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That one uses the exact same technology without the pretty report. Have you used it lately? It was upgraded a week ago and I believe intended to replace the one in seomoz labs.

That seems long to me. If you run a crawl. You can run it here instead and get results in 24 hours. Up to 2 per day and 3000 pages. It won't give you that nice red, blue and yellow report but it basic info is the same. You just need to manually analyze it. http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/crawl-test

Thats a good tip. Beware of rewording products titles though. Especially for titles where people are searching for a specific branded product or will be searching for exactly the same title.

I don't know if you saw this. Its very good timing that Rand wrote a blog post about this very subject!

Check it out, as always its a worthwhile read.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-places-citations-5-tactics-to-earn-links-for-your-local-business

Nope. iFrame is a link juice free zone.

I don't think it will hurt to do that, but there is probably no SEO value to doing it either.

It could be a good idea if you want to use an easily remembered URL in offline media and advertising thought.

I do not believe you have been penalized. You still come up on the first page for Dentist in Salt Lake City".

Especially on new sites, it has been my experience that it's not uncommon to see an initial boost in rankings for new sites before sinking to your natural position.

Well thats a pretty easy experiment. And the results appear to be that a proxy is not necessary.

I searched for SEO firm on google.co.uk from my office in San Diego and from a UK proxy @ http://goproxing.biz

Here are screen shots of both SERPS. While not an extensive test it appears that US based IPs can get UK results when searching google.co.uk

RkH6N.jpg hMle0.jpg

Eric,

Let me add that the keyword difficulty tool doesn't necessaraly apply to local search. A LOT of other stuff is looked at as far as local SEO.

You should check out David Mihm's bolg. It is one of the BEST resources available in local search.

http://www.davidmihm.com/blog/

Citations are the "link" equivalent for local search. If you go to your places page, there is a section that says "more about this place" That is info google has scraped from other local sources that mention your businesses. They may or may not contain a link.

Looking at your citations and your competitors is a good area to work on improving your listing in Google Places.

Heres an image of a citation section.

zXRor.png

Oh and a strong listing you would be more focused on number of searches if you feel it's realistic you could rank for it.

Oh and a strong listing you would be more focused on number of searches if you feel it's realistic you could rank for it.

It depends how strong your citations are. If your new or ave a weak listing I'd pay more attention to competition?

Awesome find on the snippet optimizer!

Awesome find on the snippet optimizer!

That's really great!

Named anchors I great if it meets your needs otherwise rel canonical will work.

Is your own shortner really necessary? I can't imagine it is.

I did this accidentally as well recently and had 100% of my products disallowed from google shopping within 48 hours. Sounds like it's not an option. They need the crawl your images folder to make sure you have valid images in you product listings.

Found it! http://www.seomoz.org/blog/301-redirect-or-relcanonical-which-one-should-you-use Check out the section "Redirecting all pages in one go to a single URL" "Although the intention may not be manipulative, there have been cases of people doing this to try and consolidate all the link juice from loads of pages into one page, to make that page stronger. This can sometimes put up a flag to Google who may come and take a closer look at whats going on." This post does also come with a Matt Cutts video discussing this. Hope that helps!

I swear I read in a recent post that Google frowns on large redirect to your homepage... Am I crazy??? I tried to find where I read this but can't remember. Anyone? Bueler?

Huge bummer. I thought you may say that. Thanks.

Since WP is all dynamic content the canonical tag is a good thing. It tells the search engines which version is the prefered version Without looking at your report or site, I'd say your ok. Work on fixing the red and yellow if possible and necessary.

Do you really need one? If so WP Super Cache is pretty great. I don't think most sites need it though.

There isn't really a canonical error in the crawl report. There is a "notice" which is really just the number of pages in your crawl that had the canonical tag on them. It doesn't mean there is a problem. Are you referring to the blue notices section in your crawl report on the campaign view?

i.e. Google.com v.s. Google.co.uk

This relates to another question I have open on a similar issue. So if I open the same e-commerce site (virtually) on company.com and company.co.uk, does Google really view that as duplicate content?

I would be inclined to think they have that figured out but I havent had much experience with international SEO...

| has my vote! More for readability than anything.

| has my vote! More for readability than anything.

I like that a lot! Can you rewrite product descriptions without maintaining separate databases? Would that involve a custom field or something?

I kinda figured that was the case.

I know it is going to be more complicated then setting the market in WMT. Any specific advise around geo targeting for e-commerce?

Is hosting on a US server a problem if we were going to launch a site in the UK?

I have a client who has 3 ecommerce sites. They are somewhat differentiated but for the most part sell the same stuff. Luckily 2 of them are quite authoritative, old and rank reasonably well.

Most of the visitors and sales come from the US. He wants to start targeting Europe, Mexico and Canada.

What are your suggestions for doing this? Are we better targeting on the main domains? Not really sure how to do that?

Should we use a subdomain and a new store front for each geo?

Should we use a .co.uk .co.mx and .co.ca each with a unique storefront?

It looks like we are moving to a Magento platform so setting up multiple storefronts on a single database is not a big issue.

Anyone have any experience with this?

Good question!! I have looked at that before and second Aaron's concern.

Has anyone else purchased these? I'd love to hear your feedback?

SEOmoz, are these still up to date-ish?

lets not forget - therapist.com

Well the more specific the search term (longer tail) the less likely it is that there is any data on that term. You cant be confident that a specific long tail keywords will produce anything if there is no search data on it.

IMO I find the idea of "targeting" specific long tail keywords kind of funny. By targeting head match keywords and generating content around those keywords you will naturally rank for long tail (high converting) keywords. But to think that I can anticipate the actual long tail terms seems unrealistic to me, unless it is something like a product specific "branded" search.

Does that make sense? Am I way off base here?

I hold VERY little faith that the numbers in Google's keyword tool are accurate. I think it is a good indicator of traffic levels, especially if you compare it against other sources, like WordTracker, but I try to normalize the numbers and look at them as relative values. I dont believe the actual search volumes.

The SEOmoz tool used to be difficult to use but I find it to be much improved. It is a good snapshot of what types of site/pages are ranking for a keyword and saves me a lot of legwork.

I really like Rands post here. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/10-steps-to-advanced-keyword-research

The process is pretty labor intensive, but I think well worth it if your client is willing to pay for it.

If you can get a really good relevant domain then go with that, but a hyphenated domain is not really good. I personally have found that I would rather go with short and easy, given the absence of good keyword domains.

SEO can't be my only strategy, especially for a new site, so being able to tell people about my site verbally and them find it easily is more important to me.

You have to setup a new URL. The rewrite only redirects traffic. If the page doesnt exist you are redirecting traffic to a page that doesn't exist. No Bueno!

None that I am aware of. What about traffic sources? Did traffic drop? How much and from which sources?

The data is there but not presented as nicely and requires some manual sorting.

Traffic Sources --> Search Engines --> Add Metric "Landing Page" or "Keyword"

There may be duplicates you need to account for if multiple search engines are sending traffic via the same keyword or to the same landing page.

If you only want to see it for a specific search engine and therefore not have to remove the duplicates do this.

Traffic Sources --> Search Engines --> Pick Search Engine --> Change Main Metric to "Landing Page" or "Keyword"

Hope that help. I really like the way they format it though. It is a nice report. I wish they allowed for more custom reporting on those metrics though like adding custom dates and export to PDF, etc.

Sure it does. I would argue that onsite optimization becomes even more important on a large scale. Just given the fact that there is so much internal linking a good onsite strategy can be crucial to success.

Good SEO should also help usability of your visitors too. The reason it is rewarded is because thats what users want to see and Google wants to give it's users what they are looking for the first time.

Good SEO = A Good Site!

Have you submitted a news sitemap? It should only include links to your news articles.

http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/answer.py?answer=74288

Also it looks like they want to know more about your editorial review process. Here is the standard message from google about being included in News results.

We typically include sites in Google News that:

• have news content reporting on recent events - please note that we don't
  include informational and how-to articles, classified ads, job postings,
  fictitious content, event announcements, advice columns or adult content;
• have content that is original to the site;
• are written and maintained by a clear organization, one that has
  multiple writers and editors with accessible contact information;
• don't solely promote their own activities or products;
• don't violate Google's quality guidelines available at
  http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769#3.

I think this blog post from Rand is just what you are looking for. In short, "Subdomains DO NOT always inherit all of the positive metrics and ranking ability of other subdomains on a given root domain!"

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites

I noticed that too. Kinda sucks. SEOmoz doesnt want to comp too many memberships i guess. Kinda lame, good thing SEOmoz is awesome, willing to overlook it.

BTW it's funny that you noticed that, yet neglected to thumbs up your own post on a question about the very subject.

Thats pretty broad. In what respect?

It is an automated process. Google uses rich snippets to collect this data. The review site need to use rich snippets to transfer.

If you are looking for sites to get reviews on, check your competitors and see where their reviews are coming from.

Encourage your customers to use the same review sites. Also, give your customers options on where to review you. If someone already is active in Google reviews it doesnt make sense for them to review you in Yelp, especially since yelp will probably filter their result if they sign up for an account to write one review and never come back.

If it is your review site, there is a submission process. Here is some info on rich snippets and the submission process to Google.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/05/introducing-rich-snippets.html

If it isn't competitive, you may still display in a larger geo. You may consider multiple listings in areas which are so far away that you arent displaying in. This suggestion will probably get a lot of flack as it can be considered to be map spam.

I have done this in very limited situations. It involves getting an address in a new locality to verify your listing. I think google has gotten better and combatting this although I have had a client do it with very good success. They still get a lot of call on these listing.

Do not go overboard (a few extras at most)! also don't list anywhere if you really cant compete there. It's an option but a controversial one.

Yeah that makes sense. Unfortunately this site is built in ProStores, which gives me no control over the URL structure. It makes me hesitant to make category changes that are going to recreate the URL structure.

ProStores is a nightmare.

Thats a tough call. Would you redirect the old pages? If so where would you redirect them to? Redirecting to the home page is not a good idea. I would be cautious getting rid of content that has links to it without having somewhere to redirect thos pages.

It seems almost impossible to analyze all of the implications. Have you thought about removing older content in smaller batches? Maybe get rid of the least visited 5000 pages first to see how that impacts the site overall.

I am not sure I would be comfortable dumping that much content willy nilly without doing some testing.

Another option would be to make sure to redirect the old content to the category page so you don't just lose that link juice all together. I would highly recommend figuring out a redirect plan for that content. Losing the links is a bad idea!

I'm working on an e-commerce site that currently has about 50 root categories and growing, with no sub-categories. They are all linked from the sidebar of every page and all the products are pretty related. They could probably be sub-categorized in to 5 root categories.

At want point does categorization become too flat?

Interesting point. The old URL structure isn't entirely clear to me is though, so it would take some real digging to apply all the old urls.

I guess its worth a shot.

Whats up with the new having to remember to thumbs up your own posts by the way????