Welcome to the Q&A Forum

You can learn a lot.

But what you'll learn is probably a lot different from what you'll hear on SEOMoz.

I wouldn't want to say that one is right and one is wrong but right now I wouldn't pay for access to Warrior Forums.

I would definitely bring the content onto the main domain.

As far as how to structure the folders - it depends on the content. If it sits quite naturally as a stand alone section then a resources folder would make sense.

1. They cheat using automated methods of link building.

2. It's a loophole in Google's algorithm.

3. If it's as bad as you say then I would imagine they will be penalized for it however you can always give them a little help by filing a spam report

There is an argument that linking out might increase your rankings by a tiny bit.

So long as it's a decent, none malware hosting, none spammy site it won't have  an adverse effect.

With regard to follow/no-follow - if you trust the site and think it's passing a benefit to users then why put the no-follow on it?

This is a tough one.

The keyword difficulty tool can give an indication of where you need to improve in order to move up the rankings but at the same time there are other things that you might need to consider like one page optimization.

You also have to remember that SEOMoz's data does not necessarily reflect how Google views the same data. For example SEOMoz might be saying that you have 30 unique linking root domains however Google might discount 29 of them as having been previously identified as being in a link network. So you see, you have no way of knowing whether the data you see is the data that counts.

The keyword difficulty tool gives an indication of how hard it will be to rank for a certain term. So the lower the difficulty the easier it is to rank for.

A good rule of thumb is that you want to rank for terms with a low difficulty that drives a lot of users who are likely to achieve your goal. So for me he perfect term would -

• Have a low difficulty score
• Have a high volume of searchers
• Have a higher than average conversion rate when those searchers hit my site.

Hope that helps.

Your site is a subdomain of blogspot.com so Open Site Explorer and other tools will return Blogspot's domain level metrics.

If you look into the link data you should be able to see subdomain data - however in this example I think the site is too new for Linkscape/Open Site Explorer to have picked it up yet. Give it till the end of the month and if you've built some links you should see some change.

Hi Laura.

Well the obvious thing is to push for organizational change and get the whole company on board with SEO and moving in the same direction. That's the best solution as if you're all working together you can pool resources and work cohesively.

But you probably already know that.

To make the most out of your current situation I'd start by doing some onpage analysis - checking your pages are targeted at the right terms and that everything is set up correctly.

If possible I'd push to improve your page types - making sure that your product pages are as good as they can be and packed full of information. That way you might be able to do some linkbuilding to your pages based on the quality of the content.

If not possible then you've got to figure out how to linkbuild to your pages in their current format.

And that's pretty much it - do as much optimization as you can but if your company really wants to move the needle on SEO then you'll be wanting to work on a sitewide level.

Hope that helps.

Nope.

A 301 is something you have to actively implement.

You can change your title tags without it causing any technical issues UNLESS your CMS automatically rewrites URLs based on the title of the page. If this is is the case then you'll need to find a way to disable this in order to change your title tags.

Having a presence on social media can be an enabler for other marketing methods. For example having followers on Twitter makes it a lot easier to get people to visit your blog which can drive links which in turn drives rankings and sales. Not to mention the potential for your client to set themselves up as a thought leader within the industry.

Even if you're just providing a curated source of industry specific information there's always something you can do on social media. Once I came across a maritime protection service who had a Twitter account that detailed all pirate activity off the coast of Somalia in almost real time. How cool is that?!

Hi Steve,

I think it's possible for you to do both. Conduct your research as if you want to rank for both [IT support] and [Denver IT support] and group those terms onto the same page.

Then optimize the page to put emphasis on the generic term. So in this example your title tag would be something like "It Support in Denver - Steve Sequenzia". That way you're hitting both possible avenues.

My only concern with this would be CTR from the SERPs and whether people who type in [IT support] really want a local firm or a local branch of a national firm. I'd probably run a couple of short tests using geo-targeted PPC to see which types of ads get the most interest.

Hope that helps.

Obvious one first - it could be an error in how you've implemented the canonical tag.

Or Google may have decided that it trusts/likes the duplicate page more than the original. As with anything if Google think you're wrong then they'll override your decision and do as they please.

You can use pagination markup that lets Google know it's one long list.

There's a whole video, from Google, about it here - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/video-about-pagination-with-relnext-and.html

It's worth watching.

I don't know which other search engines support this markup.

Last time I checked (last month) no body knew. There is a definite case for them being allowed as part of the functionality of a website but it looks like this is going to be decide the first time the ICO takes someone ot court over it.

Sorry I couldn't give you a straight answer but I don't think there is one yet.

1. It could be natural link growth. Often when a webmaster links to you they will do so using your brand name or a URL.

2. All links to a domain increase the domain authority.  It could be that they have strong domains which outweigh the need to have exact match anchor text. This is especially true if they're big brands- think about how Amazon ranks for so many products without actually having links to those product pages.

3. That's a strategic decision that varies depending on your site's circumstances. New site with no links = build branded anchor text. Old site with lots of branded anchor text already = build some exact match anchor text (but not too much obviously).

4. Focus on branded anchor text BUT throw some love at your product pages occasionally as well. You'll probably be able to drive some long tail traffic just by virtue of having unique content on the page and as your domain authority grows this will not only increase long tail traffic but also rankings for those exact match term.

There isn't currently an option to filter reports by date. If you want to sue OSE data for that sort of thing then you need to keep a record of your competitor's current links on a monthly basis. So if you download it now and then again after the next update you can compare the two.

Because you are an Australian company with an Australian domain and hosting in Australia you will find it harder to rank on Google.com - especially for competitive keywords.

To be honest after looking at your site I don't think you're quite at your fighting weight for competing on tough keywords in a foreign search engine.

If you really want to rank in the US you might want to conduct an onsite audit to check for issues (example-home link in top nav links to /index) and also invest some time into link building.

Hope that helps.

Get screen shots of 3 fashion sites and place them on a single image next to a screenshot of his site.

Get users/mechanical turk to pick the odd one out. If you can find 200 people who believe his site doesn't fit then maybe he'll listen.

It might be possible to create word clouds from the title tags of his competitors and seeing how similar they are to a word cloud of his title tags (you'll want to remove brand names). This visual clue might help.

Alternatively you could use a more scientific method and look at the composition of his title tags and calculate a similarity between his titles and those of his "competitors". If he's got 30% similarity to vogue and 80% similarity to examplefashionsite.com then you've got a pretty strong argument.

Have you tried seeing who ranks around him for his top 50 traffic generating search terms?

You should use a 301 redirect on all pages on your old site to point them to the pages on the new site. This is the best option.

If this isn't possible, or if it is too time consuming, then I would recommend looking at your analytics and making sure that you 301 any page that has been an entry page from Google within the past 6 months. That way you're only spending time on pages that are actually driving traffic.

If you do this then you will also want to make sure that you 301 all pages that have external links pointing at them.

If it's on that list then it's already live.

You'll have to wait for other changes although I probably should mention that Google might not see a problem with the SERPs you're looking at. For example if you're trying to compete on a competitor's brand name then you might be better off bidding on PPC rather than waiting for Google to decide that they don't belong at #1, #2 and #3.

Will moving the product pages further down the site hierarchy negatively impact your SEO? Maybe a tiny bit (http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#metrics-8) but I'd probably still do it with one caveat.

Are you actually calling the folder "products"? Why not group them under  a more specific name? So for example if you sell mobile phones rather than having "mysite.com/products/iphone4" you would have "mysite.com/apple/iphone4". This is the approach I would take.

Have you tried hosting an event? Something like a networking breakfast or maybe an advice session on how landlords can improve their marketing.

Make sure you're offering something that people want at the event and then invite people. I'm sure that you could convince a local SEO agency to send someone to give a presentation (more exposure for them) and maybe get another expert in the holiday lettings industry to give a quick tutorial. It gives you an opportunity to meet people and build some reputation.

Also have you tried approaching people to find out what's putting them off?

If the URLs are friendly then you could try and rebuild everything but keep the important URLs static.

Failing that you can migrate the pages onto new URLs by using 301 redirects. Doing this shouldn't have too much of an adverse affect on your rankings (not in the long term anyway) and also means you can swap to nice looking URLs.

Alternatively if you want to swap over to a new domain then you can use 301 redirects and the change domain option in Google webmaster tools.

If you're changing the site architecture - say for example because you're editing the main navigation - you will want to make sure that you prioritize your important pages but that's really just SEO 101 and probably similar to what you have in place anyway.

Hope that helps but feel free to ask if you want clarity on something.

If there's a valid reason to have the article on Nipca (as in it adds a benefit to users) then you could use a rel=canonical.

If it's not adding any value for users and is generally a dead page then why bother no-indexing when you could just remove it all together and not have it wasting crawl allowance.

Welcome to Q+A,

The avg positions in webmaster tools aren't very reliable. They look at data from all searches and can be influenced by personalization and localization. This means that your "true" position (position with personalization turned off) can be very different from your average position which is an aggregate of all of the data.

I tend to see that my average ranking is lower than my "true" ranking so if I were you I would just check that I'm removing personalization from the search. You can either open up a private browsing session (anonymous browsing if you're using Chrome) or add &pws=0 onto the end of an existing URL query string. In the example below I've highlighted where you would add this in.

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=example**&pws=0**

I've not done it myself but I've seen it done a couple of times and it can work. but you're rigt - there is the risk that if you don't promote it well enough then people might not turn up.

Question 2 first - I don't think there's any need for the no-follow at all. In fact I'm pretty certain Google have gone on record saying that you'll never need to no-follow with internal links.

Question 1 - If you've got some unique content in the main body of the page I wouldn't foresee it being a problem. However you should probably be asking yourself if it's actually of any use to the user? Is the content you're sending them to relevant to what they're looking for and is it improving their overall experience on your site?

You won't reduce your relevancy however you will have to do some work with your site architecture.

At the moment your top nav is pretty extensive and adding extra links to new product lines might damage user experience. So you'll need to remove some of your current links or rehaul your design in order to add new categories.

Continuing on the same domain is definitely the right thing to do however as your new content will benefit from the link equity you have already built up.

I don't think this is possible but would love to hear to the contrary.

I spend most of my time working with a generic/keyword rich domain name and as a company grows it really does cause branding issues.

That being said, purely from an SEO perspective there are some benefits. If your domain name includes a keyword then most of the time that people link to you they will use your domain name/brand name in the anchor text and within the body of the linking article.

I'm with Mr Weiss on this one. It's dodgy.

Hi Sal,

If you look for the referrer column in the report you can see which pages are linking to the broken URLs.

Fix these broken links and you won't be generating so many 4xx pages.

That's the theory anyway. It can be a pretty arduous task but if you stick to it you should be able to get that number down.

Depends on your site. In isolation it's probably nothing to be worried about.

If all of your links are coming from sitewide's then I'd be concerned.

But if it's a none spammy site with a legitimate reason for linking to you then I wouldn't lose any sleep over it at all.

In fact I'd say it's a big win.

I don't have answers to all of your questions but I might be able to shed a little light on them.

I've not seen any major studies that show the benefit of microdata specifically on rankings. However when you look at the area of rich snippets for eCommerce as a whole then I have it on good authority (but haven't seen the data myself) that you can expect an increased CTR from having some forms of rich snippet. Whether you implement that change using microdata, microformats or RDFa is irrelevant. Here's one study I found.

I would hazard a guess that many eCommerce providers appear to be a little slow to implement microdata into their product because although Schema.org has been live for over a year microdata has only provided any tangible benefit in Google since April 2012 when Google updated rich snippets for products.

If you want to find out if a specific retail is using semantic data (again not just microdata in this case) then just take their product page URLs and paste them into the rich snippets testing tool.

Hope that helps a little.

I agree with Ryan.

No. It's not going to hurt you.

Hi Larry,

To get a report of all of your competitors backlinks you'll need to use Open Site Explorer (opensiteexplorer.org). Just input the domain that you want links for and you can access all of the data you need.

If you want to compare your links with their links I recommend going to the "Linking Domains" tab, selecting "Show domains with links to all pages on this root domain" and then downloading that report. Do the same for your domain and then compare the two reports in Excel.

SEOMoz is full of advice on how to get more backlinks. Two places I'd recommend are today's blog post (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-noob-guide-to-link-building) and the beginner's guide (http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo).

I don't think you can "tell" Google that different parts of your site are targeting different locations. If you were using multiple domains you could use the targeting section of GWMT but unfortunately that doesn't apply here.

There are ways that you can send a strong signal to Google that content is targeted at a specific country such as;

1. Use of local language
2. Using local currency
3. Local addresses/phone numbers
4. Links from other local sites

It might also be worth using the markup for places/organizations on Schema.org. I'm not sure if Google are using that particular microdata but it can't harm anything.

+1 to notifying Google through Webmaster Tools.

However this may not solve your traffic problem so I'd probably get to work doing a little social outreach/linkbuilding as well if I were you.

Do your title tags also determine how you link internally and are they inserted dynamically into content on the page?

If not then (and let me know if I'm being dim-witted here) I don't see anything massively wrong with the first set of titles. Could you roll back and do a quick test to see if it works?

There are a multitude of reasons why your new domain may not be ranking above your retail stores.The age of the site is probably 1 factor amongst many.

If I were you I'd give it a month or so to settle down before panicking too much.

If it's mission critical that the new site rank #1 then I'd consider using PPC to get the visibility while you do some work on it.

If you're paginating correctly then there shouldn't be a problem but you probably want to add some indication of the page number into the title for clarity for users.There's an old post by Rand about it here http://www.seomoz.org/blog/pagination-best-practices-for-seo-user-experience

Although, as you're loading in the new results with AJAX I'm not sure if this complicates matters or simplifies them. I wouldn't foresee there being any problems but haven't experienced it first hand.

I'd go for a separate page for CityA and CityB.

You'll probably want to promote the CityB page on other sites that are relevant to CityB - local directories etc.

Hi Boo,

Adding the additional phrases into the text and title tags of the page that is currently ranking #1 could help. So long as you do it in a natural way then there shouldn't be a problem. My rule of thumb is that if it sounds stupid when you read it aloud, then you've over done it.

If you add something into the URL you should be aware that you're effectively creating a new page so you need to weigh up the benefits  of doing this for a page which already ranks well for a relevant term -horse buggies in this case.

It's fine to build links with the anchor text of the new terms (so long as it's white hat link building of course).

If the market for large and giant horse buggies is large enough to warrant a page that lists exclusively those products then that's personally the avenue I'd go down - create a new page which is tailored to help people looking especially for large and giant horse buggies.

Let me know if that didn't make any sense at all - I got disrupted part way through writing.

In a word?

No.

Or at least so little that the answer is basically no.

If your blog title is fed into the H1 then it will make a difference.

I'd recommend having a look at the SEOMox 2011 Ranking Factors Survey which looks at on page ranking factors.

http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#metrics-6

That being said I think there is an art to writing blog titles/headlines. I'd personally sacrifice having a perfect SEO title for having one that's punchy and attention grabbing.

Regarding pagination - urls look fine and you should use rel=prev/rel=next instead of the no-index tag.

Regarding sorting - Google have a handy little sheet about this which you may or may not have seen that covers this kind of issue

For sitemaps I'd try creating a single sitemap on thesquarefoot.com which includes the blog.subdomain.

You'll need to make sure that the subdomain is verified in GWMT and you'll also want to include the sitemap inthe robots.txt for both subdomain and root domain.

With regard to your landing pages I would 301 redirect the old landing page to the new one rather than deleting it.

Then real benefit of contributing to an industry forum is that it allows you to build authority within that industry and to connect with other webmasters. You can then leverage the relationships with those other webmasters at a later date.

The actual benefit of having a signature link is negligible.