I heard Matt Cutts once talk about tag clouds as not necessary and the fact that Google 'gets it' without it. I say if you're linking to something do it contextually for maximum link benefit.
Best posts made by Dan-Petrovic
-
RE: Tags to index or to no index that is the Question
-
RE: Obtaining followed links - white or black?
OK, let's keep the various colored hats out of this for a sec. What they did is simply against Google's Quality Guidelines - and that's it. The level of severity is not as high as if they hacked somebody's website - nevertheless still in breach and it could bite them back if Google should ever audit their link profile.
-
RE: Duplicate titles OK if page don't need to rank well?
I would make it very clear to Google which one of my pages is about X and which one is about Y. If there are two X pages, Google will try to figure it out using a variery of available signals (site hierarchy, how far from home page, inbound links, content...etc). There are many possible scenarios but it could in theory happen that Google chooses the wrong page to rank for the given term which would lead your users to a page that is not relevant. If you are actively promoting the preferred page than this becomes less likely. If it was my site, I would give it different titles.
-
RE: Elements of a Quality Article
Pretty much if you follow advice from this page you can't go wrong. As far as I know there isn't a "content comprehensiveness tool" out there (yet).
-
RE: Obtaining followed links - white or black?
You do have an option of reporting them to Google (with detailed explanation of what they did). I have to admit in all my years of SEO I have never actually done it. Firstly not all spam submissions get looked at and actioned and many are used to simply improve the algorithm on a global scale, secondly there are much better things to do.
I would suggest that you continue marketing, branding, networking and building compelling content for your site and products. Create as much buzz about your business as possible and get people talking about it.
On a technical side of things there are probably links that you SHOULD have and didn't think of it.
Here's a few tips:
- If your web design company linking to you via their portfolio page?
- Have you given testimonials to service providers you used?
- Are you involved in the local chamber of commerce?
- Where you rent your office space, do they have a website with a tenant directory?
- Do you allow user generate content on your site?
- What happens when people buy on your website? Thank you page can be a great time to get people tweeting and sharing what they just bought. Use the momentum of after purchase to get links for free
-
RE: On page optimisation: Good for the users and engines?
See potential users don't see your homepage yet. You're bidding for their click among 9 other organic results on that page
-
RE: Separately bolded words
The effect will be minimal and other factors will outrank these subtle variations by far. I recommend that you do what makes sense for yourself and your users. Go easy on bolding terms on the page, excessive amounts are not a good thing.
-
RE: Forex SEO resources
There are countless little resource/ppc/affiliate websites out there trying to earn a few bucks. Most of them are pretty thin, but every now and then you will run into a good one. I would start by targeting each country and finding those quality forex sites to cross-promote with.
If you provide data/information a widget/graph/tool might be an ideal way to earn links.
-
RE: Duplicate content
Any difference or are you actually on the same thing once you hop on a boat/ferry?
-
Elements of a Quality Article
In your opinion, what are the signals Google uses to judge the quality of an article or post?
Here are some of my ideas:
- Reactions:
- Comment history
- Sharing (Twitter / FB / Social Bookmarks...etc)
- Citations / Mentions / Pingbacks
- Word count
- Content (Topical and qualitative analytsis, uniqueness)
- Domain (Qualitative analysis of domain article is published on)
- Use of images and media
- Use of references
- Timeliness (News, current affairs)
- Presence of date of publishing
- Spam filters:
- Anchor text usage
- Number, type and relation of outgoing links
- Content (Topical, semantic, qualitative analysis including keyword usage)
- Author data:
- Presence of author name
- Connection / link to author profile (hyperlink, rel tag, meta)
- Reputation of author (prior content, domains published and reactions)
Looking forward to your contributions.
- Reactions:
-
RE: Link from each page or only from homepage
I would like to add one point many people forget - disclosure. Google is pretty forgiving in terms of linking of own websites if the disclosure is clearly stated and it doesn't look like an SEOs attempt to manipulate link signals.
My suggestion is to link to your other site via a specific page on your first site and explain their relationship. This is a good practice in general, not just search engines.
-
RE: On page optimisation: Good for the users and engines?
I disagree with your view that "windsurfing equipment" is a bad thing for the users. Consider the fact that they will arrive through results to your site. If the phrase "windsurfing equipment" is in the TITLE of your page that will display as a clickable element in search results and also assure the user they're clicking on the right thing.
As far as SEO goes, having an exact phrase somewhere in the title is an advantage to having a partial title (e.g. only "equipment").
-
RE: SEO Plugins for WordPress
I've developed a WP plugin which works like Tynt except it doesn't add the annoying # tag at the end: http://dejanseo.com.au/copylink/ - it's great for getting automated attribution and link when people copy your content.
-
RE: Would notifying visitors that they can put text link ads on your site destroy you in terms of Google?
There are better ways to make money from your site. Worst case outcome? Manual action by Google. Best case scenario? Algorithmic PageRank reduction where your toolbar PageRank goes down by 1/3. e.g. PR6 -> PR4 making it less appealing for link buyers.
Indirectly by linking out to random sites can put you in a bad neighborhood and reduce your websites reputation and trust by search engines.
-
RE: Has anyone found a way to get site links in the SERPs?
- Type in your brand. Usually pops up (you can check if you have it in Google Webmaster Tools)
- Get to position #1 for the term and you'll get the sitelinks if the condition 1) is met.
If you're talking about controlling what Google suggests it seems it's based on user choices more than anything. Although I did have a few suprising sitelinks which I had to manually remove in GWT. It did not make sense as they didn't get enough traffic to justrify Google's decision.
-
RE: HTML and no index, follow
Eric are you using a content management system such as wordpress to run your website? If so then there will be functionality / plugins that handle this for you.
-
RE: Links built by previous SEO company are mostly 'dead' - will this affect me?
- If the SEO company has the ability to easily remove those links then you don't want them anyway.
- Sadly, you may experience a slight drop, depending on your overall link profile.
- On a positive note, you likely have a much cleaner link profile now.
-
RE: Has anyone found a way to get site links in the SERPs?
Conversion optimisation.
Our Current Sitelinks:
SEO Services SEO Packages About Us Contact Us Advanced SEO Topics Link Building Viral Marketing FAQOur Past Sitelinks:
SEO Services
SEO Packages
About Us
Contact Us
Advanced SEO Topics
Link Building
Me Nofollow! Blekko Search EngineRemoval of: the two above introduced two new sitelinks which were much more relevant.
-
RE: Using a third party server to host site elements
Hosting images externally never had any impact on cases I had a chance to observe. The only problem I can think of is that you lose control over loading times or if somebody takes an image and links (credits) the image hosting domain instead of your domain.
-
RE: I have 4,100 302 redirects; How can I change so many to 301s
Absolutely. In fact I realised that I missed the above after posting but my edit did not register. I hope my editing priviledges are not revoked.
-
RE: Wordpress 301 redirects
Several times I allowed WP to manage page redirects and this caused no trouble. I cannot say for instances where you rename file more than once as it never happened internally.
-
RE: What's your best hidden SEO secret?
Agreed, community is something that can not only educate but get you going and inspire to do more and better. It does get a bit lonely if you are hiding under a rock for too long.
-
RE: How to recover after blocking all the search engine spiders?
One of our clients did this once. We restored the robots.txt to original version allowing robots to browse normally and pointed a few fresh links to the site. The site was back in the index within a week. If your site has thousands or millions of pages that may take a bit longer. We found that discovery through links leads to better and quicker indexation than when you simply submit to Google. Get Google Webmaster Tools account and ensure that Google has clear picture of your site.
-
RE: Penalty for using expired domain?
If this is your only way of link building (especially if you do 301 only) it will start looking suspicious, your site may get penalised on manual review. I am not that sure if Google have algorithmic trigger for this.
-
RE: My uniques have dropped around 25% since following advice here
301 redirects can take time to be recognised. How long has it been since the directive was put in place? Have you checked that there is no problem with the way redirection was implemented?
-
RE: Check Google ban on domainname
There are several types of penalties (single keyword, all keywords, complete ban...etc). Search for your own brand and if you don't come up with anything than you're likely banned. Same thing with domain, site: command and info:
-
RE: Is it ok if a company address is located in the footer which is in a external php file?
Having company address in the footer could be a good practice but it's not an absolute must. The fact that it may reside in an include does not affect SEO at all if that include renders as part of the same document.
-
RE: Penalty for using expired domain?
It should be fine unless that site was banned in the past for some reason, though that's pretty easy to check. If your new website changes substantially in topic Google will likely recognise the change and not factor in domain's history. This is from what Google said at one point, not sure if anything changed since then.
-
RE: Google & Separators
954 underscores in the source code of the first result? God knows. I suspect maybe comment material has lots of underscore_usernames/
-
RE: Check Google ban on domainname
Likely it's not banned then - just not worth indexing. Chuck some decent content up there and you'll be fine
-
RE: Accidently did a 301 redirect on root domain and lost domain keyword position
Does that temporary page rank now or not? Have you 301'ed back to index after your site went live again? It could be a matter of waiting for Google to pick up on the change.
-
RE: How to evaluate and compare sites of different cost and authority for linkbuilding impact
I would go for a less cost and more linking domains given that they are all real sites. However it all depends what competition is like and whether you need authority or quantities (or both).
-
RE: Does domain WhoIs Privacy affect SEO efforts?
If your network is not a secret then ensure that you have full and clear disclosure on the site(s). I remember Matt Cutts once said this as an answer to a similar question on YouTube. Private registrations are common for non-SEO purposes so Google cannot act on it alone. However if you have 1000 domains with private whois that may start looking a bit suspicious.
-
RE: Rel-canonical tag
It's safe to include rel="canonical" on all canonical versions of your site and will not cause any problems. I have done this and tested many times. If you run a template based website such as WordPress it would be much easier if all pages referred to their own canonical version (even if it be itself).
-
RE: How Many Results Does Google Show From The Same Domain?
On a branded term you typically get quadruplets.
-
RE: Having some weird crawl issues in Google Webmaster Tools
There are website crawlers you can employ to scan the site and hunt for specific parameters such as: http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html
-
RE: Removing Duplicate Content Issues in an Ecommerce Store
Recently we had the same situation which was resolved nicely with rel canonical alone.
-
RE: Optimize flash site
OK, I was going to discuss some techniques which can be employed with Flash but this site hardly has any content and it's all very visual. User experience / navigation could be improved as well.
http://www.google.com.au/search?q=site%3Awww.ziba.com.au shows a few URLs in index. What confuses me is why go from index to main - what does that achieve?
Options you have are:
Focus on TITLE & Meta description in combination with inbound links.
If you can add some descriptive text under flash which would explain to search engines (and users who do not support flash) what the site is about including basic contact information.
-
RE: Can I use the same source for two different websites?
If this was a problem then all Word Press websites in the world would be penalised. What you're trying to do is common business sense and it imposes no risk given that your statement about content being unique is true.
I say go ahead and make awesome sites now that you have the right technology.
-
RE: How to Solve Duplicate Page Content Issue?
Best practice in your case would be to implement URL canonicalisation (rel="canonical").
Watch this: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=139394 (contains explanation and examples)
In addition to this try to prevent page duplication form happening in the first place, though this may need to be done on a programming level.
It seems that string such as "6_129_130" appears based on the category and navigational path. For example if user browses from outdoor and home decor and arrive on the same page the URL will have different number.
In addition you may want to remove "zero products" pages from index and not link to them as they are not good for users or search engines.
-
RE: SEO - Localization
I am seeing this page as #1: www.rpgdicas.com.br/builds/diablo-3/wizard.html
-
RE: When to delete low quality content
Good point. I would go further into exploring which pages / phrases have been cut most and work out any common elements of all that have been affected and define a plan of attack. If you have more than 100 articles it would take some time before it's all fixed. It's all about prioritising.
A good place to take a peek at is Google Webmaster Tools which shows search trends and CTR data as well.
-
RE: How to extract URLs from a site (without bringing the server down!)
Copy the site, set it up on a staging server and run http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ on it?
-
RE: Any advice on acquiring "jump to" via anchor link text?
I can comment on pagination as Google has released very good guide for this in light of their support for prev and next rels: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html
-
RE: Rel=cannonical vs. noindex.follow for paginated pages
My choice with be a rel canonical, however have you considered using rel prev and next?
-
RE: Need some urgent Panda advice. Open discussion about recovering from the Panda algorithm.
Panda still runs in installments, not continually. Rewriting content sounds like a massive task, hope it's worth it (e.g. is it better to write new stuff instead?). Have you got any pagination present on the site or indexable search results? We are under assumption here that you are certain that the problem is caused by Panda filter and not other factor and that your page layout and ads are not the cause of the drop or that the problem is not link related. I see no problem with 301 of pages with duplicate content to a new better content page. Sounds like something users might appreciate as well.