Welcome to the Q&A Forum

You could try searching NerdyData for a search operator like below:

href="http://example.com

Make sure to leave the closing quotation mark out to account for any sub pages.

This may or may not  return some different results, it's worth a shot.

If you are seriously concerned about a penalty which could result in your business having to close it's doors, you should probably be seeking out help from an agency rather than looking for free advice here.  If the situation is that dire, then getting an audit and quote from an agency will probably be your safest bet at this point.

Migrating to a branded domain is probably the best step to avoid a penalty at this point.  Get away from the EMD and over-optimized anchor text ASAP.

If your domain is penalized, it won't be your branded domain - it will be your EMD domain.  It's hard to say if it could be penalized in the future, but it hasn't been yet, so you might be OK.

I assume that you'll 301 redirect all pages on the EMD to the new branded domain.  You should be prepared to put in a lot of effort to clean up the anchor text of the EMD link profile, or completely disassociate the old domain in the event of a penalty.

I would tell your client to not worry about it.  I didn't know that GoDaddy was in the SEO consulting business now?

I found this as an explaination of what a GoDaddy SEO Checklist Stop Word means:

Words that are common do not help search engines understand documents. Exceptionally common terms, such as the, are called stop words. While search engines index stop words, they are not typically used or weighted heavily to determine relevancy in search algorithms.

It sounds like more of a warning to me.  I wouldn't worry about it.

I would suggest Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARRP), but since your main concern is performance - be wary of large sites.  This plugin can be resource intensive on large WordPress sites, in which case it is to your advantage to use YARRP Experiments to control the cache and throttle.

To 301 redirect all files in the direct to the new directory in .htaccess, try this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^old\ foldr/(.*) /newfolder/$1 [R=301,NC,L]

This should redirect all HTML pages, images, you name it.  It should also account for the space too.

You'll want to move all your files to the new folder location so when the redirect happens your end user doesn't receive a 404 error.

As Jeff mentioned, it could very well be Google running a test - they run small tests like this quite often.

I just tried a branded search for one of my clients when I was not logged in, and I see www in front of the domain.  This client required www as part of their domain, so we set up .htaccess redirects to force all URLs to begin with www.

Google is pretty good about figuring out redirects and will show www is it's required, and will ignore it and not display it in the SERPs if the site doesn't use www.

Does your site have the proper redirects set up to send non-www URLs to the www equivalent?

Like Federico stated, the link results in a 302 redirect, which does not pass any link equity as far as search engines are concerned.  It might as well be a nofollowed link.

So, does it have value?  If the link is driving your client traffic, then it does have value.  If the link is on an obscure website and isn't driving any traffic - than it has no value, because it will not help the client rank in search engines.

Monster and Indeed pretty much have the job-related searches locked up unfortunately.  It would be a waste of time trying to compete with them, unless you get luck and are able to outrank them on a long tail keyword - but even then you might not get the results your looking for (as far as traffic goes).

Some marketing association sites will charge you to post a job, others won't, it depends on the association.

You might be better served with referral traffic and social media traffic.  Post the job to Linkedin and see what happens?

It's possible that the Google Hummingbird update is assuming that when you search for "privateequityfirms" you are really trying to search for privateequityfirms.com because of a lack of other relevant results.

It's also possible that the fact that it's an EMD has something to do with it.

It looks like you used to have a domain 301 redirect to your domain (pedatabase.com) but that no longer is the case.  I'm showing a lot of links to this domain, even some .edu links.  If Google has disassociated this domain with your domain, you rankings could be dropping as a result.

Of the linking domains in your link profile, many of them link to the pedatabase.com domain: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links.html?page=1&site=privateequityfirms.com&sort=page_authority&filter=equity&source=external&target=domain&group=1

You will have a hard time competing with Monster and Indeed for job-related broad match keywords, but you might have better luck with long tail keywords.

You could also look at posting to popular niche directories for the type of work you are looking to hire for.  If you are looking for a developer or designer, StackOverflow has a job board.  If you are looking to hire a marketing oriented job, Inbound.org also has a jobs board.  Where I live (in Minnesota, USA) we have a local marketing association that also has a job board that gets a lot of attention and traffic - so much so that showing up in the SERPs isn't even necessary.  Perhaps you have a similar place to put your postings?

Unfortunately, sometimes we're at Google's discretion as to whether or not they want to display structured data and authorship the way that we would like them to.

Even if you have authorship set up properly, Google has no obligation to show your author image next to your content.  When we set up Google authorship on our sites, we're merely suggesting to Google that we are the author of the content - it's up to them to display the image if they feel it's relevant.  I've seen many SERPs where my authorship doesn't show up, but changing the keywords a bit will display the author image for the same posts.

I would give it a few days.  Try using depersonalized search to see if it makes a difference.  If your authorship image doesn't come back, I would unlink your site from your Google+ account, and relink it - and see if that brings it back.

Does most of the traffic come from referrals or from organic search?

If you are targeting organic search, you would probably be better off using the acme2013.com domain as a redirect (for those that want to go directly to the site, easier to type in) and hosting the content as a subdomain of your main site.  You can piggyback off the domain authority you've built with your main domain to gain added exposure in search engines - as opposed to starting from scratch with a new domain.

If you aren't concerned with search traffic, it might be easier for people to remember a shorter domain than a longer domain, so creating a new domain each year would be the way to go.

I don't believe that this will affect your mobile search rankings.  It's a common practice in responsive design to hide some elements on smaller screens.  Google knows this, and they take this into account.

Lots of sites have large sitemaps in their footer, and this doesn't really translate nicely to mobile screens.  You could consider creating a jQuery dropdown menu that includes the sitemap - this way the content is still there, accessible, and usable, but it doesn't take up any screen space until you click on the "menu" button.  Just a thought.

The only thing to be careful of is to make sure that you are not hiding keyword intensive objects.  It's hard to say, but it's possible that Google could interpret this as abuse.  I wouldn't leave it up to Google to try to interpret what you are doing.

OpenSiteExplorer only returns the social sharing data for the specific URL you entered.  If you entered your root domain (http://example.com) it will only return the number of shares for that specific URL - not the entire domain and all sub-pages.

Likes on a Facebook page will not show up in OSE, because the number of Facebook likes returned is the number of times people on Facebook liked the specific URL you entered into OSE.

So in short - the social sharing data that OSE is returning is accurate, it's just not what you are expecting to see.  Hope that helps!

I personally don't think it would make a difference one way or the other, as long as the proper 301 redirects are put into place and all traffic to the old URLs is sent to the correct new URL.

I do, however, think the sub-directory approach looks cleaner.  Anything beyond the first sub-domain looks spammy to me (or just sloppy).  That's just me though.

I don't think it's Google that is causing the problem, perhaps it's the browser.

In Chrome, I searched for your keyword.  I noticed the '%20' (the HTML character for a space) in the URL of the first result.  When I moused over the result, the HREF that showed had a space in the URL in place of the '%20'.  When I clicked on the result, it correctly sent me to your page, and did not replace '%20' with a '+' symbol - which can also be used to replace a space.

Have you tried writing .htaccess redirects to send users to the correct page if they encounter a situation where they are attempting to hit the + URL when they should hit the '%20' URL?

Those ads are generated by Google AdSense to target the user - you.  Google keeps track of your search history and pages you've visited to generate relevant ads to increase clicks and sales for the companies paying for those ads.

So in short, the ads have nothing to do with the sites rankings.  The fact that they are the same is explained by them being AdSense ads.

I could be wrong, it's possible that feature was just added to the higher subscriptions.

For the record, I remember checking yesterday, and the Pricing page said "coming soon" I'm not sure why it doesn't today.

Branded reports will be included (soon I think) in the Medium, Large and Premium subscriptions.  The 30-day free trial is a trial of the Standard subscription, so it does not come with the branded reports.

For a production environment, I would suggest having one minified CSS file.  This will reduce file size (minifying) and server requests (1 file as opposed to 10).  This will help reduce page load time.

Of course, on your staging environment, or in an archive of the website, it would be best to have your stylesheets broken down into an easier to manage system.  That might mean multiple CSS files, it might not - it's up to you to manage.

As Chris stated above, there is nothing currently in place to allow your clients to log in and see their data, they'll have to do with reports.

As far as reports go, branded reports are on the horizon for Medium, Large, and Premium subscriptions!  https://moz.com/subscriptions

You'll want to use a rel="publisher" tag.  More info here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1708844?hl=en

[Find us on Google+](https://plus.google.com/yourpageID)

SEOTools for Excel has Google Analytics capabilities.

Here is more info on it: http://nielsbosma.se/projects/seotools/functions/googleanalytics/

The number of Facebook likes returned by OpenSiteExplorer is the number of times the URL you entered into OSE was liked on Facebook posts, not the number of Facebook likes for the Facebook Page tied to the domain.

So in short, this number is accurate.

Ruben,

I can't think of a comparable profession you can learn in college that changes so frequently and so drastically.  Just think of how much has changed in SEO since 2006, which is when I started college.  If I learned pre-2006 SEO in college and hadn't bothered to keep up with industry standards and best practices, I would be out of a job right now.

I will concede that some SEO courses could be added to another degree, like Marketing or Advertising - such as "History of Search Engines and SEO", "Technical SEO", "Basic HTML and Web Design", "Structured Data" and others.  These could absolutely be beneficial for future marketers.

If I was to hire a new marketer, I would still certainly weight experience higher than college courses - hands down.

Thanks,
Brad

I disagree that SEO should be taught in colleges, or that there should be certifications for it.

SEO requires constant learning, testing, and adjusting.  By the time you finish a 4 year degree, the tactics and guidelines you learned in year 1 may be completely obsolete.

Each SEO is different.  Everyone has their own opinions and techniques.  That is the nature of the industry, and why it's so interesting.  There is no one right answer, there are many different ways to get to the top, and even more that make it harder to get there.

SEOs also use an ever-changing set of tools, which also is adapting and changing with the industry.  The tools you learned while at University are probably outdated or obsolete by the time you graduate.

I personally think that a degree in Marketing or Communications will set you up for a great start in the SEO field, but the majority of the leg work to learn industry standards, tools, techniques, etc., should not be taught in school.

Just realized I forgot to add the link to the article, my bad!  http://www.wowinternet.co.uk/blog/100-dollar-link-building/

The best link building is creating good content and having an audience to share it with.  If your content is good, the links will build themselves organically.

Building links and authority organically can be, unfortunately, a long and frustrating journey - especially in boring niches.  When I pull up your blog posts, I don't see them as blog posts (much like Peter above) but rather as promotional material disguised as a blog post.

The problem you are facing is one that I've seen time and time again.  Online businesses in boring markets with little to no audience are really hard to get off the ground.  You have to be extremely **creative. **

When you are writing your next blog post, I would suggest browsing through Pinterest to see what popular items come up for "storage bins" or something similar.  There are probably a bunch of "life hacks" and instructographics that you can gain inspiration from to write a blog post.  Then share the heck out of it - share it on Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, you name it.

I know you are facing a frustrating challenge, but if your task was easy, then people such as myself would be out of work

You're going about it all wrong.  You said that your goal is to drive traffic to your automotive site (pun intended), but then why are you concerning yourself with link building?

Building links for the automotive industry will be extremely difficult in the first place.  How many different blogs could you guest post on?  Probably not tons, right?  Submitting your site to directories won't help you in the Search Engines, and certainly won't drive much referral traffic.  Why bother?

You should focus on building a website that is easy for people to consume and navigate, create content that is worth peoples time, build a social media presence, and focus on customer service and improving your product/brand.

This might seem like a daunting task, but it's the only sure-fire way to "win" on the internet in the long run.

You might think that since you're in a traditionally boring internet niche, that it will be difficult for you to generate buzz about your content to earn links.  That isn't true.  I submit to you an article that Matthew Barby from Wow Internet put together on "link building" on a micro-budget.  What it comes down to is that money isn't as important as creativity.

Good luck!

You could not possibly do any good by building your own link network with 12 domains you purchased.  Google will figure it out, and your links will either be devalued completely, or you'll get a manual penalty placed on your site.

There are legitimate use cases for site wide links (like in the footer) but it's best to nofollow these links to be safe.

You upload images through WordPress' built in Media upload tool.  Don't FTP images directly into WordPress as they won't be recorded in the database and you won't get the built-in feature of having several different sizes of the images made (thumb, small, medium, large).

I would also recommend optimizing your images before uploading them.  Use a tool like tinypng.org if you are primarily uploading pngs.

I think using an intermediary page with a redirect script is the way to go.  This allows you to modify the redirect (301 vs 302), the server header, and the destination - after the fact.

Ideally, you could do this going forward.  For your current affiliates, you could reach out to them and provide a new affiliate link, or ask them to nofollow the link.  This part isn't ideal, but if you had the intermediary redirect page you could handle this without contacting the affiliate.

I personally would avoid CommentLuv.  Off the top of my head, the cons would be:

• Costs $97
• Increases/promotes comment spam
• Increases WordPress database size by adding more data to the comments table
• Increases page load times due to extra processing of each comment

The only pros would be that it increases your exposure slightly and you will most likely get an increase in comments - but if the commenters are self-serving and coming simply to drop a link (as opposed to actually being interested in what you have to read) then is that really a good thing?

On top of all that, I personally think that CommentLuv is just kind of....cheesy....and doesn't belong on a professional website.

I think it comes down to the branding requirements of the new product.  Is this a major product launch, or just another product amongst an existing product line the company has had for ages?

The advantages of having the new product under the current domain (as a subdomain, or a subdirectory as Kurt pointed out above) would be that you could piggy back off the existing brand and online presence, and it would be easy for new customers to find the product, even if they weren't looking for it.

If the product is new, your company is investing a lot in it, and it deserves it's own branded presence, than a new domain might be the way to go.  Search Engines and Marketers have been moving towards "branding" for a while now, and if this product warrants it's own name, personality, or community - this would probably be the way to go.

My two suggestions for a WordPress specific site would be WP Engine or Pagely.

Pagely is a smaller company, but they have excellent speed, uptime, and service.  They also have a deal going on right now for "Cyber Monday": http://blog.pagely.com/2013/12/cyber-monday-12-days-pagely/

You can't go wrong with either WP Engine or Pagely.

Thanks Devanur,

I understand that site-wide links should be avoided, and I fully understand why.

What I'm asking is if it's necessary to physically remove those links altogether, or if nofollowing them will suffice?  You suggested I do both (remove all but homepage and nofollow home page link) - so I'm looking for more clarity here.

Thanks!

Brad

Egol,

In my experience, scrapers and feedgrabbers are usually server-side scripts that won't register in Google Analytics because they won't have Javascript enabled.

Of course - the server logs will definitely show scrapers.

As a web developer, it's not uncommon for me to place a link in the footer of a website to give myself credit for the web design/development.

I recently decided to go back and nofollow all these site-wide footer links, to avoid potentially looking spammy.

I wanted to know if I should remove these links altogether, and just give myself text credit without a link at all?  I would like for a potential client who is interested in my work to still be able to get to my site if they like my work - but I want to keep my link profile squeaky clean.

Thoughts?

My understanding is that Disqus uses iframes for their comments, so they won't be crawled and indexed by Google.  This may have changed since I last checked, but I'm fairly certain it's still true.

I believe Disqus gives you the option to store your comments locally, check this out: http://help.disqus.com/customer/portal/articles/472125-data-synchronization

If the structure is identical (I'm not clear on that from your post) then why not do a global redirect from the old content to the new content

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !newdomain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://newdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

This should redirect old pages to the same structure on the new domain, including images.

I'm a fan of using this CSS for responsive images:

image {
     max-width: 100%;
}

I personally wouldn't be a fan of running a check on the user-agent and serving up an optimized image because you would probably negate some of your load time optimization from shrinking down the image by running unnecessary server processing.

Also - by optimizing an image for mobile, you should actually be increasing the DPI because of higher resolution screens (Retina).  Shrunken down images might look awful on iPhones.

Just my .02

I understand what you are referring to about having to hide certain elements on smaller screens.  Sometimes not everything fits or flows correctly.

When this happens, however, I try to hide design elements as opposed to text or links.  I'm also OK with hiding images.  If a block of text or a link seems out of place or doesn't flow properly, I will build a dropdown for it.  I'm sure you've seen mobile sites with dropdown navigation menus.

I wouldn't leave it to up to Google to interpret what you are doing.  Don't hide any links.

You'll need to create a custom Menu by going to Appearance -> Menus.  Name the menu, add the appropriate pages, and choose the theme location.

If you don't do this, by default WordPress creates a menu using all "Pages" and there is no way around it.

The "Home" page doesn't need to be named home.  Check in Settings > Reading to see if you already have one set. f you don't, your theme files will dictate what is generated for your home page.

As Jon stated above, create a new Page (perhaps call it Home to avoid confusion).  Add your content there, and/or set your template file.  Then go into Settings > Reading, check "A static page" and select Home from the Front page dropdown.

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The thing is though - these methods will not increase your rankings.  Google has pretty much devalued any links that we have some form of control over (directories, forums, blog comments, social bookmarking sites - even guest posting).