Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Christy,

Thanks for the follow up.  The login became too tedious for me and I cancelled my subscription to MOZ.

Best,
Christopher

Unless they have fixed it in recent months, xml-sitemaps does not generate correct video sitemaps.

I posted the response above around 10 am.  So now I'm back at around 2 pm and I'm logged out.  Why?  Why the rush to kick me off this site?

I know it's not an intentional error and I'm sure the Moz team are working hard to fix this.

The cookie error is not intentional but the timeout is intentional.  Why not increase the timeout period or remove the timeout until the cookie defect is isolated and fixed?

Chris is correct, if you log out and then log back in, that should fix the problem for that session.  That said, why does the system need to log us out so quickly?  Why can't we stay logged in for a full day?  Or better yet, why can't we stay logged in until we log out?

Best,
Christopher

Hi Christy,

Thanks for checking.  Sorry to report it's still broken.  This morning I deleted the history and cache and logged in and everything was fine.  Then later in the day I returned to the site and some pages think I need to login and other pages think I am logged in.  I have to find a page that thinks I'm logged in, log off, and then log in again.

Quick question: Is it the intention of the system to automatically log members off after a certain amount of time?  If so, what is the time period to log someone off?

Best,
Christopher

Yep, I agree with belt and suspenders.

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.

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

**I want to ... promote websites ... with very poor ... content. **

Google devotes considerable resources to make sure these efforts fail.

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

Is it possible to share a post from someone's personal FB wall to a company fan page if they have the permissions set to allow this?  I often get a message that a share was denied and I'm not sure if shares from personal to business fan pages are always denied or if this is controlled by the person's privacy settings.

As myself and the other top 3 sell quality big name brands (big in the UK horse world anyway) we can't really do the SALE SALE SALE selling style ...

Why can't your supplier provide an MSRP and MAP structure that allows for sale prices?

The use of nofollow does not retain link juice (Google made this change years ago).  Each link uses link juice; a follow link passes link juice to the other page and nofollow throws the link juice away.  You should use nofollow for paid links and if you can not vouch for the other page (e.g. spam links in a blog comment).  If you link to a quality site that is not a paid link, then follow is fine.

Best,
Christopher

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

They really aren't providing any traffic and the content is poor, and not written by me.

I generally answer these questions by thinking about the user experience.  I would delete anything from the site that does not provide a good user experience.  Google devotes considerable resources to determine which sites provide a good user experience and we can assume they will continue to get better at this in the future.

Best,
Christopher

OK, found it three seconds after posting the questions.  Duh.

Is there a way to add annotations to the GA visitors graph?  There is a YouTube tutorial on how to do this but the comments suggest is has not be rolled out yet in the US and I can't get it to work.

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

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

Best,
Christopher

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

Thanks for the follow up.  It was apparently just a glitch.  It's working now.

Best,
Christopher

Do href links that leave a site and use target="_blank" to open a new tab impact SEO?

EGOL, What about PLA?  What about Remarketing/Retargeting?  Are you able to make money on either of those?

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.

I have a job site for a tiny niche.  It's a free service that is related to a software app that I license.  I decided early on to leave all the job postings because even after the jobs close, it gives job seekers valuable data on the companies that hire in that niche.  If this was a large generic job site I think the stale job listings would not be that useful for job seekers and I'd probably use a 301.  In other words, my decision would be based on what I thought was most useful for the users.

Best,
Christopher

I read a number of articles and reviews on various sites for locating writers and although I have not used them yet, my current thinking is that ProBlogger is one of the better sites to find quality writers.  They have a job board that is only $50 a month.

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.

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

Just a quick follow up, I isolated the problem.  WordPress was stripping the rel=author that I had included in the link.  I have since upgraded to WP 3.6.1 and I don't know if it was that or something else, but WP is no longer stripping the rel=author.

To date my site does not get a lot of user engagement via G+, but I am helping those who write for our site with their G+ accounts.  Our writers are experts and practitioners in our niche and they are not (nor do I expect them to be) SEO experts.  I explain to them the potential benefits of G+ and help them set up rel=author to get credit for both the articles they write for our site and also the articles they write for other sites.  I also encourage them to increase their circle.  I'm confident our readers would prefer to read articles by experts in our field rather than ghost written articles.  I also compensate them better than ghost writers.  I think it's a win/win if these experts' photos are in the SERP and they get the recognition they deserve and it should improve the CTR as well.

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 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.

About 90% of organic traffic is new visitors.

Are you using Retargeting?  A significant fraction of the visitors to your site may be interested in a purchase but surfing is easily distracted.  Retargeting can be a cost-effective way to get their attention again.

Best,
Christopher

Expanding on what Schwaab said ...

When first setting up an AdWords campaign, many people assume that if they bid $4 for a CPC and someone else bids $3, they will win the bid.  However, Google only gets paid for a CPC bid if someone clicks on the ad.  Therefore, CTR (click through rate) is also used to determine the highest bid.  If the other advertiser has a CTR that is twice yours, then their bid is $6 compared to your $4 when CTR is factored in.  So, when creating AdWords campaigns, it's important to have compelling ads.  Likewise, it's important to have compelling landing pages, because Google does not want to send customers to a page that is not relevant or over time people will stop clicking on ads.

In summary, compelling ads and compelling landing pages will stretch your AdWords dollars much further compared to your competition.

In answer to your question about boosting page rank, there is reportedly a wall between Google search and Google AdWords, though you could realize second order effects.  For example, if your AdWords campaign drives more traffic and some of that traffic adds natural links and social shares, that could indirectly increase page rank.

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

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

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

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

... if I was having numerous links to a site from several pages on mine I would consider adding the nofollow ...

I guess we read the question differently.  I don't think the OP was asking about "numerous links to a site".  I read the question to mean that he was linking to multiple sites.  Here is an excerpt from the question:

I've found that there are sometimes links to sites ...

Perhaps the OP can clarify the question.

Best,
Christopher

You are confusing two issues: a) does nofollow pass page rank to the linked site (answer is no) and b) does nofollow preserve the page rank for the remaining links on the page (answer is no).

Here is another way to say it. When Google first implemented nofollow, they did not include the nofollow links in the denominator when dividing PR among all the links on the page.  Then Google realized that webmasters were using nofollow for unintended reasons (the reason you are still trying to use it).  Google wants you to use nofollow to identify sites for which you can not vouch and for sites that are paying for the link.  Google does not want you to use nofollow for page sculpting.  When Google realized that webmasters were using nofollow for page sculpting, they changed their algorithm.  That was in 2008.  Now, ALL the links on the page, both follow and nofollow, are counted in the denominator when dividing PR among the links.  The PR assigned to follow links is passed on and the PR assigned to nofollow links is discarded.

So, you have two choices.  You can either pass the PR to the other site or you can discard the PR.  Neither of these preserves PR for your site.

Best,
Christopher

"There is no hard and fast rule to this, but if you think that 4 links is too much then you may want to consider placing a nofollow on some of the links ..."

Not true.  Changing some of the links to nofollow will not affect the other links on the page.  Google announced this years ago.  See this article Matt Cutts wrote back in 2009 on page sculpting at  http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/

The paragraph below is the most relevant:

So what happens when you have a page with “ten PageRank points” and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are nofollowed? Let’s leave aside the decay factor to focus on the core part of the question. Originally, the five links without nofollow would have flowed two points of PageRank each (in essence, the nofollowed links didn’t count toward the denominator when dividing PageRank by the outdegree of the page). More than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each.

If the links enhance the user experience, then leave them.  If you can vouch for the sites and they are not paid links, then there is likely no need to nofollow.  Also, it is extremely important to understand that Google ranks you based on not only the quality of the sites that link to your site, but also the quality of the sites to which you link.  This is often overlooked or not well understood when site owners focus on trying to keep all the link juice to themselves.  Instead, site owners should focus on creating an awesome site.  If that means directing your users to other sites with awesome content when appropriate, then include the links.

Best,
Christopher

As I recall the weekly Rank Report used green and red to indicate an increase or decrease in page rank.  Now, there isn't even a minus sign for a drop in page rank. If the current page rank is 10 and it dropped 5, all I see is 10 and 5.  How am I supposed to know at a glance that it dropped 5 without having to pull up the historical graph?

Best,
Christopher

Comment...  I stopped thinking about linkjuice a long time ago.  I don't regret it.

+1

I find things are easier now that I devote my energy developing content.

Best,
Christopher

Thanks, Dan, your comments and links were useful.

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

Also 10% for one anchor text in my experience is a bit too much

I've seen comments like this before but I've never been clear on what it means.  Does this rule apply to anchor text with brand names or the name of the website?  For example, isn't it natural for the anchor text "Nike" to be frequently used for the URL nike.com?

Best,
Christopher

When you create a biography page for authors that point back to their G+ account, do you include any other signals in the URL other than the authors name?  For example, would you use www.domain.com/sam-spade or www.domain.com/sam-spade-biography, etc?  Similar question for the meta description.  Do you add any signals there?  Or, is rel=author strong enough.

Best,
Christopher