Has anyone had any delays on Google+ reviews to show up? We have multiple clients who have not received a new review in over two months. These are good accounts with good Zagat scores with 15+ good reviews from real customers. Our clients have asked their clients and have confirmed that there has been reviews left recently. However no new reviews have shown up in the past 60+ days.

I think what your programmer meant to say is "It's easier to apply SSL to the entire site". For most instances on a new or existing site, I would recommend just adding it to the checkout page.

There are some great responses on the SEO aspect of your project already from Keri and Matt. As far as building the site, I would build it off of WordPress and use a custom post type for "Recipes", and custom taxonomies for "ingredients" and "type" etc... Then you can use the default WP search function and taxonomy lists for users to easily search for the right recipe.

Wow... I'm sure there will be little benefit if any for SEO with these. I personally can't stand these new domains!

You will not be penalized for using the word "free" in your metadata. Just make sure you have something free to offer and your description is not mis-leading.

How many links are in your footer? If there are 30+ I would try trimming it down a bit, anything less you should be fine. But ask yourself this: Is every footer link you have benefitting the user of the website? If not, get rid of them. If you are using your footer links as an SEO tactic, you should probably take a step back and re-think your strategy.

Footer links in my opinion are perfectly fine when used in moderation and they provide value to the user.

What content is included in the modal windows? It sounds like it's just maybe short snippets and some form fields to login or signup? If that is the case you don't have anything to worry about. Depending on your site structure you should have plenty of other content on your pages to differentiate "page" content from "misc" content.

We have had good success in the past with journalism students from the local colleges. You can usually find them through Craigslist or contacting the schools directly. One good thing hiring freelancers locally is they are available to come in and meet with us when needed to learn about our clients brands and their needs.

I would highly suggest if you want to outsource your content to go with someone local and trustworthy rather than trying to find someone online through Odesk or other similar sites.

As William said, without seeing the URL's its pretty hard to say. Despite what some people say, content and on-site SEO signals still go a long way in SERP results. Perhaps it's something on-site that is causing them to rank higher than you.

Check out the 2012 Mozcon video from Paddy Moogan, great presentation with actionable takeaways.

There can be pro's and con's for both instances. The biggest pro you can get with a blog hosted on your domain rather than a WordPress.com blog is a cohesive brand image. I would never want my blog readers to leave my main website to read a blog on another domain, most likely they wont come back to your main website.

As far as your WP.com hosted blog beating your main URL in the SERP's, WordPress.com has a very high domain authority that can pass through to your blog and help it out a bit. You can think of that as a pro, but I see it as a con if your blog is outranking your main website.

If you wanted to keep the tag based archives, you could always noindex the tag archives. With WordPress, you can do that with ease with the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin. That will solve your problem without needing to delete your tag archives.

What kind of a redirect did you do? Also did you re-direct just the homepage or the whole site? Ideally you will want to individually 301 redirect the old pages to the new pages.

To let Google know they are the same website, you will need to verify both websites with Google webmaster tools. Under "Configuration > Change of address" you can let Google know that your website has moved, this should help.

I'm sure you may be aware that .md domain extension is for Moldova(apparently a country in Europe) which could explain your high ranking on that international Google site.

I would check Google Webmaster Tools under "Configuration > Settings" and make sure the "Target users in:" is set to United States.

You can name the sitemap whatever you want, but yes it should be in .xml format and should be located on your server. Having your sitemap at domain.com/sitemap.xml is a best practice. You can also have it in a xml.gz file for larger sitemaps.

Once it is created submit it to Google Webmaster Tools.

Im not sure where you read it only finds 25% of links, but that seems low. As long as the link is on a crawl able page it will pick it up.

The next update is schedules for Nov 5th - you can find the update calendar at https://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/345964-linkscape-update-schedule

It is said it can take anywhere from 1-2, even 3 updates in some cases for a new link to be indexed.

The rankings are updated weekly, and with the way SERP's can fluctuate daily its hard for them ever to be accurate besides the moment when they update.

I am curious how you are double checking your rankings now?

SEOBOOK's plugin is nice, also we use rank tracker a lot for when we need data instantly.

I have never used tags, mainly because I have never seen any point to them. Tags are basically categories, so why not just create a category instead? I understand you can get more specific with tags in some cases.

The main reason I dont use them is because they also make tag-based archive pages, which in most cases look like like your category-based archive pages and blog archive pages, making just another duplicate page for search engines to crawl.

It looks like your current theme is called "Focus", rename that to something different and it will uninstall the theme for you and you will be able to access WP again.

You mentioned you deleted the old theme also, so make sure you have either twenty ten or twenty eleven installed as a fallback theme.

You need to rename your current theme, not the old theme. Once you rename your current theme that will uninstall that theme and revert to the default theme so you can access WordPress again.

In the future(if they havent started to already), I think Google is going to be cracking down a bit on websites that are structured like this... Having X amount of pages for the same thing just changing it up a bit to target a new city.

If you have an office or address in those 20 cities, I would start with optimizing any Google+ Local listings and focusing on ranking those first. It's a much easier and legitimate strategy then making a bunch of spammy(most likely) looking pages.

I am seeing your social media buttons throughout your blog archive and single blog posts pages. They all seem to have different numbers associated with them also.

It seems to be working for me, did you figure this out?

Without knowing your client's industry, generally speaking If I had 3 hours to work on Local SEO, I would split it up between Google+/G+ Local and Yelp. If I had any time left over, I would try to make connections with reporters from local news websites.

They can absolutely have a positive effect to support your SEO efforts. One thing I feel you should know is though, simply using a service like Piktochart and some of the other infographic creators and slapping together something quick isn't going to give you the results you are looking for.

I would recommend designing a custom infographic from scratch - or hiring a designer to do it for you after you provide him with a creative brief.

You also need to think of your plans on how you will distribute the infographic. Here is a great youmoz post on how to push an infographic - http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/how-to-push-an-infographic

Just make a new page for every service.

There is no reason to use the multisite function or have each keyword on a new domain. Not only will it not benefit you from an SEO standpoint it will also feel disconnected from a user standpoint. Nobody wants to see a "weirdexactmatchdomain.com" with a small amount of content on it, they would rather see all of your services on one complete website.

Assuming the service and keyword is something like "divorce lawyers in city" (disregard my whole reply if I am wrong :)), there should be Google map listings dominating those SERP's. At least in the test cities I just searched. But for any local based service SERP there is most likely the same look.

In that case if your client has offices in those different cities, it would be easier to claim and optimize your Google+ listings for each location rather than have a bunch of spammy looking pages on your site. There is no reason to have 7 different pages on the exact same topic.

I would determine a top/important page as one that is not only ranking well for your terms, but pages that may be receiving traffic from other sources. Check out Google Analytics and sort by top pages and filter by source and redirect the ones that are actually seeing inbound traffic.

Sooner is better than later.

Make sure when you 301 redirect the site, you not only redirect the site, but redirect the individual pages to the new pages also so that any of the internal ranking pages pass the rank also.

Make sure to verity the new site in Google webmaster tools and notify them that the old domain has permanently moved to the new domain. In my experience, you will usually see direct ranking transfer within 2-4 weeks max.

I wouldnt always go off of the SEOmoz grader tool. You could have a 1000 piece of content about the presidential debate last night, and throw in the word "storage bin" in that article 5 times and you will get a grade "A+", but that doesn't mean the content is good content for storage bins. (Im not saying your content is bad, but dont assume your on-site SEO is good just based off of that tool).

Improving your overall inbound links would be a great place to start, looking at OSE you only have 4 internal links pointing to your site http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=http%3A%2F%2Fmonsterbins.com%2F. I'm not sure what your SEO level is, so I am making that suggestion blindly. Dont just go out and blindly build links if your not sure how to. I would recommend checking out Point Blank SEO's Link Building Course - or at the very least his blog has great actionable link building tactics.

Dave,

Adding a rel="nofollow" tag to a URL is not going to fix any duplicate content. It just means that moz/Google bot aren't going to follow that link. But they already know that that URL exists so they will continue to index it.

If you dont want Google to index your content because of duplicate content you can use a canonical tag or noindex, nofollow tag. Check out this article on the same issue http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/duplicate-content on how you can resolve your problem.

Hope that helps!

Without looking at keywords or competitors, typically 6 months is a perfect amount of time to get noticeable results on a local campaign. You can most likely rank for local deck building keywords with on-site SEO and good content.

Personally, I would take it on. I would say it depends on your SEO capabilities and track record on weither you want to take the project on. Definitely do not take on any project that you are not comfortable with, those never end well for anyone...

There are many many things you can do with your .htaccess

What are you trying to accomplish? Are you trying to redirect non-www to www? Trying to get a better link structure? Trying to redirect pages? Or a site?

In most cases it depends on your server setup and your needs. Since you mentioned Joomla, this post has some pretty good explanations and examples at the bottom you can download.

The keyword difficulty tool is working 90% for me, its still pulling in all of the SERP results, links, DA, PA, etc. The only thing that is not working is the adwords search numbers - which if you really want to know that, use the Google keyword tool.

And if you read the big bold warning on the tool's page it reads:

Our Keyword Difficulty Tool is having issues displaying AdWords API data. We are working with the AdWords API folks to get a fix soon!

Give them a break, I am sure they are working on it. I know their support team works hard to reply to everyone's emails.

John Doherty did a great post a while back on meta tags that will NOT help SEO. As you can see, "classification" is on that list.

The rel="stylesheet" is just pulling in all of the website's CSS styles. Design related, not SEO.

You can read more about pingback's here.

By default WordPress includes stylesheets and your pingback URL.

You also mentioned you are using meta keyword tags still, I would recommend removing those, they have not been a ranking factor for quite some time now, you are just giving your competitors an insight to the keywords you are targeting.

There was a recent post a few days ago in the UGC blog on how to push an infographic. http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/how-to-push-an-infographic

In reality though, a good infographic should do the work for you.

You can absolutely still rank with good content and site architecture. It doesn't have to do with having a lot of content, just good content. While you aren't going to rank for any competitive terms, but you can climb up high on the first page for some long tail and local based keywords.

Xavier,

I think generally right now they still work to a point, the problem you will likely run into in the future is the mass amount of links with the same anchor text pointing back to the same page on your site.

One way to work around this problem could be to randomly generate anchor text and URL for each site that uses the badge.

Sam,

I am working on a mac, and OSE works across all browsers including Chrome. What version of IE?

You mention "It doesn't work". What exactly do you mean by that? The website is down? The tool is pulling in wrong data? The tool is pulling in no data at all?

No one here can possibly answer your question without more specifics.

No problem, feel free to send me a private message if you need help with the code.

Please check out the authentication wiki page: http://apiwiki.seomoz.org/w/page/29574176/SignedAuthentication

$objectURL = $domain_url;$accessID = "member-XXXXXXXXXXX";

$secretKey = "XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX";

$expires = mktime() + 300;

// The request is good for the next 5 minutes, or 300 seconds from now.

$stringToSign = $accessID."\n".$expires;

// Get the "raw" or binary output of the hmac hash.

$binarySignature = hash_hmac('sha1', $stringToSign, $secretKey, true);

// We need to base64-encode it and then url-encode that.

$urlSafeSignature = urlencode(base64_encode($binarySignature));

$urlToFetch = "http://lsapi.seomoz.com/linkscape/links/".urlencode($objectURL)."?AccessID=".$accessID."&Expires=".$expires."&Signature=".$urlSafeSignature."&SourceCols=26&&TargetCols=4&Scope=page_to_domain&Filter=follow&Sort=page_authority&Limit=25";

// You don't have to use fopen and can't in some scenarios. CURL is a better choice for production.

$handle = fopen($urlToFetch, "r");$links_contents = ''; while (!feof($handle)) {    $links_contents .= fread($handle, 8192);} fclose($handle);

echo $links_contents;

?>

Here is how we are pulling it in. Replace $accessID with your API code, you can sort and filter through the different link calls. Replace "Limit" with however much you want to pull in. The code will return a json response, from there you can parse the data however you want.

I hope that helps!

Hi roberthseo,

It seems like sometimes it can take OSE 2-3 index updates before some links are included in the index.

But since your profile is from April, I would guess it is because your profile link may be to buried on CrunchBase for the OSE crawler to find. Build a few links to your profile page and it will show up in the next update or two.

Depending on how example.com is redirected to example.com/default.html you may be losing some "power" through the redirect.

A easy fix would be to simply make your example.com/default.html act as though its example.com through .htaccess

It depends, as a backlink can serve many different purposes aside from just "helping SEO".

You dont list the domain authority, whats the DA of each link?

Rich,

How old are those links? OSE updates roughly once a month, and its said it can take up to 2 index periods for your links to show up, if they are relatively new, this is the reason for this. You can check the linkscape update schedule here.

I know it can be frustrating for newer sites, you want to see the are showing up, but be patient. When they do show up in OSE the data you get is better than any other service we use.

We try to get 3-4 per month per client - each "outreacher" has about 3-4 clients they work on actively. We found that its also easier to hire & train professional writers/social media people to do this job, not only can they create good relationships through good email and status writing, but they can also write the content for the blogs itself.

We use WordPress + Shopplugin (newest version)

Typically I use /sitemap.xml

I dont think it matters what you call it, as long as its submitted to Google webmaster tools.

Check out sitemaps.org for more info on how to create a quality sitemap

Hi Cindy,

You can install the plugin on your current setup, and it should work, if by chance it doesnt work, you can download the older versions here which are supported in 2.9.1

This plugin allows you to 301 redirect from anywhere on your site to any external link you want