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Possibly a really stupid question.

Is Page Rank logarithmic or exponential?

I've seen a lot of people talking about Page Rank saying it's logarithmic but when they describe it they're actually talking about an exponential scale.

(Apologies if I'm showing a basic misunderstanding in mathematical knowledge - I studied Drama)

That's a good indication that they're not worth buying. If you're going to be buying links then you might as well pay for a guest posting service to get some good links. I don't use one myself but I know people who do and it seems to work.

I would imagine that algorithmically there is no ideal number of links to build in a day. Really your daily number of links is only limited by your own resources although depending on your site and the tactics you're using it might not be appropriate to build so many links in one day. So for example

I wouldn't worry about the umber of links built in a day and instead focus on getting decent quality links.

It takes some time for Google to crawl and index pages so sometimes they won't find your links very quickly and sometimes they might not find them at all.

Is 20 links per day the ideal link building amount? I doubt it - but I don't have any evidence to back this up.

There's so much that's dependent on context.

For example if you're a design agency and you want to get guest post links from other design sites then it's pretty easy to put together a roundup of "Top 35 Most Beautiful Examples of X" that will get published by a lot of medium weight sites and be worth the two hours you spend putting it together.

On the other hand if you want to be featured on powerful sites that are going to drive referring visitors and boost your brand reputation then you're going to have to put more effort in.

I would say that guest posts are good for monthly reports - they give you guaranteed links. If in doubt you could always dip your toe in the water and outsource. There are plenty of people who will gladly do guest posting for you and it's pretty cheap (sub $100 per link if memory serves).

I don't use GA very often (I use a paid analytics package i my day job) but I think this page from google on multichannel attribution might help.

http:// is automatically added to any address you put into OSE.

If there is a redirect from one page to another then OSE will automatically show the data for the page that is redirected to (the main page).

However there is a yellow box that appears above the link data that will give you the option of exploring the data for the redirected page.

Make sense?

Hi Dana,

I wrote the following after assuming , for no reason at all, that you didn't know much about SEO. However having looked at your profile I realized that I was wrong and that my tone is probably a little patronizing. That being said it's 1am over here and I really don't want to rewrite it so please accept my apologies.

If I had to guess (and it is a guess as I'm not technical) I would say it was some badly formed links.

You know how some of your error pages have an Origin parameter (like this one) that say where the page was generated? Well these URLs follow the same format as the error pages that you're finding. It looks like rather than using an absolute link (like http://www.ccisolutions.com/page) the onclick action is actually generating a relative link (so just /page).

When you use a relative link your site adds the partial URL (/page) onto the end of your domain to give you a full URL (http://www.ccisolutions.com + /page = http://www.ccisolutions.com/page). It looks like you're using relative links as if they were static ones. Which is why you have "www.ccisolutions" in each URL twice.

If I had to blame anything it would be whatever is powering your IAFDispatcher however as I haven't been able to replicate your problem I couldn't be certain. If you can track how these URLs were generated by looking at the preceding pages that are sending traffic/bots to them then you should be able to narrow it down to which links are broken.

Structured data (microdata etc.) is markup that specifies what a section of a web page is about. So for example you can markup a review so that Google can identify the star ratings and knows that the product got a 4/5.

This type of data is part of the semantic web - which is a WWW where bots like Google stop seeing Sites and start seeing entities. So for example in the current web a search engine might see links to a site with the anchor text "shoes" and interpret that to mean that the site is relevant for "shoe" based queries but if those links went to that brand's Facebook page the connection with shoes would be a lot weaker. In a semantic web the search engine would be able to tell very easily that a brand's Facebook and Twitter pages are part of the same organisation and that links to either count the same as to the main site.

That's a pretty crude example (and to some extent search engines are already doing this) but you can see how it can affect SEO. That's not to mention the benefits that you can be getting right now from having rich snippets (Google them, they're cool).

It depends on the purpose of the video. I'd put informational videos onto Youtube just because of the traffic floating about on the Youtube platform.

I'm not an expert on video SEO but if you read this then you will be.

They're two different URLs.

If the URL changes but the content stays the same then it's classed as duplicate content.

I feel your pain though - the amount of duplicate pages I've ended up with just because copywriters like to capitalize their words...

What type of meta data were you thinking about? Were you thinking about structured data (like microdata, RDFa, microformats), just alt and title tags, or something else?

To answer your second question you can't add anything into the iFrame but don't worry because Google won't read the contents of the iFrame anyway.However you can always affect the markup around the iFrame if you want to.

As part of a balanced campaign I don't see a problem with getting links from dog blogs.

In your shoes I'd make sure I had other more relevant links as well but if the dog blogs are easy enough to get and you just want a few links then go for it.

One of my sites is installing Strange Loop, a front end content optimisation platform.

Does anyone have any advice when dealing with this type of implementation or pitfalls that I need to look out for.

Even just a headsup on some reading material would be good.

Thanks

And the sitemap for good measure. And preferably hardcode any internal links that you can to point to the new default.

So long as you're staying on the same domain then the 301 should be enough.

Images from the GDN don't count as "real" links whether you can see them in Open Site Explorer or not.

You don't want to implement a canonical tag to names.php.

For all of the categories that generate URLs like this

http://www.afternic.com/names.php?c=1

You probably want to implement a URL rewrite to give them more user friendly URLs (like afternic.com/business or some such).

It would also help to throw some unique content onto those pages if you've got the budget for it but that's on the assumption that you want those pages to generate search traffic.

Hope that helps a little

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.

Do you really want to match for the individual search keywords?

When using the current version of Facebook search aren't most people searching for an entity that they already knows exists (your  page) rather than for information on a generic term?

This is just a guess and maybe I'm totally off the mark.

From what I've seen of Facebook search you're going to need to exact match the terms that you want to rank for - so it would be  "First Second Third"

Open Site Explorer crawls a lot of the web but some pages do get missed - normally because they're very minor in the grand scheme of things.

Unfortunately this also happens at Google at it looks like the page that links to you isn't in Google's index. Were I you I would try and build some links to that supplier's page so that Google can index your link.

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.

Yeah, I've seen an unfortunate amount of times.

Check your on page optimization (SEOMoz has a tool for that).

Check your site architecture to see if the product page is better linked to internally than the external one.

And if it's still not fixed but it's really annoying you then do some link building. Drum up some interest int he category and the links should move the needle on this.

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.

Technically - yes. It's a violation.

Currently Google won't penalize you for using a rank tracker however they do take steps to stop rank trackers working.

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.

Twitter. You only need to find one decent copywriter as they tend to hang around in groups.

And depending on subject matter you can also try hiring bloggers.

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?

Sweet answer. I would add that it could be that you've turned off re-targeting, social or some other form of advertising that was getting eyeballs but not clicks.

However see Mat's answer first because he's hit the nail on the head.

It is possible to redirect users based on UA (user agent). However Google now recommend using responsive design so if possible you'll (probably) want to do this

No.

However if all or most of your links come from resources/links pages then I would hazard a guess that you will leave behind another footprint for which you may get penalised.

As a rule of thumb you should try and be on well curated resource pages. So if the webmaster will link out to anyone for a small fee then they're probably not worth getting a link from. If on the other hand it's pretty hard to get featured on their resources list then there's more of a chance that the link will actually mean something.

You'll find that for a lot of the long tail keywords you will be targeting users will expect something different than they would if they had just typed "evening dresses". Whatever you do you'll need to remember that user experience is vital - after all what's the point in traffic if it doesn't convert?

I'd love to give more advice but I've never been in that situation before so I look forward to hearing what other people feedback.

I reckon you'll be fine just changing the title tags in this case.

Yeah, that's a big steaming pile of lies.

If your site is particularly slow then expect to have your rankings reduced however 1.5 seconds is very fast page load time.

If anyone has evidence to the contrary then I'd love to see it.

Have you recently made any changes to an affiliate program or banner ads campaign?

An extra 100,000 links is actually pretty easy to come by - it could be one site with dynamically generated pages linking to you. I wouldn't be too worried about this but you may want to look into it for your own peace of mind.

With regard to your linking root domains dropping - do you have any records that show what type of sites have been removed? It could be that you had a lot of directory links which Google has removed from the index. If this drop in LRDs hasn't already led to a drop in rankings then, again, I wouldn't worry about it but you may want to look into it further for your own peace of mind.

One sitewide link probably isn't going to hurt you too much. On the other hand it's probably not going to help you too much either.

It is worth pointing out that removing the no-follow from the banner would be a violation of Google's T&Cs regarding paying for links to manipulate Page Rank.

Have you not seen a decrease in rankings/visitors from search? Or is it just a change in TBPR(tool bar Page Rank)?

If manual action has been taken against your site then you would expect some sort of removal.

However if could just be that you've lost TBPR because all your links have been devalued.

It looks like a lot of your links were from "link" and "resources" pages. This kind of link building doesn't look natural so you might have been penalized.

If you do want to submit a reconsideration request then visit this page from Google.

HI Aidan,

I'd probably avoid directories that ask for reciprocal links. Google is getting really aggressive with low quality tactics like directory submission.

For more info I'd recommend checking out articles like this one (there are plenty on the net)-

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-directory-removal-15151.html

So are you saying that you're thinking of buying a keyword rich domain name and redirecting it to your main domain.

I doubt that would pass any value.

I would guess that including the main subject of each post in the title would de-duplicate it enough.

Have you noticed any issues with the pages getting indexed?

#1 for everything is always a start.

Increasing long tail traffic is always an option (assuming you don't already have plenty of longtail traffic).

Depending on the industry it might be an option to increase traffic from referring sites or social media not to mention affiliate marketing.

Bloggers and influencers - yep. You want these people to share your content if at all possible. I've found that some bloggers won't link to your content if it's on a commercial site however a lot of them are willing to Tweet it if it is great content.

Have you considered paid exposure? Facebook ads are pretty cheap and a small Google PPC budget could be used to target interested searchers.

If it's a city guide have you considered getting in touch with whichever municipal body is in charge of tourism in that city? If it really is the best content out there then you might be able to convince them to share it.

I'd not both with PR Web as (personal opinion) it's a waste of space but agree that sharing on social media is a good idea.

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.

1. Changing the information architecture could cause issues - I'm assuming that you're not doing it lightly and that you're making changes for the best. So long as you're aware of what you're doing then you should be fine.

2. Tons of new content is good- if it's good content.

3 & 4. Sounds exciting!.

I'm with Ryan on this one. If you can use less pages with more information on then do so.

And also I'd recommend reading up on the Panda Update.

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.

Have you had any site outages recently? It could be that you're site isn't up when Google is trying to crawl you.

Have you checked to see if your DNS is blocking Google bot by accident? Geting touch with whoever manages your servers and ask if they block any user agents or IP ranges. If they do then you might want to get them to look into this.

If you have Google Webmaster Tools set up you should check that you haven't accidentally messed up with blocking certain URL parameters.

Google's got another page about this issue here which might help.

Let me know how it goes.

Write unique content for your top 100 pages. Wait a month to see the results and then decided whether it will take too much time to write all those pages.

It's counting ALL the links.

Reducing the number of links on the page is best practice but I don't think there's a penalty for having too many links.

If you're struggling to rank the issue is probably elsewhere.