Welcome to the Q&A Forum
Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.
'Links to your Site' feature shows who is linking and how they are linking to your site. 'How is your data is linked' gives an overview on anchor text distribution within your link profile from both types of links. You can see a basic overview here.
Chances are, you'll rely on a Open Site Explorer to get a better, more in-depth overview on how your anchor text breakdown looks.
No negative impact. Unless it's a one service/product website, the heading "Overview" would not be the best use of the tag. This would be something more like "Real Estate Refinancing Product Overview" or something much more descriptive of what is to follow.
Utilization of H2's and H3's will also be useful towards structuring the overview page.
Duplication would be my secondary concern. After running many site audits this year, I have seen how many sites have duplicated heading tags as a result of how it was built into the site theme/design. My recommendation is to make h1's an editable field at the page level, rather than generate automatically, or, style it remove the tag from page heading's (as you suggested), this would be the next best option.
First off, sorry that you're running into ranking problems. It's never fun, but always turns into a learning process.
Upon inspection, it seems as though your link profile is lacking a set of links with integrity. Those that come from natural evolution of the lifespan of a linkworthy site. Looking at your link profile, sorting by external links to the root domain shows top links are from directories in large part. Granted, they are directory links with good authority, I would surmise that there are a lot of competitor links you could obtain as well as the ever-sought-after editorial-type links.
You're right. Big brands have these and they will continue to grow in SERP saturation within your vertical. The best thing you can do is be dynamic, target time-sensitive news items, provide better content and build your network of bloggers, social authorities, youtube users and grow your footrpint the right way.
Look to the link profiles my friend.
It's from adsense.
Here is everything you need to read:
For your reference:
The general thought is that they will take up valuable ranking landscape, since your title lengths are limited to begin with.
disparaging gaps between pageauthority and pagerank isn't uncommon. Sorry to tell you, Page Authority is much more valuable. The continuous refresh of the metric has left PageRank behind in the dust. Don't believe me? Check it out, http://moz.com/ugc/google-pagerank-vs-seomoz-page-authority-which-is-a-better-metric
If they are looking for local leads, go directly to building Citations. Social mentions will do very little to help with Google local rankings. Realistically, unless it is a metro area and you dedicate a lot of time & energy towards social, your efforts will not be show adequate ROI.
Why Citations are Important:
I agree with Todd unless you have a good recommendations engine. If that's the case, related or suggested products would still provide value to the user even if the product is no longer attainable.
If you're running PA as a number, be sure to look at the www version of the domain. Some tools neglect that critical component and will display the non-www version's PA.
You are entirely right, there are many conflicting stories within the educational side of SEO. Coupled with the fact that it changes dramatically over time, you have to stick to several trusted sources (like Moz!) and focus on what is happening right now. Other than going through the SEO Guide for Beginners and Google's SEO Starter Guide.
Last count, there were 250+ ranking signals.. looking at 4-5 is usually enough to gain some insights to why sites/pages rank the way they do. If those 4-5 signals aren't telling you the story, you simply have to look deeper.
Take anything Google says with a grain of salt and look at the UK as a whole for general search behavior. That will give you a more accurate read of search volume & behavior, then take what you've learned and apply it through a local lens where necessary.
For example: search phrases and behaviors for floral shops may be different in the UK as a whole than in Tunbridge Wells because people on a local level could be using mostly branded terms and looking for directions. I would complete several local business citations & profiles and use general search terms for the website.
I don't think they ever left.
Ontolo has had this feature set up for quite some time. You simply have to set it up and it will keep clean records of OSE data.
Without digging into it too deep, it's because _that number is all links. _
It is pulling links from within your own site.
Looking at OSE, you have 464 total external links and 30,837 total (including the links on your own site).
It looks like you have social buttons which are sitewide and likely to be nofollowed. I counted at least eight nofollows on your homepage alone. This is the culprit, or at least a good contributor!
Hope that helps!
I wouldn't worry unless you already have 5,000 existing forum posts and a brand-spankin-new link profile.
Right around the holiday season last year (2012), Google reps stated press release sites would not be worthwhile for SEO purposes alone. Meaning, they would discredit link equity passed from the major PR sites. Now, it's worth noting that Google will make these announcements before actually implementing, but it usually means it's here or coming soon.
You'd probably be reallocating PR-funds and resources into something more long-lasting, like content and linkable assets.
References:
There will be no issues. There aren't any with regular AdWords ads and there won't be any in this case. Updating PLA content is essentially updating for search terms/phrases, similar to both PPC and SEO.
Using the same information, assuming it has strong search potential, will not impact anything outside of creating consistency of info for the user. You should be fine as long as everything is accurate.
It will communicate that the relationship between the linked document and the current document. It's reverse of the rel attribute. Browsers do not use the attribute, but search engines can learn more about the relationship, such as: glossary, index, chapter, subsection and appendix.
Read more:
If you are seeing a large increase in traffic as the result of the redirects, then removing them will reverse that shift in traffic.
If it's SE referrals from long tail keywords going through the redirect, then you're going to definitely feel the hit from moving to 404's. Sure, your newly created pages may replace that traffic eventually, but the 301's are helping them do that now. Just the traffic standpoint is one reason, but passing any and (dang near all) of the link equity through to the new pages in the process.
Optimize things for search the same as Google, but with added info. For example, instead of just saying "iPhone 5 case," try using something product-specific, like, "natural cherry wood iphone 5 case."
Quality of info, categorization,and images is very important to Amazon, so don't cut corners. Beyond that, definitely get into Amazon's ad service to display your products. Just speaking from my/our experiences, this has helped a lot! After all of that, it comes down to user trust, etc. Think like a shopper. What do you want to see? Cost savings. High-quality imagery and information. Lots of reviews. LOTS of positive reviews.
Wouldn't you be showing 404's instead of 500's in the first place?
If the old URL's are still showing in the index, I'd reckon you'd want those 301'd to relevant pages anyways, at worst, at least a resource-heavy 404 page popping up rather than a 500.
External factors play a big part in this. If you aren't carrying a site like Amazon.com to use for your linking disposal, you're going to have a big uphill battle. Unfortunately, right now, part of that battle is the quantity of Time and significant natural growth within your link profile. Sites like Diapers.com can become a major competitor quickly (and you'll see this with Media groups & corporate conglomerates as well) as they have the whole network of sites at their disposal. Linking schemes between the properties can bring these relatively new players hundreds of thousands of dollars in organic traffic revenue in a relatively short period of time.
Your specific scenario is a tough one to speculate on.. simply because we can not see what you are seeing without looking at the sites in question.
Yep, you're going to want to avoid the strategy altogether unless the infographic is extremely useful and proves to make a splash with users.
Share with like-minded power users on Social Media, reach out to powerful bloggers within your niche and talk to friends to get the word out. Also, Visua.ly is your friend.
Don't waste time going after sites like Ezine Articles or the like.. even one submission at a time.
To increase the review rate, I would suggest doing these two things:
Glad I could help!
Here are some good sources to get your feet wet:
Unless the site is very small, you will definitely want to have (at a minimum) sub categories within the top-level pages. It's better for ui to have the site structured in a logical sense.
Your dev is right though, the closer a page is to the root the better it is for SEO. However, it is the ever present line we must straddle between building for SEO and for users. In my experience, the more you flatten, the higher the number of pages you must have on each URL.
Here's a great conversation on the subject on Webmaster World.
My favorite part about programs like Market Samurai is that you can push out rankings whenever you desire.
Last time I fired up Market Samurai, it did not play well with universal aspects of SERPs, perhaps that's different now. If not, moz will be a big plus here. Another perk is the reports. They are pretty, they are straight to the point. Analytics is coupled with ranking data.. which is not nearly as fun as doing it yourself in Excel.. of course 
Moz's rank tracker has a richer feature set. The only downside is once-per-week updates. Which, for most, is more than enough ranking data.
Yes, it's absolutely possible as long as targeting allows it, like John said. I like going this route, just like in Google. I split my campaigns by newsfeed (particularly with heavy-ups in mobile) and the right sidebar to create more visibility for my ads. I used to have a live example of this, but I can't seem to find it right now.
But, yes, it's definitely possible
There is no way to determine that, not unless you have access to the code and can verify the footprint the .html upload verification process leaves behind. For audit purposes, we just verify that a sitemap exists.. not whether or not it has been uploaded.
Best course of action is to talk to them.. ask them. Then, if they haven't, go ahead and work with them setting it up.
Google no longer shows ad rank/position. Google Shopping and PLAs have changed so much in the last year, and ads show in so many different places that rank/position no longer makes sense. Just go through the shopping process and note how many times you see an ad, then you'll realize how that metric matters less, or could be in different places throughout the process.
You'll have to rely on other metrics in AdWords to decipher how your ads are doing. Dig into the Columns and decide what matters to you most. Obviously Revenue and Cost-Per are the most valuable, but it's up to you/your client to decide other KPIs.
It's not the answer we want, but it's what we need to live with for now