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Thanks for the answer Kris!

Regards,

Ash

Thanks for your answer Nathan!

Regards,

Ash

Thanks for the excellent answer and helpful link Anthony!

Regards,

Ash

Hi Mozfans,

I've been asked by my management to try and "Dominate" our Branded SERP (I've also posted this question as a private question to the Moz staff but would love to know what the community thinks of this or if anyone has "Brand SERP" experience);

For our brand name, the first page SERP currently looks like this;

================================

Current SERP 1 (Google UK):

1. Our homepage (with the 6 pack of prominent pages beneath it)

2. An advert that we control

3. An advert that we control

4. An advert that we control

5. An advert that we control

6. One of those random business directories - we don't control the listing

7. Something not related to us at all

8. Something not related to us at all

9. One of those random business directories - we don't control the listing

10. Something not related to us at all

================================

As you can see from the above list, we are already dominating the top 50% of our branded SERP page, however management would like 100% (of course).

Now two obvious things that are missing from our Branded SERP page are our Facebook Page and our Twitter Profile, however, how do I get those to rank?

I believe I read somewhere (it might have been on the SEOmoz/YOUmoz blog) that the answer is to build links to those profiles (with your brand name as the anchor text).

Would that work?

We currently use an external SEO company for our link building so could it help if we asked them to build links for us pointing at those two social profiles?

Also, are there any other methods for dominating a branded SERP?

What would you recommend?

Thanks in advance everyone!

Regards,

Ash

Hi Moz fans,

I had a telephone conversation with an SEO company last week and they mentioned that the following "versions" of my domain were causing a canonicalisation issue;

http://www.example.com

www.example.com

example.com

I've already fixed the /index.html issue but do the above 3 also need to be fixed? Is the best solution to use a 301 redirect?

As a side note, the SEOmoz web app doesn't identify these as being duplicate content...

Regards, Ash

Thanks for the answer and link John!

Regards,

Ash

Same problem here SEOmoz, my traffic data tab is still showing data from 8/8 and isn't showing analytics data from the last fortnight!

Hi fellow SEO's,

Just a quick one, I was reading a few guides on Bing Webmaster tools and found that you can use the robots.txt file to point crawlers/bots to your XML sitemap (they don't look for it by default).

I was just wondering if it would be worth creating a robots.txt file purely for the purpose of pointing bots to the XML sitemap?

I've submitted it manually to Google and Bing webmaster tools but I was thinking more for the other bots (I.e. Mozbot, the SEOmoz bot?).

Any thoughts would be appreciated!

Regards,

Ash

Haha thanks for the example Ryan.

OK, I think I should let my web developer know, he seems to put it on all of his sites (he knows his stuff so maybe it's an old habit he's never bothered to research).

Your example prompted me to find the following page: http://www.seoconsultants.com/clueless/seo/tips/meta/

Quite a good read IMO.

Hi Mozfans,

Just been thinking about the robots revisit metatag, all pages on my website (200+ pages) have the following tag on them;

name="revisit-after" content="7 days" />

I'm wondering what is the purpose of the tag?

Surely isn't it best to allow robots (such as Googlebot or Bingbot) to crawl your site as often as possible so the index and rankings get updated as quickly as possible?

Thanks in advance everyone!

Ash

Thanks for the excellent answer Alex! I think I'm going to go for the plural as it is more accurate to the content on the page.

Regards,

Ash

Thanks for the answer Rene! Is there a way to optimise page titles for both? For example "Green Apple | Green Apples | Apples Galore UK" (don't ask how I came up with a site about apples as an example, it was the first thing that came to my head) seems a bit pointless?

Or would optimising for both feature only in the pages content?

Regards,

Ash

Hi everyone,

OK I've been looking at the Google adwords keyword tool and it's thrown some of my On-page SEO into question (everything said here are examples, I haven't used any real life terms or figures).

Lets say my page is about "Green Apples", let's say the keyword tool shows that the singular version "Green Apple" gets more searches (as an example).

Should I optimize for the singular or the plural?

Also lets say my title tag for that page is "Green Apples | Apples Galore UK" would Google/SEOmoz count that as an optimisation for the singular "Green Apple" or do the search engines take the title literally and don't differenciate between singular and plurals?

Thanks in advance everyone!

Regards,

Ash

Hi Lewis,

Thanks for your answer.

Yeah I watched that Whiteboard Friday (on Friday actually) and it was pretty interesting, however, correct me if I'm wrong but that was talking about rankings of your own site? I'm reffering to linking to such sites? Would those links be completely useless? Could they drag us down in the rankings? Or would they be better than nothing (we only have a handful of links at the moment)?

Regards,

Ash

Hi Theo, thanks for the quick response!

Hmm, they are owned by a customer of ours, I'm currently searching around for link building companies/freelancers (as we haven't done any considerable link building yet) but as this offer was on the table it seemed a simple place to start!

Hi SEOmoz community!

Hopefully a pretty straight forward question here...

Does anyone know if linking to "Adsense heavy" websites can have a negative impact on your rankings? Or a positive impact even?

Thes sites in particular are owned by a business aquintance, so they come from a trusted source even though the sites themselves look quite "spammy".

Also they all have pagerank of 1 or 2 and there's about 100 of the sites that we would link to.

Does anyone have any thoughts?

Regards,

Ash

Hi everyone,

Under the "On-Page" tab which shows your report cards, is there a way of getting it to grade your entire site? One of my site's is only ~20 pages so it's no big deal to manually enter each URL and set each one to update weekly.

But what if I have a site that has ~1,000 pages and I want to optimise each and every page for my main keyword using the report cards feature?

Thanks in advance!

Ash