i would personally block these as i don't want my visitors landing on them).

Check out http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/canonicalization for more info on canonicals.

best of luck...

Aran

People per hour worked for me. Also, i have found them on twitter.

One piece of advice, quality check the work prior to publishing any of it. I recently had a few hundred articles written and discovered about 25% were duplicated as the guy sub contracted the work to another 'cheaper' writer.

I agree with everything inhouseseo says above. Sound advice.

I've recently been looking at the wedding niche with a view to finding guest post opportunities, one thing that came to light is there's a ton of blogs out there that love publishing series of photos from weddings.

I'm not sure where you stand with ownership of the photos and whether you have the right to publish without the consent of the 'models'. Theres a great opportunity to assemble 10-15 shots write some commentary and then create a series of posts using 6/7 different shots from the collection and differing comments and post them around various wedding.

Myblogguest.com is great place to start. I think this could be the cheapest/quickest way to get the links your looking for.

Best of luck and I sincerely hope you get your old positions back.

Regards

Aran

Ps.(oh and in the mean time you might wanna hit facebook/twitter/pinterest and post some photos, connect with your target audience, it could drive some valuable traffic in! and it just might help you rank)

I'm all out of ideas then!

set up the 301 and see what happens

Sorry I couldn't be of more help!

I see your point... cant find reference to /feed/ however i also cannot find your sitemap.xml to confirm their are no references in there are their an external links pointing to kontakt/feed?

I'd consider adding a 301 rule into the htaccess to redirect traffic from the offending 404 pages, just in case.

could you share the url?

By default I think most wordpress blogs have a feed accessible via the urls you describe (http://en.support.wordpress.com/feeds/)

I'm pretty sure there specified somewhere link in sitemaps or even in meta.

Have you disabled your feeds?

Seeing your URL would help.

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!

I personally use Tumblr quite heavily to promote my photography aransphotography.tumblr.com, not so much for link building but there is a huge amount of traffic flowing through that site and its great to divert some of that traffic to my flickr or my own website.

Also, if people chose to re-blog my stuff then I get some free links as a bonus, link juice or not!

In short my tumblr is part of my social outreach and inbound marketing strategy rather than my link development plans.

I do not use wordpress, blogger or Weebly personally, but I do have links on other peoples blogs from there that do me no harm!

Completely agree with Cesar.

I also feel the need to explain the context in which they could be harmful. Some spammy article sites would use tool tip type functionality to display adverts when a user hovers over particular keywords. In the past I've found this really annoying, but what your suggesting sounds like a helpful resource. However I would be very careful with the implementation and ensure it does turn out to be a helpful gadget and not a hindrance.

Best of luck with it.

Aran

Hi Rob,

I don't think the keyword spamming i the footer is helping your cause. Also, your link profile is extremely heavily weighted towards "Hen Night Accessories".

You have over 1k links on that anchor text, though only from a few domains.

There are also canonical issues at play too. (your site is available under www and non www).

Thats my 2 minute analysis, but these could be core issues that need resolving.

Best of luck...

Aran

| <a class="clickable title link-pivot" title="See top linking pages that use this anchor text"></a> | | |

I agree completely with Zach and would like to add one little thing. I prefer to rewrite my URLS to remove the extension altogether. (so does SEOmoz, take this page for example http://www.seomoz.org/q/are-htm-files-stronger-than-aspx-files)

this makes it slightly more user friendly as its one less piece of info the the user to remember/type in and makes for a slightly cleaner looking URI.

Thanks Matt.

I think the key to pinterest for ecommerce is to mix up our own product images and graphical creations along with other products that could compliment your range. Obviously having great product photography helps massively.

(ooh I can feel a youmoz post coming on!)...

I've found Pinterest to be really useful as A social networking site, a link building tool and a resource to gain targeted traffic.

I think your header links will look spammy.

Also, your sharing out our Page Rank to your duplicate sites! I would either remove the links or no follow (are the links of value to your visitors? if not get rid!).

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

Hi,

Always love your post intros!

Hola from Overcast and humid 19 degrees C  Blackpool UK

Hows about using Google Alerts on particular keywords?

No problem, best of luck and let us know how you get on!

you can certainly use the canonical, however you probably wont rank from domains 2 and 3 as your telling Google not to attribute the content to those domains.

I'm still missing the bit where having thee regionalized sites is beneficial to your visitors, why not make one general site with the products and then do some geo-targeted pages?(thats what I would do, makes for a much simpler task).

best of luck with which ever way you go, but come back and let us know what happens

Agreed with Matt, but surely social signals are going to be in play too. Encourage social sharing of your pages and the links, G+'s, Likes and tweets will follow, then the Page rank will flow.

Get comfortable as its going to be a long process though!

Best of luck.

What is the benefit to the user for an individual sites for North, South and west?

Are you not just creating a lot of work for yourself, especially since as you state ''would like to rank well for Blue Widgets generally" which ultimately means each site is competing against the others.

I would rethink my strategy, Your more likely to rank 'generally'  for your chosen terms if you focus your efforts on one site and perhaps use canonical tags on the other two to ensure Google knows who to attribute the content too.

Agreed with Justin, however I would also hope that my guest post page authority would grow over time.

I generally like to do a social campaign on guest blog posts to ensure I get the URL in front of as many people as possible in the hope of helping the PA grow.

I think it depends on where you want your site hosting.

In the UK I like Rackspace for top end stuff (expensive, awesome), Heart Internet for my mid level stuff and one.com for my cheap stuff.

There is no need for the content to exist any more if you have 301'd the containing URL.

Thanks all for the info.

Yep Google places rather...Told you my exposure was limited!

I understand the mechanics of  the upload and set up. I think I may have worded my question incorrectly.

I'm looking for tips on creating 'well optimised' Google Places for each of my other business locations. Are ther any best practises to follow, or is it as simple as uploading the CSV and were done?

Hi our company is expanding and we are opening up branches throughout the UK. I want to register a Google Local for each of our new branches. How is best to do this?

My exposure to Google Local is somewhat limited, though I have set up single businesses before, I've never dealth with multiple addresses.

Any help or advice would be great!

Thanks

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

My advice would be to get some decent content on your site then hit the social sphere though twitter, pinterest, facebook, stumble, reddit etc and get yourself noticed.

Whilst thats happening get some other great conet that you could use for guest posing on other websites.

these are just the initial steps, theres plenty more to do as Matt says. Check out Matts link.

Glad you like.

You could also setup a facebook page for your business and require people to like it in order to get at the free content (similar idea just using facebook over twitter, though I prefer twitter to help drive serps).