Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey all, I plan on making some awesome short, informational (and not overtly promotional) videos for my business. The basic idea is an expert talking and demonstrating how to perform different topics with tools and equipment (related to solar energy). We have a quality film crew and a really knowledgeable and engaging presenter, but does anybody have any awesome examples of this type of video (in any industry). Just trying to get a sense of how I want it to look and feel for maximum engagement. Thanks!

We have changed our site architecture pretty significantly and now have many fewer pages (albeit with more robust content and focused linking). My question is, what should I do about all the 404 errors (keep in mind, I am only finding these in Bing Webmaster tools, not Moz or GWT)? Is it worse to have all those 404 errors (hundreds), or to have a massive htaccess file for pages that are only getting hits by the Bing crawlbot. Any insight would be great. Thanks

I'm wanting to build a in-depth profile for my company's typical site visitor and I was wondering if there is anyway to view other websites that visitors are searching for online to get an idea of their hobbies/interests and how they spend their free time. I'm not sure if I'm asking the right questions in Google because the results are very broad and are more about reading analytics for your own company. Can anyone point me to a website or software that allows for this sort of thing?

Hello Everyone, I had previously added Structured Data for reviews for my product pages, which worked, and has slightly bumped up CTRs. Now, I am trying to get dates and locations to show up in the SERPs (Products are classes). Google's Structured Data Testing Tool shows that the data is being read without any errors, but I cannot seem to get them to show up in the preview (or actual SERPs). https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cleanedison.com%2Fcourses%2Fentry-level-solar-energy-training%2F If anyone could take a look and let me know if there is anything obvious I missed, it would be much appreciated. Thanks

I recently noticed a jump in my Crawl Errors in Google Webmaster Tools. Upon further investigation I found hundreds of the most spammy web pages I've ever seen pointing to my domain (although all going to 404 errors): http://blurchelsanog1980.blog.com/ http://lenitsky.wordpress.com/ These are all created within the last week. A. What the hell is going on? B. Should I be very concerned? (because they are 404 errors) C. What should my next steps be? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Hello All, So about 2 months ago, there was a massive spike in the number of crawl errors on my site according to Google Webmaster tools. I handled this by sending my webmaster a list of the broken pages with working pages that they should 301 redirect to. Admittedly, when I looked back a couple weeks later, the number had gone down only slightly, so I sent another list to him (I didn't realize that you could 'Mark as fixed' in webmaster tools) So when I sent him more, he 301 redirected them again (with many duplicates) as he was told without really digging any deeper. Today, when I talked about more re-directs, he suggested that 404's do have a place, that if they are actually pages that don't exist anymore, then a ton of 301 re-directs may not be the answer. So my two questions are: 1. Should I continue to relentlessly try to get rid of all 404's on my site, and if so, do I have to be careful not to be lazy and just send most of them to the homepage. 2. Are there any tools or really effective ways to remove duplicate 301 redirect records on my .htaccess (because the size of it at this point could very well be slowing down my site). Any help would be appreciated, thanks

Hello everyone, I have a megamenu with 87 links in total. We offer a ton of products, so when we decided to have this developed, it seemed like a no-brainer because a straight drop-down menu was really hard to digest. But I have been wondering if it is creating too many links on every single page and/or muddling the signals to the search engines. If anyone could take a look and give me their insight, I would really appreciate it. Thanks, www.cleanedison.com

Hello everyone, We run classes and we just released our 2014 schedule. I am thinking of manually posting each class on the various event sites on the web (zvents, eventbrite, yelp, etc.) Should I worry about any sort of penalty if the content of these events are exactly the same? Also, some allow links within the description, my plan was to have 1-3 links going back to my product page with varying anchor text. Is there anything I should worry about with this plan? Thanks in advance for any help

Hello everyone, Can anyone figure out why my Rich Snippets aren't showing up in Google searches: Their webmaster tool displays it perfectly, but I never see it in search results: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cleanedison.com%2Fcourses%2Fbpi-building-analyst-envelope-shell-combo%2F Perhaps it's only my IP? Any insight would be great. Thanks

Hello everyone, I had to write a white paper for an entirely different purpose than to drive links, but it did come out very well and I think it would be a fantastic tool in my SEO efforts. What do you guys think is the best way to market a white paper? Obviously I will let our email subscribers know about it and place a link to it in a prominent place on the website, but if anyone has any extra ideas, I would love to hear them. Also, what is the best way to host it? Taking the Moz beginners guide for example, I would love to just put it on my server like http://static.seomoz.org/files/SEOmoz-The-Beginners-Guide-To-SEO-2012.pdf but is it necessary that I make it web-friendly like http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo? Can the former do anything for SEO? What if there are links to and from the site? Any advice would be great. Thanks

An old SEO consultant left a lot of comments with exact anchor text links on non relevant blogs back in 2010. At this point most of them are no-follow, but I'm obviously still concerned they are damaging. Is the no-follow enough? Or should I still work to remove them? Is the time worth the effort? Thanks,

Hello everyone, I got hit with an algorithm penalty and need to start removing old backlinks ASAP. Does anyone have any good resources on how best to ask webmasters for removal? Are there any other ways to remove bad back links besides the disavow tool? (An SEO consultant I talked to said that they had a proprietary software that can remove them - is that possible?) Thanks all,

Hello SEO Community, I'm trying to find the right balance between adapting to Googles move towards local listings and not spreading out my site too thin. We provide our services nationally and currently have local city listings (i.e. http://www.cleanedison.com/courses/city/IL-Chicago) but these do not show up in the SERPs for individual products + city (i.e. Building Analyst Chicago) So I could make individual pages for each product in each city, but that would exponentially increase the number of URLs on the site and probably inundate me with duplicate content. Is there a better way I could take advantage of local listings without creating all the duplicate content and other problems that would arise with individual URLs? Thanks

Hello SEO Community, So sometimes I will pitch one guest post to multiple outlets and if multiple reply positively, I will tell all but the single most authoritative site that the article is being published elsewhere and it won't be unique for their site. But some don't mind and still post anyway. I definitely don't mind because it just means that more people will read my article and more sites will be linking back to me. What are the implications on the link juice from the most authoritative site? What about the other ones (which are still authoritative, just not as much)? Is there any reason I should explicitly tell them not to post if I know it will appear somewhere else? Thanks much,

Hello SEO Community, So I was able to rise to #2 in a highly competitive search term after a guest blog post that I wrote really took off (wish I could recreate that for my other terms, haha) Anyway, I steadily rose from 30ish to number 2 and have obviously seen more traffic, which is awesome and I'm happy. But still, in terms of the amount of traffic that google estimates the keyword gets, and the amount I'm getting at #2, it seems like #1 is getting the VAST majority (I know this is how most markets work). Judging from my link profile compared to #1, it would be extremely difficult to dethrone them. So what do y'all think? Is it worth spending time and resources shooting for the glory and traffic of #1 and potentially never getting there - or focusing my efforts on my middling keywords and getting those on the first page as well?

So my overall bounce rate is around 70% and the average time on page is around 2 minutes. Obviously, this is no bueno, but I feel like I've been staring at my own website so long that I have trouble viewing it from a fresh perspective. Are there any tools to I can use to diagnose the usability of my site? Would the SEOMoz community mind taking a look a my site from a fresh perspective and giving me some pointers on how to improve those metrics? Thanks! homepage: http://www.cleanedison.com/ Most viewed pages: http://www.cleanedison.com/courses/leed-green-associate http://www.cleanedison.com/solar http://www.cleanedison.com/courses/bpi-building-analyst

So SEOMoz says that I've consistently ranked #6 for a certain keyword. But when I search I'm no where to be found. I've done regular searches, incognito and some non-seomoz reports and all come up with nothing in Google. I noticed it a week or two ago, but didn't think it would continue. This is no bueno. I wouldn't be surprised if I got penalized (luckily my homepage relatively well for similar keywords), an old seo consultant used very spammy tactics. I recently removed them, but not before I started to notice that I fell off the map. Why would SEOMoz not recognize this, and continue to say I'm ranking well? The keyword is bpi building analyst the page is http://www.cleanedison.com/courses/bpi-building-analyst

Only for one set of my keywords. But I fell from first page to off the map in one fell swoop. Did this happen to anyone else? Should I be worried?

I get it, a truly authoritative source will not be able to control the exact anchor text that others link to it with. Google is trying to deliver the most authoritative source, so non-exact anchor text is more likely a good option for them. This makes total sense and I have been varying the anchor text of my blog posts. But this begs the question: How am I supposed to know I am increasing my rankings for the high volume key words in my industry, and not leaving it up to Google to decide which keywords are most important?

My product page had been solidly in the middle of the first page for months. Now, it is being replaced by my homepage for the same keywords. I don't understand why this is happening and I'm worried about it, particularly from a business stand-point (we offer a variety of products that appeal to completely different audiences) In terms of SEO, Is this necessarily a problem? What can I do to ensure that Google recognizes that the content that those keywords are tied to is on the product page, not the homepage. One thing I did notice is that the 2nd and 3rd most common anchor text for the links to my homepage are the two keywords in question (they are a distant 2nd and 3rd however). If nothing else, is there a way I can get SeoMoz to recognize the homepage on its page rankings so that my heart doesn't drop once a week. Thanks,

Say I write a great article about The Best Colleges at X and in the article there is a keyword linking to www.mydomain.com/productX my hunch is that it would actually be better for www.mydomain.com/productX if the article wasn't promoted to the colleges through www.mydomain.com/blog - instead it was promoted through www.yourdomain.com/blog my thinking is that the authority of another site linking to /productX with a popular post is higher than my own domain linking to /productX with a popular post. Am I right? Does it not matter? Am I completely wrong?

The company I work for offers a variety of very different products, that are sold to different audiences. Right now (and for the past 4 years) all the products have been listed on one main website. Over the years, we have accumulated over 200,000 links and rank relatively well in most of the product-specific keywords. Still, for business purposes we really feel that having a unique site specific to each product would be more beneficial than having them all on one site. What are the pros and cons of making a move to different subdomains from a main site. (i.e. instead of www.cleanedison.com/solar we would set up a solar.cleanedison.com)

My blog http://www.cleanedison.com/blog/ doesn't seem to be indexed by Google even though my posts seem to get indexed within a day or so. Is this not necessarily a bad thing? I feel like it would be nice to search "CleanEdison Blog" and get the homepage. The robots say: name="robots" content="noodp,noydir,noarchive" /> Is there anything I can do? P.S. My posts that get picked up by larger entities generally get ranked lower than the offshoot even though I have a rel="canonical" tag. Anything I can do there?

I'm sure this happens to a lot of people for a lot of different reasons. My pages http://www.cleanedison.com/leed and http://www.cleanedison.com/courses/leed-green-associate suddenly dropped off the map over the past 2 weeks for the keyword "LEED Certification" I tried to limit the number of times "LEED" was mentioned on the first URL (/leed) to try to combat an over-optimization penalty but I did not for the second (/leed-green-associate). Both of them have fallen precipitously and are no where to be found on Google. What can I do to troubleshoot this? Is there anyway to guard against this in the future?

I've been doing link building by writing good content and getting other blogs to post my articles with keyword links embedded. One example is: Original article: http://www.cleanedison.com/blog/setting-the-stage-for-greenbuild-2012-1997 Re-published article: http://www.renewableenergyfocus.com/blog/2012/11/7/guest-blog-setting-the-stage-for-greenbuild-2012/683.aspx (Keyword is LEED Certification - it goes to http://www.cleanedison.com/leed) I have 2 questions: Why isn't this backlink being found by majesticseo or open site explorer? Why isn't my original article showing up a google search at all? P.S. Overall, despite my best efforts, my keyword rankings have been falling recently, is there anything obvious that I'm doing wrong?