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In my opinion, yes, there is some value in getting your website listed in some directories–but not all.

The main trick is figuring out which directories are worthwhile. I'd put a higher value on sites such as BOTW or DMOZ over 99.9% of directories in your list.

The main thing is to check how often the listings are updated, are the pages cached regularly by the SE's and the general quality of the sites that are submitted.

What you're trying to do is to figure out how much trust and what value the SE's are giving to the sites.

There are probably a few jewels in your list but I would be very selective and once you have found a dozen good sites you'll have a high quality list for most projects.

From an SE point of view XML sitemaps are enough, if you have a large site you may want to consider having more than one sitemap for different categories.

As Kieron suggested HTML Sitemaps are useful for people to navigate your site it might be worthwhile writing some PHP to convert the XML into HTML and making your HTML Sitemap a little more dynamic?

Many SEO Hosting services use the same Domain Name Servers for their accounts and then you allocate a different Class C-IP once the sites are propogated.

This means that there is a footprint to follow especially as the Search Engines have easy access to Whois and DNS information.

You don't have to be a  genius to do a query to match the SEOHosting DNS information against a Whois Database to compile a list of sites for reviews.

There is no set hard and fast rules so this is simply my opinion.

Google is pretty lenient if the percentage of content you have copied is low compared to the rest of your page.

Duplication issues can also be overcome if you have other good SEO trust signals i.e. good back links, established domain, unique content etc. I assume this is why Rotten Tomatoes get away with duplication issues as they have an established brand.

As long as you are citing the original source and the duplicated content is not a large percentage of your page then you should be ok.

If you want to build links from your images then you will need to allow hotlinking from your site - there is a great piece of code from Patrick Atloft and also a Wordpress plugin that will mean you can get links via this method but the script can be heavy on your bandwidth each month.

As for using your images as part of your social media then Pinterest and Flickr would be good places to start.

You  want to rel="canonical" the actual products in the categories for example with Magento with just 5 products in a category page you can end up with nearly 200 different URLs because

• You can sort them by Grid or by list
• You can sort them by Position, Name, Price etc
• You can show 9, 15 or 30 per page
• You can sort them ascending or descending

So basically any link that changes the visual elements of a page but doesn’t change the content of the page I'm not sure if your site does this but that's why its important to use rel="canonical" for eComm sites..

Hit CTRL + U and now compare the 2 pages you can see that this page has just 3 products on it this means that about 90% of the content on this page i.e. the header, sidebar, footer is the same as this page.

1. Your titles are also very similar one is 1994-02 5.9L Dodge Cummins Diesel Performance Parts and the other is 1994-98 5.9L Dodge Cummins Carbon Fibre Hoods make sure your titles lead with the difference i.e.

Carbon Fibre Hoods for 1994-98 5.9L Dodge Cummins

2. Canonise your Product Pages - make sure you use the rel="canonical" on the individual product listings

3. Remove the common text - e.g. opening hours from the sidebar and consider a page specifically for that content

4. Try adding a unique paragraph to each page - this is easier said than done depending on your CMS but every little helps

Zeke To learn how to use the linkscape/OSE try this article from distilled http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/getting-started-with-the-free-linkscape-api/ SEOMoz has a toolbar just like SEOQuake http://www.seomoz.org/seo-toolbar

As Ryan mentioned the ratio is not important the only difference is do follow pass PR no follow do not.

I would return a 404 as the content no longer exists. If visitors are discovering this page via a link that provides traffic then you need to ask why you are not creating alternative content as a replacement.

Unfortunately you are not allowed to run contests or promotions on G+.

The social network’s content policy bans direct hosting of contests, sweepstakes, offers and coupons on Google+ pages, BUT posting a link to a promotion page is OK

I suppose this makes it a little more difficult to run a contest on the social network

It sounds like you need to find someone to help you with all this work.

It might be worthwhile looking at finding a VA in your local area especially someone with SEO or copy writing experience. There are a growing number of Virtual assistants in the recession with people working only part time hours.

Use a site like Craigslist or ask your business contacts or networking group if they might be able to recommend someone to help you during busier periods.

If I understand correctly you want to ensure that a piece of content triggers a Google alert.

If that is the case you want to make sure that you ping as many services as possible when you publish new content you also want make sure you submit your RSS feeds to any relevant RSS services this will increase the likelihood a new web page is crawled and indexed and ultimately triggers an alert.

Blogging contests will only be successful if they are promoted well, have good prizes and have very rigid and well defined rules. As Tom mentioned you'll get extra content for your site but you need to maximise the number of links you will receive too.

For Example: If you are an e-commerce website you could invite bloggers to imagine they have $500 and for them to write a blog post on their site about the products they'd buy with this money and many will link to the products. The prize could then be the $500?

You want to make sure that if the blogger is going to write a guest article for your site that they also write an article on their blog promoting the blogging competition.

You can give out extra prizes based on social measures such as the article that gets the most  FB shares, +1's or Tweets that the article receives.

I recommend that Chrome is part of your link building tool kit and get a broken link checker, you'll also find that visiting web pages with images off in Chrome will speed up your prospecting efforts. I can see you want to search a whole website for a broken link then try a tool like Screaming Frog or Xenu.

A 301 redirect is for pages that have moved to a new location....if they didn't move somewhere and were just deleted, then they should respond with a 404 or 410.  You can return a 410 with a custom navigation menu. If your home page is relevant for the content then by all means redirect your pages here, but as a visitor if I followed a link and ended up on an irrelevant page I'd bounce. You might be better editing, merging or creating new content then doing a 301 to your homepage.

Hi Nick,

Broken Link building isn't just about getting a broken link replaced with your link. It's also a tactic to build a relationship with a blogger/webmaster to later pitch them a proposal for a link.

Jon Cooper (@pointblankseo) loves this technique so be sure to hop over to his blog

http://pointblankseo.com/creative-broken-link-building

He also recommends a few broken link tools too

I do love my Orange Juice!!

Morning from Leeds!

I agree with Paul, it looks as though it might be because <title>is over 3 lines</p> <p> </p> <pre id="line18"><span class="attribute-name"> </span><span class="attribute-value">esheet" </span><span class="error"><span class="attribute-name">/</span></span>><<span class="start-tag">title</span>> Great Inns of Britain - Home – Independent, Historic Inns, Quality Service </<span class="end-tag">title</span>></<span class="end-tag">head</span>></pre></title>

Link Juice provides a way of illustrating and conceptualising how PageRank flows between pages and websites, therefore Link Juice is just another term for PageRank

Firstly do a search online for Guest blogging opportunities. Here’s more or less complete list of phrases bloggers use to invite people to guest post:

• “Submit a guest post” / “Submit post” / “Submit blog post”
• “Add blog post”
• “Submit an article”
• “Suggest a guest post”
• “Send a guest post”
• “Write for us”;
• “Become an author”;
• “Guest bloggers wanted”
• “Contribute to our site”;
• “Become a contributor”;
• “Become guest writer”
• “(Write for our) guest column”.

Include your keyword in the search term i.e. "submit a guest blog" Link building

Don't always start with the people on page 1-3 they get inundated with requests everyday so jump straight to page 5 they are more likely to accept.

I don't think the relationship of your other sites is having any effect on your rankings but it maybe Google post Panda is showing syndicated versions of your content as the most relevant. Finance and Making money online are very competitive niches and scraping/syndication is rife.

I recommend that you firstly make sure that when you publish your blog posts you are pinging pubsubhubbub to make sure Google knows you are the originating source.

Two questions:

Which landing pages and keywords have seen the biggest traffic change in the past 6-12 months?

Have you checked your competitor and your own link profiles for any recent changes ?

Hi Alessio

One common Black hat tool that can be used in a White Hat way is Scrapebox

Scrapebox can be used to harvest valuable backlinks that you can manually work with e.g. search for Guest posts you can also do competitor research, bulk check your backlinks to make sure they are still live, perform bulk WhoIs lookups and lots more things too.

As you can imagine a tool that can automatically scrape blogs for guest blogging opportunities or who  might publish your new infographic is going to save you lots of time.

Hope this helps

It doesn't matter sitemaps are designed to make sure all your pages are crawled and improve the chances of indexing.

Happy Link building

Having more than one sitemap is not an issue for SEO.if anything it makes sure the search spiders can definitely find your content.

The Google XML sitemaps plugin normally creates a file in the Wordpress folder i.e..

yourdomain.com/wp/sitemap.xml but you can define your preferred location

When you publish a new blog or page the sitemap will automatically update.

If you install the All in One SEO or Yoast SEO Wordpress plugin you can no index no follow the tags and categories within the settings.

there is a recent article by John Doherty here:

http://www.johnfdoherty.com/noindex-organize-categories-tags-in-wordpress/

The more links a sitemap the it harder it is for people to follow but should be ok for search spiders.

Can't you no index no follow the categories & tags or rel = canonical the duplicated pages? Tags & Categories are good for user navigation.

Hi Cecily - what's the URL and I can look at your on site SEO

I use the Google XML Sitemaps plugin to automatically generate my sitemap for my blog. You can have more than 1 sitemap for a site so you could create a 2nd sitemap for the static pages & manually manage this as static pages are less likely to change. If the static pages are part of your Wordpress install then the plugin will pick these up too.

I would build 2  sitemaps for these files, 1 XML sitemap and 1 HTML sitemap, separate from the main sitemap  and add these to Google WMT. The HTML Sitemap could also be used as a directory for visitors too.

Where possible link to the documents from the site too, this will increase the chances that the assets are indexed by Google.

Hi Dave

From what I can see the site is in the Google index after I searched info:www.specialtysealgroup.com

A quick search in OSE shows me that you only have 2 links pointing this page a PA of 19 and DA of 8

Your clients competitors will no doubt have much higher PA/DA and lots more links to their pages, and therefore Google will value these pages more than your clients.

I recommend you consult a reputable SEO agency to discuss a link building campaign.

When did you change your meta description was it in the last few days?

Have you tried to add this:

<metaname="robots" content="noodp,noydir">Without looking at the site, I couldn't tell you what's causing the problem but Google could be pulling info from the open directory, this tag will force Google and Yahoo to use the description you give them</metaname="robots">

Google do not always show the meta description. If they feel a more meaningful snippet can be had from the content, it will take something from there. If you have little or no content (say just images) then Google does not have much to show.

I recently wrote a guide to link building and traffic generation using Scoop.it

http://www.rootswebsolutions.com/social-media/content-curation-web-traffic-scoopit/

It's just been promoted to the Scoop.it's own account.

There are people on Scoop.it who already receive hundreds of page views per day to their pages.

So by suggesting your own content to their page you have a chance that your post will be accepted and a good percentage of their fellow Scoopers will come flooding to your site and re-scoop your page to their followers and other social networks too.

Dave,

Assuming your 301 redirects are technically correct then it will take time for your new page URLs to be indexed by the major search engines.

Be aware that your rankings may not come back 100% as they were before the change.

A 301 redirect does not pass all the PR and linkjuice as many SEO's assume. You can read about it in this interview with Matt Cutts and in this illustrated summary from Rand on SEOMoz

From my personal experience what you are seeing is normal just keep doing the good work you are currently doing a quite Google search with info:yournewdomain will show if your new domain has been added to the index.

If you are starting out then I recommend the Hostgator baby croc package they have absolutely brilliant support and all the scripts and features you will ever need from cPanel hosting.

Hope that helps

For keyword research I like to use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool.

I have also used Market Samurai in previous roles which is a great tool for analysing the whole market for that keyword e.g. competition, back link sources however it is a paid service.

This blog post over at SEObook has some reviews of free to use or trial keyword software

http://www.seobook.com/archives/001013.shtml