Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I selected the plugin called Redirection mostly because it has been downloaded 1.4M times.  My thinking is that popular plugins tend to get more testing and tend to be more compatible with other themes and plugins.  It works fine for me.

Best,
Christopher

I like this site, I really do, which is why I visit multiple times a day.  But I grow weary of these premium sites that require me to log in multiple times a day.  This morning I was simultaneously working at ordercup.com, strengthcoach.com, and moz.com, and all three log me out at every turn.  Argh!!!  What's worse is that some MOZ pages think I'm logged in and others don't.  I don't fully understand the logic behind the curtain, so I wander from page to page trying to get the login in sync.  Why can't these sites work like lynda.com where I can stay logged in for days and weeks?  To top it off, LastPass rolled out a new release that broke auto-login.  All this logging in is getting in the way of me getting anything done.

It's perfectly natural for each page on a site to have a different keyword.  Write good content for each page and both users and Google will give you two thumbs up.

Best,
Christopher

Hi Karen, it depends.  Are all the links spammy or are there some good links as well?  Given that the site continues to rank well and without additional information, I'd be inclined to try and clean it up and create some new compelling content.  If it does get hit then you can reassess, but again, it depends in part on the value of the good links.

Best,
Christopher

It is my understanding, bases on other responses to this forum, that using nofollow does not improve the link juice passed to the follow links, but that the link juice that would have been passed to the nofollow link is lost.

Best,
Christopher

If I publish and page and then later add authorship, it can take a long time before Google adds the author image to the SERP.  However, if I publish a page with the author markup and then Google indexes the page, the author image is included in the SERP when the page appears in the SERP.  So, the lesson I have learned going forward is to make sure the author markup is correct for all newly published pages, because if you get it wrong or add it later after publishing the page, it can take many weeks for Google to use it.

Best,
Christopher

Unless they have released a recent upgrade, xml-sitemaps does not generate proper video sitemaps.  If you have a Word Press site, you should consider Yoast.

Best,
Christopher

I used to spend a lot of time identifying high value sites in our niche and create relationships with the site owners to get back links.  In hindsight I think that was time that could have been better spent.  Now, I spend my time researching and writing articles that I think my users would find interesting, useful, engaging, compelling.  As these articles are published on our site, I post a link to our pages/accounts on Facebook and Twitter to create some buzz, and I may add a few marketing dollars to promote the post as well.  If the content of an article was well-researched and well-written, the shares, retweets, and links will come.  Some of the links are high value, others not, but they are all natural.

Best,
Christopher

It is my understanding the search volume and keyword competition are independent.  For example, many people purchase socks, but the potential for profit is relatively low which limits the pricing competition.  In contrast, awards for medical malpractice could be quite high, but the search volume for a rare medical procedure could be very low.

Best,
Christopher

I agree.  Each should target it's purpose.  If they are the same, fine, if not, fine too.  My excerpts are usually longer than my meta descriptions and for that reason alone they are typically different, but it's not my objective to make them different.

Best,
Christopher

If a link to my site is posted on another site and many people start following that link and they stay on my site for a while, and I also have GA set up, does Google factor that information back into the Google rankings?  In other words, are there ways that Google tries to use clicks and bounce rates and other user behavior to determine page rank and domain rank?

Best,
Christopher

Thanks, Sha.  It does not happen with other automated email from Moz such as ranking reports.  It's only the email from the Q&A responses.

Best,
Christopher

Agreed.  If your client has an account with Commission Junction, then they likely have a product or service with good volume.  The DIY affiliate programs are good for new or smaller sites that don't have the volume for a service like Commission Junction.

Best,
Christopher

Understood.  I read EGOL for months before I really grokked what he was saying about how to optimize a site for search engines.

Best,
Christopher

Thanks for the quick response.  I'm not sure I worded my question well.  I'm not asking about follow versus no follow or any other attribute that can be determine by crawling the web.  I'm asking about user behavior.  Does Google monitor user behavior to help determine page and domain rank?

Best,
Christopher

what's your opinion on "Or should I stick to one comprehensive link section? Or perhaps a small link section? Or none at all?"

My answer to questions like this is: what is most compelling for the user.  In the past I would focus on a wide variety of things including good content, but I've been strongly influenced by fellow MOZ member EGOL and in recent months I've devoted considerable time and money to creating really great content and I have already seen the benefits.  Sure, the articles have internal and external links and I do ensure things like G+ authorship are done correctly and other SEO minutia, but I'm always thinking in terms of usefulness to the reader.

As for specific questions regarding follow and nofollow, some of the things I would use nofollow include paid links, forum/blog comments, and a footer link to another site.  I can't think of a reason I would ever nofollow an unpaid link to a reputable and related site that I included in an article or a page that I wrote.  If I included the link then that means I think it has value for my reader.  And, Google has made it very clear that nofollow does not affect the denominator when dividing the page range among the linked articles, so why discard the page rank?

Good discussion.  Thanks for asking.

Best,
Christopher

Yes, the vendor you use (e.g. AddThis), the features you use (e.g. number of likes), and number of icons you use (e.g. FB, Twitter, G+) can affect the performance of your page.  FWIW, I dropped AddThis because it was much too slow.  YMMV.  I recommend testing several vendors and feature settings.  Also, you should retest the page performance periodically.

Best,
Christopher

There is a limit on the size of a sitemap and to allow for large sitemaps to be split into smaller sitemaps, the sitemap protocol includes a sitemapindex.  See "Using Sitemap index files (to group multiple sitemap files)" here http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html.  Of course, it's also possible to include the multiple sitemaps in the robot.txt file, but automated sitemap generators will likely use the sitemapindex feature so that the robots.txt file does not have to be modified as the size of the site changes.

Best,
Christopher

This looks like an interesting idea from Wistia.  Anyone have comments or experience with this?

http://wistia.com/blog/video-backlinks

Best,
Christopher

I have a niche site that attracts between 50 to 100 visitors a day.  For the past several weeks we've been working on a new article and the with aid of social media have attracted 2,000 visitors in the first 24 hours of posting, a dramatic spike in daily visits.  Visitors are spending about 10 to 12 minutes reading the article and then leave our site.  So, the GA bounce rate is quite high at about 95%.  Does Google know this is a compelling article for our niche based on the number of visits and time spent reading the page?  Will the high bounce rate affect the article's PR, or do they also consider the time on the page?

Best,
Christopher

I'm not familiar with the A1 Sitemap generator, but regarding the sitemap protocol, there is a limit on the size of a single sitemap.xml file, so for large sites, the sitemap must be split into multiple sitemap.xml files.  And, the protocol has a method for indexing these multiple sitemap.xml files.  It's sort of like an index to an index.  None of my sites exceed the sitemap file limit, so I don't know which sitemap generators use this approach, but I would guess many of them do.

Sitemap generators I have used include DMXZone which is a Dreamweaver plugin, and xml-sitemaps.com which includes a video sitemap generator.

Best,
Christopher

EDIT: PS: Your current sitemap looks fine to me.

Add a redirect to the .htaccess file, as in:

Redirect 301 /index.htm http://www.manandhisvan.com.au

Best,
Christopher

If you can't get 100 FB likes for a new online product or service using white hat techniques then fold up the tent and go home.

EDIT: Posted in response to a suggestion that has since been deleted.

Hi Dana,

" ... you are right, one of the fundamental questions I still have is how does a bot behave when it finds an orphaned page like one of these? Does it just revert back to the sitemap and move one? Does it automatically go back to the last non-dead end page and move on from there? What does it do?"

Bots are not really like a single spider that has to crawl around the web that can get trapped when entering an orphaned page with no back-button.  When a bot enters a site, it creates a list of all the internal pages that are linked from the home page.  Then it visits each page on that list and keeps adding more linked pages to that list.  Each time it adds more pages to the list, it only adds new unique pages and does not add duplicates.  It also keeps track of which pages it has already visited.  When all the pages have been visited once, and no new pages are discovered that are not already on the list, all of the pages have been crawled.

Best,
Christopher

Another great tool is the SEOmoz toolbar plugin.  When the highlight tool is set to Nofollowed (pink), all the nofollow links are highlighted in pink.

Best,
Christopher

It's quite all right to link the pages you author to your bio page using rel=author, but then your bio page needs to link to your G+ account using a rel=me.  This is the way I do it and it works fine.

The other way to do it is to link your pages directly to your G+ account using rel=author, but since you have a bio page, I think you should use the scheme above.

Best,
Christopher

In addition to EGOL's excellent comments, you will also have to compete with all the Amazon affiliates that sell your product, and even worse, they will create crappy ads on the web and Youtube showing your product.  There are countless Youtube videos of Amazon products that are nothing more than a pan and zoom of an affiliate product set to elevator music.

I have a niche site with modest organic search traffic so perhaps this is the exception rather than the rule, but since I've made an effort to engage using social, the social traffic now outperforms the organic.  The organic is up a bit, no doubt because of the surge in social, but the social seems to be paying off as an end to itself rather than a way to increase organic search.

I think the way these social plugins work is they pull the +1 and Like counts from the social media sites.  That's why these plugins can be slow as they get the information from the other sites.  So, if you change plugins, the counts should remain the same.  At least, that is my understanding.

As an aside, I post the buttons on my pages but not the counts.  My limited testing suggests that my pages load faster without the counts.  I'd be interested in any other comments on this aspect as well.

Best,
Christopher

The markup is used to identify what the content is.  When a human sees

2003 Boxster, Red with Black convertible top, 26,000 miles, $14,000

we know someone is trying to sell something and we know what the item is, the description, and price, but search engines may or may not know this is a product for sale or is a review of a product or something else.  The schema.org allows you to tell search engines this is indeed a product for sale and here are the attributes of that product including item name, price, etc.

So, in answer to your question, the markup goes in the body of the page and marks up the content.

Best,
Christopher

Vadim, have you tested the performance of these buttons with and without counts?  My testing suggests there is a performance hit.

Best,
Christopher

manual action ... that was spurred on by a PRWeb press release where publishers took it upon themselves to remove the embedded "nofollow" tags on links.

Seriously?  I've been thinking about trying PRWeb for product announcements but this makes me rethink that strategy.

Yes, your question makes sense.

You can put the schema.org properties in any order, but spitting the description like that is going to be problematic.  I would also suggest that your example is tedious to read and lacks a product description heading.  A more realistic example would be:

h1 Widget /h1
The widget comes in blue, green, ...

Hiding the price in the middle of the description is also difficult for humans to read.  Putting aside the schema syntax, the example IMO is a poor user experience.

The other domains are ours, yes.

Oh, that's a horse of a different color.  If you have multiple domains on one account, one domain will be the primary domain and the other domains will be virtual domains.  If you look at the file structure on your server, all the virtual domains will be sub-folders under the primary domain.  You need to create a robots.txt file in the primary domain that blocks the spiders from discovering the other domains through the sub-directory structure.  Otherwise, all the virtual domains will be duplicated, once via the primary domain and again via the virtual domain.

Best,
Christopher

You should be able to resolve this with robots.txt and .htaccess files, but one more thing I've learned to do is to use a domain name for the primary domain that I do not plan to submit to Google for indexing.  For example, I'll use arbitrary color names like silverblue.net as the primary domain and then the domains I intend to index will be virtual domains.  This isn't really necessary but it helps me keep all my domain names straight in my head and avoid the issue you described above.

Best,
Christopher