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Nofollow does not pass any juice... According to Matt Cutts of Google, Google doesn't count nofollow back links.
There is a great answer to that question here. http://www.seomoz.org/q/do-no-follow-links-have-any-seo-value-at-all
I wouldn't suggest buying, but focus on finding better locations to build Follow links.
If the site is built well, then all pages would be accessible via 3 clicks. So html sitemaps really aren't needed.
MozPoints - http://www.seomoz.org/dp/mozpoints
The best way is to get involved.
Google doesn't support meta keywords. Bing looks at meta keywords as a spam signal and not a ranking signal.
So there really isn't any reason to use them.
Read the full article about Bing and Meta Keywords here: http://searchengineland.com/the-meta-keywords-tag-lives-at-bing-why-only-spammers-should-use-it-96874
The first thing I would do is install the **WordPress SEO by Yoast. **
Then start focusing on local seo. Google Places, +1, and any local link you can get. (Quality Local Link Buidling)
And you should integrate Social. (Not just links to your social sites, but actual interaction.) There's an easy to use plugin for that: Really simple Facebook Twitter share buttons
I'm not sure where to begin here since there are many issues. I think you should start by looking at the Web Developer's SEO Cheat sheet. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-web-developers-seo-cheat-sheet
pdf - http://static.seomoz.org/user_files/SEO_Web_Developer_Cheat_Sheet.pdf
and The Beginners Guide to SEO http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo
Title: Most Important, Main keyword in beginning
Meta-description - No SEO, but use for SERPs call to Action and attention.
Meta-keywords - No SEO, Remove.
H1 - Important, should be one of the first things a spider crawls.
H2 - Not as important
H3 - H6 - Not important
Bold or Italic - Important - Main keyword should be bold or italic
Link Anchor Text - Important, most important links near the top, and Google will only count the anchor text for the first link. (same link)
Image Alt - all images should have Alt
Content - Content is extremelly relevant. But this section would need a whole page of explanation.
Have you checked out SEOmoz's Directory list? http://www.seomoz.org/directories
I would see about adding some secure logos via Verisign or McAfee.
And do you have any well know brand names you could display as clients?
First, I wouldn't even look at Google PageRank. Google isn't consistent with updates, and it isn't a good measurement tool. Focus on SEOmoz's Page Authority and Domain Authority. This will give you much more insights to what is going on.
And with looking at metrics on www.opensiteexplorer.org, you only have 302 links coming in and a Page Authority of 48 (out of 100) and Domain Authority of 39. Looks like your overall domain doesn't have a very good Linkscape which is why you have low PA and DA, and maybe why your Google PageRank is still low.
Your Domain MozTrust and MozRank are very low as well. Looks like you should investigate the quality and types of links you have coming in, and focus on building quality relative links.
I guess my question would by, why are you creating a sub domain to help your main domain? All the effort you are putting into the sub domain, could be put into the main domain for more power. This is why everyone suggests "www.example.com/blog" instead of "blog.example.com".
Depending on what you are doing, a sub domain or a different tld are going to have the same effect. (I'm assuming your main domain is www.example.com)
I would suggest reading "Root Domains, Subdomains, Microsites and subfolders" from SEOmoz. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites
I would go for the link but not the reciprocal link. On devaluing the link, it all depends on if the site is relevant to yours.
You should take a look at the metrics inhttp://www.opensiteexplorer.org
As you will see you have only 3 linking root domains, 23 total links, Page Authority 30, and Domain Authority 19.
Focus on getting inbound links.
I guess my question is why would you have to 301 redirect from your development (staging) site to the client's live site if you had nofollow, noindex? Google should not know about the dev site, or even be able to access it.
Sounds like in the new client site there are links going back to the development site. (maybe rel=canonical). Or there is a link out there linking to content you don't want found.
Google's not going to index it unless it finds it. Just jump into Google Webmaster and remove those directories.
Remember, noindex,nofollow or robots.txt are not 100% answers. You should make these sites password protected.
Just make sure that after you install the template, that you take a look at the code and make sure everything is fine for SEO. Remember that you can always modify the code to make it work for you.
It looks like you purchased a link building package. I would wait on their reports to see where the links actually are, and personally check them to see.
Inbound links aren't going to show instantly. Everything has to be indexed, so it will take months before you start seeing numbers (if any based on the sites they are on).
For example, SEOmoz starts their crawl and like search engines takes time crawling many sites. So even if their report came out today, and you and new links last week, they might have actually crawled the sites your links are on 3 weeks ago.
I would also be extremely careful on what you are using right now to build your links. If you are a new site it isn't a good idea to start off with a bunch of garbage links coming in. Focus on building quality links, not quantity.
Here is another Q&A today about link building with some great example of the best ways of doing so.
Google +1 is something we can't ignore. Google, the largest and most used search engine controls +1 and integrates this into their serps. Even if it isn't a huge factor in SEO, it is a huge factor in serps.
But I wouldn't select just one Social site to focus on. I would focus on the top ones. Google +1, Facebook, Twitter, and maybe LinkedIn or Pinterest. (It all depends on who your target audience is). Even if you aren't interacting with everyone on all of these sites, it is still important to allow people to Like, Follow, or +1 your site.
Canonicalization - Very simple way to clean up a lot of duplicate issues.
Here is a great article on how to take care of these:
I assume you are getting no data reads via Open Site Explorer correct? This just means that OSE hasn't crawled or found your site. I wouldn't panic, since there are so many sites out there, OSE only crawls a small portion.
I would wait until the end of this month until the next OSE Linkscape index update comes out. You may find that they now have info on your site. (if not, start link building so OSE can find you)
Since we truly don't know Google's secret recipe, we can't say if PR is split.
I don't believe you will loose any Link Juice with duplicate links. You can have 10 links to the same url, but Google only sees this as 1 url.
Interesting article on SEOmoz:
http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/an-internal-link-juice-tool-14969
Interesting PR tool from that article: (PageRank Link Juice Calculator)
http://www.ecreativeim.com/pagerank-link-juice-calculator.php
I read a comment from SEOmoz's Dr. Pete:
"Google sometimes views navigation differently, but it's a bit hard to say. My general assumption with Google ignoring 2nd (3rd, etc.) links to the same Page B from any Page A, is that they ignore those links completely. Since they don't pass PR and their anchor text doesn't count, I'd tend to treat that page as if it had 10 links. If anyone has evidence to the contrary, I'd certainly love to hear it."
View Post: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many#jtc131211
In November of 2011 Google announced that it would start encrypting search sessions of anyone signed in to Google.com. In practice, this means that Google stopped passing the organic keywords that referred traffic to websites whenever users are logged in Google and conducting searches.
Basically anyone logged into Google and does a search, the keyword is now "not provided".
http://searchengineland.com/encrypted-search-terms-hit-google-analytics-99685
Your competitor has 1000 different websites linking to them. It could be from any page on their site to any page on your site.
It's not necessarily their home page.
I would follow the urls that GWT say are bad. This will give you the answers. Also, for all bad urls, make sure you have GWT re-crawl them."Fetch as Googlebot" and "Submit to Index" under "Diagnostics"
You need to setup your site Canonicalization so that you don't have the duplicates. SEOmoz has a great article here: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/canonicalization
Since you are hosted on an Apache server, you will need to modify your .htaccess file in your root directory to take care of these.
Make sure you also setup the www or non www preference in GWT. (Google Webmaster Tools)
Even if you make the links nofollow, you will still lose link juice.
Just focus on putting your best links towards the top.
Here is a great post explaining why you still will lose link juice.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-maybe-changes-how-the-pagerank-algorithm-handles-nofollow
Here is a great post about that topic.
http://blog.tamar.com/2011/10/google-rids-keywords-of-apostrophes/
It will be great to see if anyone has any stats on this. I did recently read a good article similar to this on Hubspot, "How to Write Call-to-Action Copy That Gets Visitors Clicking"
I know it isn't exactly the answer you are looking for, but I feel they have some good points and suggestions.
It would have to be a significant amount of bad links coming in. And this would have to be an ongoing practice from the competition to do something like this.
So we have a rough idea when to expect the next Linkscape Update. This isn't an exact date, but more of an estimate or goal.
schema.org is becoming the standard.
Here is a great post from SEOmoz: Schema.org - Why Your'e Behind if You're Not Using It...
OSE takes a while, so don't expect sudden results. Start analyzing the sites/pages these links are on in OSE.
For example, if www.example.com (where your link is from) isn't in OSE, then OSE won't find your link.
If you are going to work with an outside company to help you build links, then you should thoroughly investigate the company and make sure they are on the up and up. And when they start, really review their reports and watch very closely all metrics with your site.
Google's crawler has a separate larger database, crawl rate ect, than OSE.
OSE indexes monthly where as Google's index is updated more often than that.
In short, OSE is just a different "snapshot" of the net then Google's much larger database of the web
Minify css, use shorthand, avoid @import, old unsupported css code.
Since I'm not sure what kind of warning you are getting, it is really tough to answer your question.
Here is a great css tool: http://www.minifycss.com/css-compressor/
and you can Validate it here: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
At a quick glance, it looks like you might have over optimized the site.
I would slowly start taking steps backwards and see what happens with each step.
Also, looking at OSE, it looks like you are way too heavy on inbound links with "jobs in kent" (75 domains, 103,647 links) and "jobs around kent" (73 domains, 4,029 links)
Then from there it drops down to 4 domains with 16 links.
It is alright to have outbound links, just make sure that they are relevant to the page it is linking from. I believe I have read that relevant outbound links are actually good for SEO. (But don't go crazy).
Yes, Google Webmaster Tools. Under "Diagnostics", select "Fetch as Googlebot". This will show you exactly how Google sees your page.
When you are ready to start, you should run a report with www.opensiteexplorer.org and export all of your inbound links to an excel spreadsheet. That way you can sort them by the PA and DA and start figuring out how to contact the website to get the link removed.
Or if that isn't an option, it may be best to let a lot of those bad links 404 on your site so Google knows that those pages don't exist.
But cleanup your internal structure, setup XMl sitemaps, and make sure there are no errors (internally).
I'm not sure that is the rule. I would continue with the product reviews, just make sure that the people who are doing the reviews, that their sites are relevant.
I would guess that you are looking at two different metrics. Are you looking at the sub domain, or root domain (not what is coming in, but the page that is being analyzed)?
www.example.com (sub domain)
or
example.com (root domain)
or page specific.
All links and ads should come to your site. If they want to have a different splash (landing) page, then have them build it to sit on your site.
The only benefit is for them.
Taking a quick look you have a ton of spammy bad links coming in and they are going to internal existing, and non existing pages.
57 - Linking domains to home page
3,766 - Linking domains to all pages
You have a lot of cleanup to do. I would start by setting up your account with Google Webmaster Tools and running an internal scan to start cleaning up everything.
I believe you are probably doing this alright. Just as long as you aren't out soliciting 100's of blogs asking for a link and a review.
It all depends on the amount of pages on the website. I would suspect that you will see results any day now.
Yes, SEOmoz is addictive!
No, they understand seo. That is why they are tying to get the links to their site instead of yours.
The first thing I would focus on would be the url restructure of the site.
- www.mydomain.com/folder/page-name/
Then 301 all old urls to the new urls
Then start the cleanup of inbound links.
Basically a "Natural Link" is when someone links to your site for any reason without you having to ask them or pay them to link to you. They found value in your site and wanted to share with others.
It's not a type of link, but how the link was acquired.