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Sounds like your pagination is being used by Google.

Really good point. I find that most of my content ends up behind a login (therefore hidden from search engines). Do you know a way of going around this? Uni blogs are good for example.

Can you believe that I never considered this in all my years of link building. Thank you for bringing this up Peter!

Your Google PageRank went down immediately after some of your linking websites lost their PageRank or cut their links to you. Toolbar PageRank updates rarely so you couldn't see it until now. Timing with Panda is accidental and not related to your PageRank change. Nothing to worry about and keep up with great content and good design. New thing to keep an eye on is user experience, however links are still very strong as a factor so you should try to earn great links as well.

Correct. Latest I can find is from 9th May.

Just reporting that there has been a public toolbar PageRank update.

What did Santa give you this round?

We have implemented something similar in the past with no negative effects. Same deal with tabbed content. If this type of display is convenient for the user and not only served to search engines then you're within the search engine guidelines. Even if you do get in trouble (very unlikely) there is always a re-inclusion request in which you can explain things to Google.

One thing to keep in mind is Google's cloaking filter they've been writing about this recently as they start to compare what is displayed to them to what user would see. I cannot know exactly to what extent the site may vary in appearance with your overlay feature.

Visit: Google Webmaster Tools > Labs > Instant Previews

See the last paragraph in the attached image.

dejan-seo-preview.PNG

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.

Yes though it's going against me right now as I cannot Tweet. We've been sitting at AU $217.50 and no movement I will end the auction early and give the Tweet to the highest bidder. If anything we made two hundred bucks to our charity!

It's not exactly 3 clicks... if you're a PR 10 website it will take you quite a few clicks in before it gets "tired". Deep links are always a great idea.

Great tip. I have seen this happen too (e.g. forum, blog, archive and content part of the website not indexed equally).

Agreed!

Oh yes, Google is very big on balancing and allocation of resources. I don't think 10,000 will present a problem though as this number may be too common on ecommerce and content websites.

Very good advice in the replies. Everyone seems to have forgotten PageRank though. In Google's random surfer model it is assumed user will at some point abandon the website (after PageRank has been exhausted). This means if your site lacks raw link juice it may not have enough to go around through the whole site structure and it leaves some pages dry and unindexed. What can help is: Already mentioned flatter site architecture and unique content, but also direct links to pages not in index (including via social media) and more and stronger links towards home page which should ideally cascade down to the rest.

Thanks Shaun!

Well, one would assume that quality content = ranks well. It's kind of a loop, isn't it

Demand is a very interesting point!

If there are 200 content pieces on a topic versus only 2 pieces of content and one is really good value would undoubtedly be much higher where there is less such content available.

Well, I guess a well-formatted content does not always mean scannable. Little eye catching elements, bolding of key terms and colour would aid in the process.

Ah, good point which goes well with "Formatted (easy to read and follow)".

I consider user driven metrics as a big part of what Google uses to judge quality (citations, links, social buzz). Other stuff would have to be with their understanding of the content itself. I wonder how much of it they are able to figure out?

And when it comes to user motivation to spread and engage I am curious what the elements are and attempt to dissect and analyse what makes up a good piece of content.

I am curious to hear what you guys consider to be the characteristics of good content and in which order if you have a preference.

Here are a few I can think of:

• Informative (you can learn something new)
• Substantial (enough of it and thorough)
• Complete (doesn't give half-baked information or ideas)
• Unique (not regurgitated original content)
• Helpful (practical actionable information)
• Visual (content complemented by media)
• Referenced (claims made are substantiated through citations)
• Entertaining (or otherwise emotional, e.g. surprising, sad, shocking, controversial)
• Formatted (easy to read and follow)
• Timely (right content at the right time, applies for news)
• Professional (writing style, grammar, spelling and sentence structure)

Can you add to this list?

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.

$103.50 - woooo!!! Good times.

It's actually nerve wrecking - I'm afraid I'll do some auto-tweet somehow or hit tweet button on an article out of habit. Twitter withdrawal symptoms for 10 days!

I can answer from software development point. Querying Google is a funny business and can be a real pain to manage. If you change the ranking tracking to daily frequency to all users across the board that would add an enormous amount of new queries and would likely add significant cost to SEOMoz. I am not sure how they go about getting the serp data though (likely contracted out to a server farm like 99legs...etc, or managed in house). I agree daily tracking would give a nice fine grain resolution but is probably meaningless in the overall scheme of things.

I hear good things about http://www.ayima.com/ - have met Rob Kerry at SMX Sydney this year and the man knows his link building.

http://cgi.ebay.com.au/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=200622210180

Whatever it sells for I'm giving to: http://www.beaheroaustralia.org/

Thanks guys,

Dan

Are we able to see this IP / domain?

My vote goes for Magento. It's a bit of a pain to set up and configure but very robust and has not caused us any anomalies so far.

In some instances it's simply swapped but in others it seems to depend on on-site. I am puzzled though that a page with no links ranked the same way the page with links.

I have been noticing this behaviour creep in slowly over the period of some months on many of the websites I monitor -- particularly eCommerce. The idea is that the user is sent to the very product page as Google determines that most users end up there eventually. Where they fail is by forcing users to end pages when they are not ready for it (still browsing and researching and would much rather see a category then a product page).

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

None to my knowledge. Wouldn't loading of offline data into algorithm go against Google's whole philosophy?

What an interesting topic!

Firstly URL effect is minor in comparison to the actual navigational hierarchy.

I give preference to short and neat URLs however www.company.com/category/sub-category/service doesn't sound terrible to me. What would be my primary concern is if this is how you get to that page:

Home > Category > Sub Category > Service (3 clicks)

If this "Service" is a key service to your client then it would be wise to create navigational wormholes to drill through from say home page or top level category page and label it as "popular" or within a piece of text.

In a website with 200-300 pages PageRank distribution and indexation should not be a problem (assuming you have decent links) so there is no huge need for flattening site architecture to the point where you have 1000 links on each page.

I have heard Matt Cutts validate this point in at least two or three of his videos stating that linking your main content from as high as possible is the key.

I thought long about what to answer here and if I really put myself in the situation I would go for the juiced up domain as the first choice. Why? Most of my testing shows that search engines are not that great at picking up relevance and sites with completely unrelated but diverse and strong link portfolios still rank really well.

Would I base my entire link building strategy on this principle? Absolutely not.

I wonder how many Serbian SEOs on SEOMoz? Raise your hand everyone.

Pozdrav!

Good point and absolutely a must, though once you exhaust all that and have already a good content strategy and your competitors are still kicking your butt - what then?

Internally we go technical, big backlink profile analysis, do the maths and go hard and creative on links. It's kind of like brute force in some respect however within 2-3 months you're going up after many months of stagnation.

I see this all the time in highly competitive industries (e.g. insurance, flights...etc).

There have been cases though where we have seen quality beat quantities (in extreme differences)... still a bit of a mystery to me if I am to be completely honest.

If your competition is getting quantities of links and beating you while your your best content effort cannot level up... that might be what you need to do - get as many new c-block links using all means possible apart from buying links and spam (I cannot recommend those).

Article submission and directories are not my favorite activity and I do not believe in it - however there is ample evidence that sheer quantities can win.

The answer I gave you is simplified as I have not analysed your and your competitor's links in details (anchor text, authority, numbers, velocity...etc).

Thanks for your valuable input.

If you are to sort the factors - I guess titles would be at the top of your list, what would follow?

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).

• Creating a lot of bad content is a bad strategy.
• Creating a lot of good content is a good strategy.

(Assuming it's done in balance with your capacity.)

Content is the king but a kingdom needs other roles to run smoothly so I would not completely sacrifice other SEO activities just to satisfy monthly content needs.

One example of content being a problem is when too many pages discuss the same topic and fragment your inbound links, diluting the effect. This would only be good if that was only way to get as many diverse inbound links.

Click on "MozPoints" next to your point number and read explanation of how points work. You will see that you get 20 participation points and after that each answer gets zero but you can still get thumbs up from others and various other endorsements (by staff or question poster...etc).

You get 20 per month.

| +1 MozPoint (up to 20 per month) | You automatically get a thumb up from yourself for any question, response, or reply you write in the PRO Q&A forum. You get 1 MozPoint for the first twenty of these contributions each calendar month. |

Hey guys, what are in your opinion top ranking factors for YouTube optimisation?

Any idea as to why the cache redirects?

Tweets and other social signals do affect SEO.