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Yes, but if the two sites are running off the same hosting environment, Google might get a little unhappy with that. But, all in all, I agree about the premise of hundreds of people using the same themes.

@Federico - I understand what you're saying and to a degree I agree, but for this case I want the two sides of the company to be very much visually linked. The services are different, however, they fall under the same umbrella. Think actual services (web, seo, etc.) and then consulting. Similar, but different. I'll take your thoughts into account though, I don't want to make a snappy decision. Cheers

@Branagan That's exactly what I thought, but I'm fairly confident that I've read about duplicate design penalties over the years, so I just wanted to checkin and see what everyones opinion is. I did spend some time Googling for the answer and couldn't come across anything worthwhile. I'm starting to think that it won't have an effect, provided the content is unique and of high quality.

Hi Mozzers,

There are lots of articles on using multiple domains for a company and we all know the story behind that. I have a different question though - I designed and built a really great WordPress theme for my company and it runs on xyz.com and has run on their for well over a year and has decent authority. I would now like to expand my business and offer a different service and I'd like to market the new service on abc.com

My question is: If I use unique content on the second domain, but the same WordPress theme, will it have a negative SEO effect on either site?

I should mention: I have my reasons for not just using the same domain for both services.

I'd love to see what everyone thinks

@Gianluca - Thank you very much for stepping in here, I know you're a busy man so this is appreciated. What you've suggested is definitely an option and I'll investigate that approach when I'm back in the office. Thank you kindly.

Unfortunately over thinking is a requirement here because the site's not ranking as it should be, and I cannot just be happy until I've made a plan unfortunately.

I appreciate your response mate, I just need someone a little more technical to assist me.

Hello fellow SEO fans, I've got a setup that I'm interested in some opinions on.

I have a website which has the following setup:

www.site.com (english version of the site)

www.site.com/nl (dutch version of the site)

Now, my experience tells me the dutch version would be written in dutch (not using Google Translate) and the meta data et al should also be in dutch. But my question is:

If somebody in, say, Netherlands perform a search in english for a specific keyword, we would want the www.site.com page to appear in the SERPs, not the www.site.com/nl page, because the person has searched in english. However, because there's a www.site.com/nl page, purely the /nl page will be optimized and linked to in order to rank it higher in the SERPs for dutch searches and not english searches? But if that's the case, then the person in the Netherlands searching for the english version of the keyword, probably won't see www.site.com in the ranks because of targeting and keyword distribution?

Bit of a tricky situation that I've been pondering over and can't quite put the nail on the head.

Any assistance would be appreciated.

Ah, you know what the problem with SEMRush is, they don't cater for Traffic in South Africa, which is where I am based

SEMRush is a fantastic piece of software and I completely forgot about it. I was really hoping SEOmoz would have a tool, but it seems not. Thank you Streamline Metrics

Cheers Billy! I'll keep looking and see what others can say, and then give you a shout.

Worst comes to worst, I could use something like WebCEO to find the keywords on my site and then SEOmoz' Rank Checker to see the positions, just felt it would be incredibly useful to have an "all in one" solution because sometimes we miss really important keywords, that turn out to be ranking really well. I know Google Analytics can pick that up sometimes, but that's more about intuition than an actual tool.

Michael, in my question I ask for a tool that will find the keywords that my site ranks for. In other words, the tool "reads" the website, determines the keywords, and then crawls the Internet checking their positions. SEOmoz' Rank Checker can do what you're suggesting.. Unless I've misunderstood..

Nothing in the SEOmoz umbrella? Trying not to sign up for yet another SEO application

Hi folks,

Something I've never had to do before so I'm not sure which tool to use, but is there a way to determine the keywords that a website currently ranks for?

Hope someone can assist

Yeh, I could do that, but through other websites I noticed that it says it'll take effect only from November!

Anyway, sounds like I've done what I can and hopefully Google will crawl the website again soon and re-index appropriately

Hi Marie,

Yes, alright so when I search for the brand name in Google, it shows 6 site links as per usual. However, these site links have names such as Viagra, Spam, Spam, but their URL links are actual links on the website for proper content! So, the malware that got into the site managed to make use of proper URLs on the site, but change the title tags per say.

Does that make sense? So I don't want to demote links that are there, I just want to remove the bad title tags..

I was under the impression that you could only demote links, not actually change them? Strangely enough, for some reason I recall being able to see the active site links in Webmaster Tools, but when I check for this site, it only gives the option to demote?

Did you have a look at the file I made for you? Hope so, took me 20 minutes to compile and all

As William said, look for 301 or 302 mentioned in the .htaccess file, if those are mentioned there, that's a sign that things are being redirected.

A rebuild is always useful, but of course, the budget probably isn't there and I can respect that.

Let us know about the .htaccess file..

Hi Carl,

I immediately fired up Xenu and did a test, there's an option to set redirects as errors, to locate the redirects. Here's is the downloadable export: http://www.imoddigital.com/sleeponcall/sleeponcall.xlsx

When you look at the file in Excel, the redirect pages won't appear as 200, they'll either be 301 or 302, this will allow you to isolate the troublesome pages.

Please do check your .htaccess file like Justin has suggested, that would have been my very first point of call.

Hope that helps!

Christopher

@Melanie - I would monitor both the traffic and rankings - just to make sure that there isn't a sudden change in any regard. I would create an Analytics alert should the traffic suddenly drop by X% so that I was notified immediately and I would use a Rank Checker like SEOmoz has, or WebCEO or whichever one you prefer. If often depends on the site in question though, but I'd just keep an eye on things and if the traffic drops or the ranks decrease, then I'd remove the redirect.

Redirects are tricky and that guide that pasted above (perhaps use this: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/09/unifying-content-under-multilingual.html) covers quite a lot of what you're after.

The redirection could mess with your rankings, so that's why I suggest monitoring those. If you're not tracking a fairly large keyword basket, then watch the organic traffic closely for fluctuations (or use the notification I mentioned above).

This also depends on what countries you're taking into account and so forth.

Hi Nicola,

I was going to write you a really long reply and then I remembered a thread written by Google that goes into detail about multi-regional websites and all the bits and pieces. This is probably a really great read for you, more so than me leaving a long winded comment:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html

I hope that helps?
Christopher

The trickiest part about IP redirection is that a lot of crawlers are US based, and therefore the crawlers may not see many of the pages that currently exist on your site and deserve crawling/ranking. There are cases that I've been involved in where IP detection was crucial, but I've also experienced problems with it.

The best advice I can give you is that if you must redirect, then monitor the website on a daily basis and if the site bounces up or down (all other factors equal), then look at removing the redirection.

Here's a thread that you might like to look over: http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/webmasters/chit-chat/c2gk9cKWJYY

I really hope this helps!

Thanks Mat,

Exactly what I told the owner of the website, guess I'll have to see how he responds. Hopefully this will get cleaned up quickly

Hi folks,

I'm working on a website that runs on WordPress and was not updated by the owner, this has resulted in a malware injection and now when you search the companies name in Google, the site links appear with words like Viagra, et al.

I've seen this a number of times, so I went through the code and have removed all the malware.

I presume I now have to wait for Google to recrawl the website and update the site links? Is there anything else I should be doing to speed up the process?

Thank you

You could try to block the URL in robots.txt like Sanket says below, but at the end of the day, the link's still pointing to your website and therefore Google will still see it. If I'm not mistaken, Bing has launched their disavow tool already (Ref: http://www.serperture.com/blog/link-building/disavow-link-tool-block-bad-incoming-links), so perhaps you should at least start there?

David, SaraSEO states, "I cannot get these websites to remove our links" above, so I would say that she has tried that to no avail, unfortunately.

Pleased to have been able to assist

Yup, I've used YouTube, Vimeo and a few other services for video hosting and I can say hands down that YouTube is the best one for so many reasons, most of which EGOL has mentioned. The only ONE thing I can say is that a premium Vimeo account is advert free, whereas with YouTube (embeds included) you often have Adsense showing and off the top of my head, I don't think you have control over turning the Adsense adverts on or off.

How about www.linkdetective.com, fidelityim?

Hi Aidan,

I've always been a big fan of on-site SEO, so when it comes to this sort of thing, I've spent a lot of time doing trial and error with all sorts of combinations. Here are my thoughts based on my feedback:

1. "keyword | keyword" is better than "keyword|keyword".
2. Writing a meta title that reads as a sentence is better than "keyword | keyword"

So for example, I might actually go for:

"Great Chocolate Cake recipes for Christmas"

Instead of actually trying to stuff all the keywords in. If you're desperate for 3 keywords on a page, then make use of other on-site factors to achieve this, stuffing them into the title won't get you the desired result - at least, that's what my experience shows.

Hope that helps

Hi SaraSEO,

If I've understood correctly, you have backlinks to your website that you would like to have removed as they're harming your domain's authority. If that's the case, then the best thing you can do is Google about Google's disavow tool and list the domains as unwanted.

Unfortunately negative SEO is a topic that's been discussed in great detail and there are many opinions, but listing these bad domains as unwanted is a wise move. Blocking the IP addresses on your production firewall, isn't going to stop Google from seeing the association unfortunately.

Hope that helps!

Thanks Oleg,

I get like that too sometimes, where I feel like giving back to the community - karma.

Thank you for your advise and for the links, I shall do some reading and implement things accordingly.

Really appreciate this!

Hit the Good Answer button! lol.

My pleasure James, let's see if anyone else comes and adds some value, but I feel that what I've said is quite accurate and it's how I would have done it.

Hi Oleg,

Cheers for your feedback, I saw you were "on duty", hehe, so was hoping that you'd respond.

Point taken about the sidebar link, perhaps I should add one there dispite my dislike for site wide links. That said, there's a Popular Cities & Town box on the home page, that links to this page, or do you feel site wide is more important?

I didn't think about the pagination, I shall do that, thank you.

What are your thoughts on those internal links at the top of the page and possibly incorporating nofollows? I agree with you that they are diluting the page horribly, an internal link count revealed around 108 internal links on that page alone!

Let me know what you think.

PS. Yes, new design and setup would be ideal, but there isn't budget for that unfortunately.

Hi Barret,

Have you watched these two Whiteboard Friday's by SEOmoz:

1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUrl6p53yfo
2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5649gtXA4o

These aren't new videos, but there is a good amount of information in the mix that you could learn from.

Otherwise, a simple search on the SEOmoz Blog or Search Engine Watch will reveal an assortment of great links to read.

Hope that helps!

Hey James,

I have to tell you, I have a number of websites that I look after that have incredibly long parameter URLs and/or horribly unfriendly URLs, but none of the sites rank badly because the rest of the SEO is done well and completely white hat. So, off the bat, I say you shouldn't worry too much.

If you have a URL such as www.carfind.com?make=honda&price=20000&color=red&year=2005... but obviously on your site, is Google indexing these URLs? Surely they're just dynamic searches essentially? Each car on the website has an actual absolute URL? It's the absolute URLs that I would worry about, and I'd rather put my time and effort into that than changing search queried URLs.

Just my opinion based on sites I've worked on

Cheers.

An absolute pleasure, please keep us posted and let us know if our advise assisted you with your rankings.

Good luck!

Hi folks,

I've got a fairly interesting scenario. I'm trying to rank this page (http://www.staysa.co.za/sa/1-2-0-0-1/East-London/accommodation) better for the term, "accommodation east london". The client isn't keen on making many changes and it was built horribly with ASP, half CMS, half not.

I have made the following changes today:

1. I introduced two paragraphs of text below the H1 tag.
2. I changed "East London Bed and Breakfast", "East London Conference Venues", "East London Cottage / Chalet" to just "Bed and Breakfast", "Conference Venues", "Cottage / Chalet" as the continual key phrase duplication in my experience is a bad move.
3. I've made a change to the title tag (this is a huge mission as it's not CMS controlled, so I had to teach myself some basic ASP to do so).
4. Meta data.. nightmare to change unfortunately, at least not without rewriting part of the CMS.

I'm wondering, are there any other on-site factors that I'm missing? I'm not a fan of site-wide links, so I don't want to put an exact match anchor text link from the sidebar/footer to the page, not unless someone can motivate why I should.

Keen to hear everyone's opinions

Good point Oleg!

Hi Prime85,

There's quite a bit to this actually. I see that the link to "Plastic Bins", actually clicks through to monsterbins.com, ie. a different website. The crux of the matter here is that a link from the plastic-bins.com/plastic-shelf-bins/ website to the monsterbins.com website will add value provided the plastic-bins.com page has a decent authority and is relavant to the page it is linking too. So, in other words, you can use the Mozbar to see the page authority of the plastic-bins.com/plastic-shelf-bins/ page and compare that to the page it's linking too. Ideally, you'd want the authority to be the same or more on the plastic-bins.com/plastic-shelf-bins/ page and to ensure that the content is relevant (not duplicate either).

If you're hoping for those links to offer value through to monsterbins.com, I would suggest taking time to carefully look at the SEO on the pages, I see issues in your meta data and other areas. The SEOmoz On-Page Optimization tool is a fantastic tool to assist you with this.

I hope that helps?

Hi Samuel,

The H1 element on a page plays a large roll in ranking, but it isn't the only factor. I had a client once whose web designer placed the websites logo in an H1 tag, by removing the H1 tag, and correctly playing the targeted keywords in the H1 tag per page, we managed to jump up the ranks fairly well.

My opinion on this matter is that this could well be the problem, but if things don't change within the next 7 days, then I would look at a full audit on one of the pages in question.

It is also important to note that you should only use one H1 tag per page, and rather use H2 or H3 for subsequent "titles".

I hope that helps!