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I was asked a question today and would like a second opinion on it :
Knowing that Alex wants to rank for personnal training the question is, from a SEO standpoint, which domain name would you recommend me using and why :
personnaltraining.com ( IS not available)
I have my idea on this, but I'd like to have your so we can share and discuss on that.
Thanks !
I wouldn't be worried if my content is useful to users and have a good level of quality
I would say that it's a bit risky since it's not "Natural" that much, especially if you site on are the same IP ou Class C and are not really related in thematic. It's even worse if your several blogs are using duplicate, automated or Thin content.
You should focus on getting good links instead. But thing is good links are hard to find. You can also focus on Social medias to increase you Social signal and sharing to increase natural linking schemes.
I would say since Google may show this one in search results which gives you a little control on what users will see when this page is triggered by a Search.
Limit it to 160 characters. Beside that, no that much ...Meta where so abused over the past.
Maybe you should also start to think on implementing Rich snippets if you have time :
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=99170
Beside great content, great domain you will need great links on great sites.
There is no real shortcut. It's not about what you lauch, it's about how people react to what you put.
I personally think that everyone should be comfortable enough to blog on his name or on company name. I don't think creating a fake identity is ethic. It should not be done in my opinion.
I personally use Firefox and save them of monthly folders where I can go and get some inspiration. I also use delicious to save the one I found most relevant in order to share it with people interested in it.
I also would recommand putting it in /blog but you could also want to build it on another domain if you want to get a plan B if you 1st domain lower is rankings.It's a longer work to build linking and authority but when done you also get longer benefits.
It can be considered as spam depending on how many you use. Try avoiding site-wide and navigation links using the same Anchors. I would recommend that you build your content trying to provide relevant information to searchers rather then relevant keywords for rankings.
Also, if you use a lot of keywords you should also have a lot of great links since this is how you can judge a great content.
I think that it's harder, you will need a lot of US links so it's a lot of work. The best would be to use a .com and to create a US version of your site.
USA users won't really be attracted to .co.uk and also the vocabulary you use on the site could be a real turn off for US users.
But if you absolutely want to do it, I would host a sub-domain of .co.uk on a server located in USA. But as I said, it's a lot of work that users may not appreciate to much.
I do believe it is counting since in definitive, it's the best method that google can use to quantify interest of a result.
You should also check for Canonical redirection or if you had any redirection in place and if it's still working. As state below I strongly believe that depending of the target market of your site the geotargeting is better when your hosted in the country your targeting.
You should do both but when you can have a custom anchor, you should link to the page it correspond since it will create more juice to this page. This is call deeplinking.
Link to your homepage when you can't set an custom anchor and that you can only use Site title or something like this. Try to use variations of your site title when doing it so you can achieve a broader range of related queries.
No, the only reason Adwords can have somekind of an impact on Organic is when people become aware of your site and search it later using it's name. Beside that, there is no link whatsoever between Adwords and Organic.
Maybe .. Maybe if your landing page or site has a problem the Adwords Bots will report it to some team at google, but if it's the case, Googlebot would spot it some time around ... So which one did it doesn't have this much of importance.
I always say why not. If the site is relevant, a link is a link even if it's not passing a lot of juice. Those links are easy to put in place and over the time they will help your site.
But don't put them on spammy, irrelevant sites
I would say that it's better to start a new site with new content because you probably have been hit by Panda or something like this or lost High value links to your website and content.
Building a new site and new contents will give you another option in your mitigation plan and can lead to discover new opportunities.
Of course, you can think of moving you stuff to another domain, but it will lost links and/or transfer the problem to the new site if there was a problem.
I am doing a test and would like to ask you're opinion about it in a SEO stand point :
I would like to structure a website that has 3 menu links to 3 keyword rich domains names that would be structure in a Silo architecture each one related to it's own topic and not duplicating the content.
Like a Cross-Domain siloing approach.
Do you think it would work ? How should I build this in order to ultimately build ranking for the main site ? Do you know if I could get this approach working in a global way : Each Second level domain working for itself and propelling the main domain ?
Any article, advises, Graphic, documentation, comment is welcomed !
It is, you must serve the same content to user then you do to bots.
Hi Adrian,
Since your site is an established and indexed for 7 years property, I would not move it since
1- The links are actually pointing at your .co.uk domain and that won't change even with proper redirection.
2- People must probably knows this URL in some proportion
3- Your domain has build a trust from search engines that I would not play with to start from a new one.
Maybe someone would think different, but I prefer building a new site with new content or new content to my site then to risk it's futur.
Hi Jason,
In a pure SEO perspective, I would say that Text Links are absolutely your best choice. If you choose to use the Image links don't forget to fill the alt tag. If you can go with the text links, they work just better. Image link may be better for user visual experience, but in my SEO perspective, design come second in term of performances.
Maybe they are not today. I'm not to sure about this like the others I'm asking myself who told you this.
I do recommand you do not to try fooling the big G around. Duplicate content is kind of not so valuable content in the best case. You should use your efforts building great content instead of trying to duplicate.
Because even if it was the case they are not doing it right now, they probably will one day.
From my experience, duplicate is duplicate anywhere you put it !
Yes you should adress this problem. Put something like this in your .htaccess :
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
# REDIRECT to canonical url
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1 [R=301,L]
Hi Cristian,
I'm not sure what do SEOMoz think about it, but I am really unsure that Google will take the tilde in consideration when ranking your site. Of course you should use it in text since it's part of a good spanish grammary. But a most of tje people I know in Latin America do their search without the tilde in Espana etc... And I personnaly don't add them to page title etc of spanish site I do for my clients.
Hope this help you making yourself an opinion about that question !
It would not officially penalize you, but it won't help you either...
You're content would fight one against each other, so you should put a rel Canonical, stating this one is the source. This will tell google which one is the source but this would take sometime and won't give you the same benefit has 5 content. Also the Panda updates are in some measure looking at devaluating poor quality duplicate content ( The one not compensated by Huge linking as for a Newpaper site).
In my opinion, maybe you won't get "punished" but you won't help yourself either... Better to do 2 Unique content then 5 not unique.
If your client is well know in it's industry, it might be a good idea to use his vanity domain since that may be what people are looking for, his name working as a Brand.
But I would also buy this other domain you are talking about and create another content more closely related to the term in the domain and related.
This way you would have people looking for this specialist + those looking for the products. Just don't put the same thing on both one.
Normally when I explain that to a client, they do understand pretty fast that using both the Brand + the product brings a broader volume of targeted traffic then one or another.
Off course it his more job in term on Backlinking and Content writing, but sometime you have to take more time to do a better job.
Alan response is great, but if by any chance you are using wordpress and want to migrate to a new permalink structure I would recommand this plugin.
This will allow you to change your URL structure and put in place de redirections for one another.
I would link to my site that is more relevant to the content of the site I link from. If not, I think I would not even link ! Also make sure to use a good Anchor relevant to your landing page.
As stated before, the answer is Yes. Should you do it ? I would answer no.
You should do it for new content, but do move all you're content to other URL and 301 just for this. This would no do too much good.
Hi Joshua,
You can use 1 sub folder per City and submit all of your offices to Google Adress. But in my opinion if you want to do things in a better way, I would create one subdomain for each city since they would be more targeted to the city then having multiple subdirectories.
Subdomain + page name + content would be targeted to the queries that people search for this would be more targeted and you can link them indivually in their local communities individually.
Both ways are good for what you want to do, but I do prefer the subdomain approach since for me it seem more targeted.
Hi Joshua,
You can use 1 sub folder per City and submitted all of you're offices to Google Adress. But in my opinion if you want to do things in a better way, I would create one subdomain since they would be more targeted to the city then having multiple subdirectories.
Subdomain + page name + content would be targeted to the queries that people search for this would be more targeted and you can link them indivually in their local communities individually.
Both ways are good for what you want to do, but I do prefer the subdomain approach since for me it seem more targeted.
Hi Timothy,
To answer your question, I would say that as long as the site is relevant and not a link farm this wouldn't hurt your SEO. But it will not help it either because Google and other search engines won't give them the same value that it gives to different links from different site on different IP.
You should focus on gaining links from many different IP from site that are related to your content.
What I call a RollBack is when Google goes back in the Past in terms of ranking. It happens sometimes when they run a new Algorithm or changes. They show older results in some datacenters while updated in others.
As Axel and Acorn I also think that you should leave the URL the shortest possible in terms of SEO. Also if you change the URL structure, the external links pointing to the old pages wont be updated automatically and will be kind of wasted.
As Doug just said, there is a strong correlation between Page speed and user experience, when a user needs to wait for a page or something to load before getting the information, there is a higher bounce rate. Since the bounce rate is a strong indicator of user satisfaction that will sooner or later be implemented in algorithmic factors, it's good to adress it right from the conception phase.
Hi,
There is several possible reasons for that to happen, I'm actually thinking of 4 possibilities :
1- Maybe Google did a rollback in the past due to Algo updates or the SOPA protest. In which case, it should be back within a few days to 1-2 weeks.
2- A Penalty on domain level. Did you see a huge drop in traffic in Analytics ?
3- Google decided it wasn't creating any value so he remove all the link at once, which would be weird all at once.
4- Change in the URL structures on the site which you probably would be aware.
Did you have those sitelinks for a long time ?
Sometimes these types of changes are from Google testing and implementing of new stuff. Google seems to be doing a lot this month with the Google Plus your World they put in place on January 10th, they did also played with Crawler Bots speed for the SOPA Blackout this week, I would on first tought without seeing anything, tell they probably Roll Back a bit, so this should fix itself alone.
By the way SOPA is evil !
In my Opinion your Brand Name should not be in your Titles. At least not on all pages. It should be in Contact pages, in pages and articles texts but it titles not that much. The reason I'm saying this is that there is 2 possible options :
1- Your Brand is not so well known so why trying to rank for your Brand when you could target a more efficient Target in term of relevant traffic generation.
2-Your Brand is well known, so that it is probably already in your Domain name and the texts everywhere everywhere on your sites, in anchor text of incoming links. You probably had a website running for this brand for a while so that Search Engine knows that your web property is the one of your brand. You probably also have a lot of links pointing to your homepage with your Brand for Anchor Text. Search Engine will then know.
So instead of focusing on your Brand, I think it's more clever to focused on bringing visitors and customer by using Keyword related to your products and services and have a larger base of customers to get awareness of the brand and then promote and recommend your Brand !