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Hi Everyone, I ran across this tag on a Sharepoint 2007 external facing site we're considering working on. Has anyone ever seen it used? NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOHTMLINDEX"/> Obviously, <metaname="robots"content="noindex"> is your standard noindex tag, but I've never seen the above. I'm seeing references in Sharepoint discussions about it, and suspect it might be native to Sharepoint 2007, but I've never seen it in the wild before - Google doesn't appear to be respecting it either. Thoughts?

I'm seeing some odd behavior with Google+ Local and Google Places listings for clients. I'm wondering if anyone else is seeing it... Here's the situation: We've recently bought on 4 new clients that all have duplicate listing issues, and, weirdly, all have both places and a Google+ local created listings. For three of those four, the Google+ local listing is outranking the Places account for a brand name search (e.g. Dr. John Doe). Weirdly, in one instance, the Google+ local account that is outranking the Places page is named in a less accurate fashion. e.g searching for "Dr. John Doe" the rankings look like this... A) John Doe Plastic Surgery, P.C. - Dr. John Doe B) Dr. John Doe, MD Anyone else seeing this sort of behavior? How are you creating local listings for clients these days - via the places dashboard, or Google+ Local?

Does anyone have experience cleaning up Yodel claimed listings or issues created by past Yodel campaigns? Do you know if they're in the habit of creating Google+ Local listings for their clients? I definitely appreciate anyone's response, but specific insight into Yodel's process would be extremely useful. Long story short, busy client with little time is unsure if work Yodel did in the past resulted in these duplicate listings, or if staff created them, and where we might get access to them. Attempting to track down access and sources before I dive in with reports. Cheers!

I wanted to get some opinions on an interesting situation for local search. Many doctors and dentists are found in one of two ways online: Their name and title, e.g. Dr. James A. Smith, MD Their practice name, e.g Smith Plastic Surgery, P.C Often sites like Healthgrades are providing data on the doctor him or herself, and the information can be tough to switch out. At the same time, there's a tendancy on the Dr's part to want to be listed as their practice name. Their site is often set up that way. How are you handling this kind of setup? Have you found a way to reliably associate (and format) a practice and doctor's name in a listing, in such a way that doesn't violate Google's quality guidelines? I know the drill for handling a doctor within a hospital, but this is a slightly different situation...

Hi All, I'm speaking to a local SEO meetup at the end of this month. If you were attending (hypothetically), what would you be most interested in hearing about for local search? The audience is a mix of SEO professionals, web developers, internet marketers, and business owners. I suspect that there will be a number of people who understand the foundations of SEO, though not all of them will be practiced at implementing it. I believe the number of people who get really indepth with Local is quite small. At the moment, I'm thinking about covering things such as: The local search universe in general--which data sources are doing what these days, where it's heading. Google Local+ recent changes Migration to Local+, data cleanup, merging (or not merging!), and other Local+ nuances Current ranking factors, and where I think they're going. I'd love to hear, and greatly appreciate, any ideas you might have. Cheers, Bede

How much value do you put on guest post opportunities on blogspot.com or wordpress.com sites (or similar). If the blog is established, gets good readership and traffic, do you consider it to be as useful as a privately hosted blog? I'm not really looking for a definitive answer here, just people's thoughts. Cheers, Bede

Hi Folks, I have about 6,000 internal site search phrases that I want to analyze. There are many variations and duplicates that have similar intent within the data, e.g. Employment, Employment Opportunities, Employment Application. Does anyone have any thoughts on how I can aggregate the data to get an idea of user intent. There's a lot of long-tail in there. The data does not come from Google's site search tool. I just have a spreadsheet of the terms and the number of times they were searched. Cheers!

About two months ago we dealt with some issues that were causing weak rankings in Bing and Yahoo! since then, we've seen rankings rise and plummet dramatically with no changes to the site. On Bing and Yahoo! we've gone from 1st page to less than 50th and back again THREE times. This happens across all keywords, even branded ones that are an exact-match for the domain. Google rankings have continued to rise steadily. We benefited greatly from Penguin, which tanked a number of competitors. Bing webmaster tools aren't showing any server or other kinds of errors during the rank drops. Has anyone every experienced this before?

We just got a new client because of recent Penguin/Panda changes. A national "SEO"  firm decided it was a good idea to set up a page for each service town or county they serve with nothing but duplicate content. Needless to say, on the week of the 23rd, their rankings tanked from 1st page (it's not a competitive niche) to 4th. I'm not bringing this up to brag, but rather because it got me thinking... How are your geographically targeted "service area" pages doing? Have the recent changes caused you to rethink your geographic targeting in any way?

On March 27th I noticed a huge rankings drop across the board on a client site in Bing and Yahoo! After some research, I found this article on SEOroundtable (it also links back to a Webmaster World discussion). For this particular site we're talking a few dozen of keywords dropping off the first page, or even from the first page dropping out of the top 50. The only thing not affected were brand keywords. The site was recently relaunched, and has a fairly weak backlink profile right now. It doesn't use keywords in the domain (which was one of the things identified in the SEOroundtable article). Has anyone else noticed changes? If so, what do you attribute them to and how are you combating them?

I'm curious what tactics people are finding successful in converting readers into leads, inquiries, or sales. Anyone feel like sharing?

When dealing with local search for a business with multiple locations, I've always created an individual page for each location. Aside from the address and business name being in there, I also like to make sure the title tag and other important markup features the state/city/suburb, or, in the case of hyper-local, hyper-competitive markets, information more specific than that. It's worked very well so far. But, the one thing you can always count on with Local is that the game keeps changing. So I'd like to hear what you think... How do you deal with multiple locations these days? Has Google (and others, of course) advanced far enough to not mess things up if you put multiple locations on the same page? (Do I hear snickers? Be nice now) How does Schema.org fit in to your tactics in this area, if at all? Cheers (Edit: dear SEOmoz, stop eating my line breaks)

Hey folks, I recently noticed a very large drop in brand-name traffic (in the realm of 50%) which coincided with some SEO changes to target non-brand-name searches. Thing is, the site is still ranking #1 for all the brand-name searches that the traffic drop happened in. (checked terms via SEOmoz toolbar, and also proxy with Bruce Clay's toolbar). Any thoughts on where to start lookingfor the problem or what might have caused it? If this hadn't happened at the same time as other changes, I'd put this down to non-SEO problems.

Does anyone recommend a particular keyword research tool or tools for geographically modified keywords? i.e. Web DesignerF Fargo. I often find that searches focused on services in the area we serve does not get the traffic volume Google's keyword tool needs to provide me with a number. I know the traffic is there, because I see it coming in via analytics. Thoughts? Recommendations?

I'm looking into Linkresearchtools.com for competitive backlink analysis. Already have SEOmoz (obviously) and Majestic. Anyone have any experience with the toolset? If so, what does it do well, what do you like, and where does it fall down? Cheers

Over the past two weeks I've noticed that Google has decided to change which pages on our site rank for specific keywords. The thing is, this is for keywords that the homepage was already ranking for. Due to our workload, we've made no changes to the site, and I'm not tracking any additional backlinks. Certainly there are no new deep links to these pages. In SEOmoz dashboard (and via tools/manual checking with a proxy) of the 24 terms we have first page ranking for, 9 of them are marked "new to top 50". These are terms we were already ranking for. Google just appears to have switched out the homepage for other pages. I've noticed this across a couple of client sites, too, though none to the extent that I'm seeing on our own. Certainly this isn't a bad thing, as the deeper pages ranking means that they're landing on the content they want first, and I can work to up the conversion rates. It's just caught me by surprise. Anyone else noticing similar changes?

So, AddThis just added a cool feature that attempts to track when people share URL's via cutting and pasting the address from the browser. It appears to do so by adding a URL fragment on the end of the URL, hoping that the person sharing will cut and paste the entire thing. That seems like a reasonable assumption to me. Unless I misunderstand, it seems like it will add a fragment to every URL (since it's trying to track all of 'em). Probably not a huge issue for the search engines when they crawl, as they'll, hopefully, discard the fragment, or discard the JS that appends the fragment. But what about backlinks? Natural backlinks that someone might post to say, their blog, by doing exactly what AddThis is attempting to track - cutting and pasting the link. What are people's thoughts on what will happen when this occurs, and the search engines crawl that link, fragment included?

I'm working on a site that is throwing off a -lot- of duplicate content for its size. A lot of it appears to be coming from bad links within the site itself, which were caused when it was ported over from static HTML to Expression Engine (by someone else). I'm finding EE an incredibly frustrating platform to work with, as it appears to be directing 404's on sub-pages to the page directly above that subpage, without actually providing a 404 response. It's very weird. Does anyone have any recommendations on software to clearly map out a site's internal link structure so that I can find what bad links are pointing to the wrong pages?