Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi, i am trying to find a way to attract guest bloggers for my site. We are looking for people to be a guest blogger on items such as gadgets, business, finance, marketing and so on, but i am not sure what is the best way to attract people.

Any advice on the best way to attract guest bloggers would be great and advice if we should give them more than one link.

Would love to hear from people who have been a guest blogger to find out what they would want.

It has been suggested to me that a guest blogger gets one link and if they require two then they must link bac.

looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

thank you for that, that is very interesting.

thanks for that keri, just contacted my hosting company for them to investigate

I think i will give it a miss, although can you explain how you mean about using it to create value to your site by linking to your back links

Hi, i got sent an email and normally i ignore them but decided on this occasion i would try it. It was an email from congoo.com saying it is a great place to get noticed.

Now i have joined and to be honest it is a lot of rubbish when it comes to promoting yourself.

I have mine here http://www.congoo.com/In2town

The only place that i see you can promote yourself is at the top but once you change your article it goes, so is it all a con.

would like to hear your thoughts

I am just looking at different ways to attract traffic and i would like to know if anyone uses http://www.social-bookmarking.net  and if so do they feel it is good for gaining traffic.

i have used it before but never gained anything from it so maybe i am using it wrong, would love to hear your thoughts on it

Hi, i have just been into google webmaster tools and i have noticed that five of my websites are no longer verified. i have tried putting the code back into the head and also i have tried verifying it through google analaystics but nothing is working

can anyone let me know what has happened and if anyone has noticed this

regards

Hi google is having problem accessing my site. each day it is bringing up access denied errors and when i have checked what this means i have the following

Access denied errors

In general, Google discovers content by following links from one page to another. To crawl a page, Googlebot must be able to access it. If you’re seeing unexpected Access Denied errors, it may be for the following reasons:

• Googlebot couldn’t access a URL on your site because your site requires users to log in to view all or some of your content. (Tip: You can get around this by removing this requirement for user-agent Googlebot.)
• Your robots.txt file is blocking Google from accessing your whole site or individual URLs or directories.
  • Test that your robots.txt is working as expected. The Test robots.txt tool lets you see exactly how Googlebot will interpret the contents of your robots.txt file. The Google user-agent is Googlebot. (How to verify that a user-agent really is Googlebot.)
  • The Fetch as Google tool helps you understand exactly how your site appears to Googlebot. This can be very useful when troubleshooting problems with your site's content or discoverability in search results.
• Your server requires users to authenticate using a proxy, or your hosting provider may be blocking Google from accessing your site.

Now i have contacted my hosting company who said there is not a problem but said to read the following page http://www.tmdhosting.com/kb/technical-questions/other/robots-txt-file-to-improve-the-way-search-bots-crawl/

i have read it and as far as i can see i have my file set up right which is listed below. they said if i still have problems then i need to contact google. can anyone please give me advice on what to do. the errors are responce code 403

User-agent: *
Disallow: /administrator/
Disallow: /cache/
Disallow: /components/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /installation/
Disallow: /language/
Disallow: /libraries/
Disallow: /media/
Disallow: /modules/
Disallow: /plugins/
Disallow: /templates/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /xmlrpc/

Hopefully it is transferred over but not show how that will be possible. Not had a chance to look inside the new site yet as the passwords are not working

cheers for that. i was thinking if i do go ahead, to do it where they login with their facebook account. I have used a forum posting before but as you say, it takes a lot of time going through them and getting rid of the spam

I have never been a fan of comment pages such as the sun http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/showbiz/tv/4783642/bruce-willis-appears-on-the-one-show-in-awkward-interview.html

but i was told the other day that not only is it good for the reader but it is also good for seo and increase the number of times that google would visit the page and i would like to know if that is true.

if you have  added a comment section to your articles i would like to know if you have noticed any change.

Hi, i think i must be the only one that did not know about Ecademy sale, well almost. In the past week I have had a number of people contact me who are angry that they did not receive an email about ecademy business network being sold off.

These people are more than angry about their monthly payments leaving their bank acounts and not having access to the new site which is here www.sunzu.com/

Although a lot of people are angry of the handling of this, an important question i would like to ask is, with ecademy no longer being around, does this mean that all the hard work of people writing articles on ecademy and gaining link juice, will all this link juice vanish

look forward to hearing your thoughts

Hi, the problem could be with your sh404sef component if you are using one. It sounds to me that if you have one that you have not updated it. I had the same problem and found that it was down to the sh404sef component, i was using an old one.

Try it out and let me know if the updated one works for you

Hi, i have joined pingler and pay per month to use it but i have not seen any difference with traffic or google rankings and i would like to know if anyone else is using the paid version of pingler.com and if they find it a good service

I have now deleted the old version can you check on this and make sure you can no longer see it.

You have a fairly complex .htaccess file (hint: I looked up your OLD .htaccess file - you should delete old htaccess files or something so people can't access them via a web browser), so I'm guessing the problem will be within your .htaccess file.

If possible, put a plain and simple .htaccess file on, test it with Google Webmaster Tools and see if the error still persists.

hi thanks for that. i will delete the old one now

Hi, i am going to try and explain this as best as possible as i am not used to working with k2 that much.

What i have as an example is a page which is here

http://www.in2town.co.uk/Cheap-Flights-Ryanair-News

This page is news about ryanair

now because i am working in joomla and i am working with k2, and i am also making each landing page a front page, i am having problems.

For people who do not use joomla i will explain. For the ryanair page which is a front page, i have to make a category and that category for all my content to go into is called ryaniar-news. Now i have the page above which is for ryanair news but the problem i have got is, because i have a category it brings up all the content as a blog format. so for example here is the category section in blog format. http://www.in2town.co.uk/news/ryaniar-news

Now i have managed to make sure that the articles are not showing but it brings up the title of the pages and i am worried that this will be seen as duplicate content and will damage the main page of http://www.in2town.co.uk/Cheap-Flights-Ryanair-News

I may have set everything up wrong i am not sure but if i have i would be glad if someone can tell me the right way to do it. I do not like the blog format and that is why i use a front page set up so i can have my layout the way i want it.

Can anyone please explain if my set up will damage the main ryanair news page or what i need to do to sort it out please.

Hi i am looking in google webmaster tools and i have seen a major problem which i hope people can help me sort out.

The problem is, i am being told that 77 urls are being denied access. The message when i look for more information says the below

Googlebot couldn't crawl your URL because your server either requires login to access the page, or is blocking Googlebot from accessing your site.

the responce code is 403

here is a couple of examples

http://www.in2town.co.uk/Entertainment-Magazine

http://www.in2town.co.uk/Weight-Loss-Hypnotherapy-helped-woman-lose-3-stone

i think the problem could be that i have sent them to another url in my httaccess file using the 403 re-direct but why would it bring up that google bot could not crawl them

any help would be great

thanks for that. what i want is for google to see that the site is getting refreshed with new content and for people to see all the new articles instead of not knowing where to look

Hi, i made my home page shorter here www.in2town.co.uk because a couple of people on here said i should shorten my home page but i have noticed that the sun newspaper and other online newspapers have now made their home page longer, is this a good idea or a bad idea.

Here is the sun newspaper http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/

The reason why i done it in the first place was to allow as much info to be on the home page as possible, showing all the different sections on my site and allow google to see as well as our visitors how often the site gets updated.

I would love to hear your thoughts on if we should make our home page longer again like the sun newspaper or if you think this is a bad idea.

thank you for this. would love for you to explain about number 1, i have heard a lot about this but not sure if i am using it correctly, could you go into more about this please.

also what is microdata and og and twiter card tags and autro tagging, feel a bit out of the loop here

Hi, a bit shocked this morning as my website http://www.in2town.co.uk/ has dropped around 20 places in google.

Does anyone know why this has happened. The site is updated all day long so not sure what is going on here

any help and advice would be great

thanks for that, i will do on both accounts. Do not get me wrong it is nice to get the traffic from them, just strange that i do not understand how it happens

i have tried looking in the source code but nothing there but i did not check on the day. I was not aware they have different stories on their site but what i have noticed is, it happens alot.

Hi, i do not do any paid for advertising so it will not be that

Thank you for this, we wanted to try and show what towns the service was available in and we have tried different ways to show this and this is the only way we have found that works, but i am open to ideas

Hi, i get a load of traffic from the bbc news website but not sure how this happens.

For example we had a story the other day and according to my reports the traffic was coming from this page. http://www.bbc.co.uk//news/uk-wales-south-east-wales-21232826

but when i checked today to see the page i can see nothing about our story. BBC news has been really good to us for feeding us traffic but i am not sure how this happens as if i did then i would try and get all our stories seen by them.

Any help would be great in understanding how bbc news is picking up our stories

i wanted to make the page as informative as possible, to help people learn all about the surgery and the hypnotherapy that does the same job

Hi I know about the bottom and we are looking into this as we are showing where it is available but this was not the question I asked. I would be happy for someone to come along and help me with the question I have asked

Hi, what i am trying to find out is, i have a page on my site http://www.clairehegarty.co.uk/virtual-gastric-band-with-hypnotherapy

and i would like to know, once i have got the page to the way i want it, the page will not change, so i would like to know if i update my site and add pages and articles, will the updates help this page with google rankings, or do i have to keep updating this page if i want it to rank high with google.

i have seen pages that have never changed but they continue to rank high with google and i would like to know their secret

hi, really do not understand, can you explain more please

Hi, i am working with a joomla site and i am using the sh404sef plugin. I have contacted the developer of the plugin who has not been very helpful so i am hoping to get help here.

The problem i am having is, the description of the page showing in google listings is not the same as what i have put into the meta tag description.

for example, for this page

http://www.clairehegarty.co.uk/virtual-gastric-band-with-hypnotherapy

the meta tag description should be

Gastric Band Hypnotherapy to lose weight guaranteed. Free Gastric Band Hypnosis Consultations with Well Known Gastric Hypno Band expert as seen on TV. Hypno Gastric Band Works. We offer full support after your Gastric Band Hypnotherapy

but in google it is showing

Gastric Band Hypnotherapy Works. If you would like a slimmer and healthier body with all the benefits of weight loss surgery without any of the risks that can be ...

now one thing i have noticed is: in the sh404sef control panel, i have noticed that i have the following

index.php?option=com_content&Itemid=190&id=153&lang=en&view=article

the above is the original url from day one but then i have the one below which is not the original

index.php?option=com_content&Itemid=190&catid=150&id=153&lang=en&view=article

i keep deleting the above which is not the original but it keeps coming back and i have been told this could be the fault

can anyone please help me with this and solve how to stop it from coming back so google shows the correct description please.

Not really looking for short cuts, i am looking for tools that will help, like a mechanic will look for new tools to use to fix cars. I receive so many emails each day from companies about new tools that are out there and you never know which are good ones and which are bad ones.

I have never bought a seo tool as i only buy things that are recommended

Hi, i see a lot of people claiming that paid seo tools work, i would like to know if anyone uses them. I have a new site that i am building and i am wondering if there are any good paid tools out there that could help me gain exposure quicker.

I get a lot of emails from well known companies promoting their paid tools but have never bought any as i believe you should hear from people who have tried them first.

If you feel there are any good paid seo tools out there for help with rankings and link building then i would love to hear about them

thank you for that, that helps a lot

thanks for this, i will add a sitemap now

Hi, i am trying to understand about leveraging semantic markup but even though i have read the page on the link, i am still not sure of what it means and how i can use it in my site www.in2town.co.uk which has been built using joomla

If anyone can help me understand then that would be amazing and help me understand how it would benefit my site.

Thanks for this, will start adding the articles on the blogs

I will be writing the articles naturally but worried that the article could reduce my rankings for the main page. For example, i have written an article on gastric band hypnotherapy and the word gastric band hypnotherapy appears five times in the article, so this has worried me, if i put it online on my site will it take google away from the important page on my site all about gastric band hypnotherapy and move me down the rankings because i have another page talking about gastric band hypnotherapy and news about gastric band hypnosis

Hi, i am going to add a blog to my site to encourage more visitors as well as encourage google to visit the site more often but i am concerned on a couple of things.

The blogs will be on weight loss hypnotherapy, anger management therapy and also gastric band hypnotherapy and i am concerned that by writing a number of articles on this topic that by using the keywords it will lower my rankings for the following keywords, gastric band hypnotherapy, anger management therapy, weight loss hypnotherapy.

To help you understand more, i have three sections which are gastric band hypnotherapy, anger management therapy, weight loss hypnotherapy, which rank well with google and i am worried that if i write about these subjects in my blog that it will reduce my rankings.

Should i reduce the number of times i use the word gastric band hypnotherapy in my new blog articles and say only say the word once or twice so google does not thing that is my main page on the subject.

any help would be great.

I am not sure about how online press releases help your seo, but what I can tell you about them is, they do help promote your business.

As someone in the PR field, I use online press release sites a lot, but never the paid version. The responce we do get from the press release is huge.

I done an experiment last year where i compared the amount of business we got from an advert in a newspaper to spending time writing five press releases and putting them on online press release sites. We got much more sales from the press release than we did get from the advert, we also found that a number of online magazines and blog sites were publishing our press release.

I have heard a lot of people say that press release sites can damage your seo but i am not convinced on this, but i am also not an expert in seo so only people like Keri and other experts can tell you if they can help or damage your seo.

i find this very interesting. If you have a page dedicated for the keyword gastric band hypnnotherapy, should you not mention this keyword on your home page?

i was thinking about having a seperate page for weight loss surgery and the hypnotherapy for weight loss but the responce we got was, people wanted to learn about both on the same page.

On the page itself, the responce rate is about 10% ideally, i would like to increase this to 30%I have watched the page go down from ranking number one in google to number four. We have been number one for a couple of years now.

Our compeditor who never seems to change their page and this leaves us puzzled to how all of a sudden they are outranking us is. www.hypnoband.com/

the hypno band company never alter their page but they are now ranking above us.

one thing i have noticed in the past two weeks and i cannot work out how to solve this, is. the description we have for the page is

Gastric Band Hypnotherapy to lose weight guaranteed. Free Gastric Band Hypnosis Consultations with Well Known Gastric Hypno Band expert as seen on TV. Hypno Gastric Band Works. We offer full support after your Gastric Band Hypnotherapy

but for some reason when you search for the page in google it is now bringing text from the page which i did not want to happen

This is such an important page that i need to try and fix and get back to number one in google

Hi, i am working on a product and services website www.clairehegarty.co.uk but the problem i have is, the site does not really change. The home page stays the same and the only time it changes is when a new course is advertised.

The most important page on the website is http://www.clairehegarty.co.uk/virtual-gastric-band-with-hypnotherapy  but we have seen the site drop in rankings because the page is not being updated.

This page has all the information you could want on weight loss but we have seen the page drop from number one in google to number four.

I would like to know what steps we should take to increase our rankings in google and would be grateful for your suggestions.

If i put in articles on the site, had a section where we put a new article every week, would this then get google to visit the whole site more and move our pages back up the rankings, or should we be looking at doing other things.