Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I would encourage you to look at Google Webmaster Tool data and observe clickthrough rate averages around different keywords and derive phrase potential by predicting traffic scenarios if position for that phrase increased by n positions and how much it would yield in terms of conversions.

Thanks for that URL! I didn't realise there were so many.

Why do you think he deleted that post?

lol @ http://www.haidt.com/google-adsense-f10/bipolar-antidepressant-t29644.html

Our industry is in grave need of reputation management.

Panda took care of half of that rubbish didn't it?

That's right. This is no ordinary result and is an extra much like news at the bottom.

Counting results on the page... yes this is a separate result completely.

Unless Google introduced 11 results per page and I was not aware of it

It's either part of Google getting smarter and detecting absolute authoritative results for a search vertical or... Google starting to steer away from their algorithm only and no-humans policy in results and marking certain things by hand.

I did a quick search for that image in Tin Eye (nothing) and in Google (1 result) so it seems like this is Google's thing only and the image is designed to highlight a verified health result.

This reminds me of comment that Mr. Weitz from Bing said about the future of search and how ridiculous it might be to judge the validity of results by link popularity in some cases:

"An expert from Bing, Stefan Weitz, notes that relevancy in search is based on PageRank. PageRank determines the position of a web page based on the analysis of links referring to that page. He notes that relying solely on this model to find, for instance, the best cancer hospital is ridiculous."

Or he has a paid geek that does his tweeting for him.

Search for SEO in Twitter and top result says:

"aplusk: I'm starting to become convinced that people put my name in articles just to improve their SEO or hoping I'll tweet it."

When you click on the result it brings nothing!

Another weird thing, when I search for the sentence and view cached Google result it immediately redirects (which is unusual and annoying). I managed to find a text only version of cache here.

Can somebody please explain what's going on here?

PageRank is rarely updated for public these days. If your redirect is set properly all your PR should show in the next toolbar PR update. If it still shows 0 then there are two possibilities: a) links that gave you pagerank don't exist anymore or don't have pagerank themselves b) penalty. Both are quite unlikely. I recommend you don't obsess too much over this and one day you will be pleasantly surprised with a bit of green. Keep in mind that will be only a historical record of PR when Google last took the snapshot.

From my testing (and I do a fair bit of that) I conclude that links still outweigh every other signal. Though it would make perfect sense that newly introduced hints steal a bit of link graph's glory until it's put in a fair place with everything else. I notice Matt Cutts still talks about links a great deal in his videos which confirms my view that links are still going strong.

What puzzles me is how strongly they treat exact anchor text, when in natural world we rarely see it happen, it's usually click here, or read more or just plain website address. This is the area I believe needs fixing sooner than others.

Back to the original topic... once links stop being a super-signal content and function will rule.

Strange I didn't notice that. (Maybe due to the fact I didn't have that many blogrolls to have significant impact). The only way to find out is to test it.

Ah, here's an interesting topic. Do you think Google will use social media for cross-referencing their signals and validating rankings or any additional hints?

There is no way you will be penalised. You would however potentially confuse search engines as to who the content originator is and delay the ranking for the intended page. So as EGOL says it's best to use short snippets on the home page that lead to the full blog post.

Soon to be updated to 2011 version: http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

Blog rolls are great when used as they should be, keep the title, but as soon as you start seeing strange mix of websites in there (casino, custom essays and life insurance) better stay out of it for it could turn nasty on you.

But there is one problem EGOL, not all SEO people are creative. Extraordinary content and assets could be staring you in the face, but if your Goggles are tuned to technical settings you will miss the most obvious opportunities out there.

Under ordinary circumstances I would just go ahead and do it, however lately I am seeing an increased activity of Google taking action against link manipulation. I would put proper disclosure on the landing page explaining why users are seeing it and if you do get in trouble it's a very simple explanation to Google.

If you, however, trigger an algorithmic filter then the solution is to nofollow all the links and wait for Google to pick it up.

If you don't want any dramas to start with use nofollow straight away.

I don't always vote in favour of exact match domains but in this case it's an obvious choice. If you target a single phrase with an exact match domain with few links pointing to the site - the reward can come quickly and with relatively little effort. I have seen some chases where the main term was so competitive that it took a month or two of link building before the top spot was reached.

If it was me though I would have the both. My real site on an older, trusted domain and a promotional satellite site for the exact match domain.

I just bumped into this video and found it immensely entertaining:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeiu8afEOOg

(horrors of a world without Yahoo! Link Data)

What were you up to at the time this video was recorded?

Externally hosting images will not be a major problem and ALT text will be seen as part of your page content.

And this is what I see on the oldest domain in the world: http://symbolics.com/ ???

I hate what internet has become.

At 1200 posts it should have equalized already. I would check to see that Google can crawl forum content properly - what if it cannot due to technical issue or perhaps need to login to see posts and replies?

Are you seeing any considerable changes in your rankings since forum went live?

I see what you're saying I would be concerned too. Google is pretty good at figuring out what's a forum and what's main site content and will separate those two for different types of searches (though occasionally blending them). What I am saying is that your normal pages will rank for usual terms and your forum content for different type of search query. One thing strikes me though... is your forum empty? If not, then its topic should reflect the topic of the website - right? So that should not be a problem.

Good point.

.

SEO advantages and disadvantages are minuscule. If you are already going through trouble of rewriting URLs make them nice and neat with hyphens. Google also recommends to use them as separators so you cannot go wrong.

Not really, though it does extend your URL a fraction which has a minimal impact but also makes your URLs longer and less aesthetic (and shareable).

For best results use: how-are-you.html

Spaces turn out to be how%20are%20you.html

There is absolutely no mystery about whether inbound links can harm you or not. Apparently Google is very good at determining whether it was you buying links or somebody trying to sabotage you. I had a chat with Tiffany from Google's web spam team at SMX in Sydney and she said that there has been no cases when they got it wrong when they issue penalties.

I have a different theory however. To get penalised you need to demonstrate consistent link buying pattern over time. What typically happens is that SEO people buy high PageRank links only with very closely matched anchor text. Often these links are sold to other webmasters with different site topics. This is very easy for Google to spot.

What happens though is that during this process the rankings will shoot up like crazy and if you were to try and sabotage your competitor you would have helped them in the process and also spent an incredible amount of money. All that for them to submit a reconsideration request to Google and be out of jail within weeks.

As far as I know attempts at cheap forms of link spam in order to penalise competitors have so far been unsuccessful.

Just the basic PageRank logic, nothing too fancy. I purposely didn't want to drill into quality and nature of each individual inbound link. The element that did bother me in that decision was whether the IBL's were unique domain or c-block. Other than that what wins is the fact that there are fewer outgoing links on the page I'm getting link from. I assumed this was external outgoing backlinks (not counting internal links, nav, footer etc).

Hey I have no tangible proof of its impact, but I've done it for our site - just in case.

Working on a shoestring I would find much better ways to invest that money.

My choice:  Link on PA56 with 88 OBL's and 80 IBL's

The message is: This move is permanent, however, crawlers will always follow links and always bump into old version of the page so there is a chance that they may pick up that 301 is changed or removed. Google (Matt Cutts) also stated that they follow 301 chains but they do not guarantee that it would work well if you have many 301s in the chain. Search engines obey 301 much more firmly than rel canonical for instance as 301 is a directive and canonical is a "hint" as he describes it.

To answer your specific question, if you set new redirection rules they will be picked up. That said I have had cases in the past where it took Google more than 6 months to clean up messy redirection situations and some cases where they have completely failed it at. In your case it should be all fairly straightforward.

Jim Boykin

Exactly. I think it's an obvious choice.

To my knowledge what you seek does not exist. If you do dig it up please share with the rest of us!

What you see is consistent with every other redirect I have seen. The redirecting website is identified as its target and it even gets the toolbar pagerank equivalent of the target website (hence the fake pagerank sites via 301 redirects).

Maybe they are doing this for domain traffic only and trying to stay safe for SEO. Otherwise they could be onto something I am not aware of! Any chance of seeing the website?

302 or 301?

Google Webmaster Tools provides rankings, though averaged they can be tweaked to a near accurate value. Their API does not support rankings at this stage, but if enough people kick and scream about it - they may! hint hint

I met the guy from http://www.ayima.com/ at SMX and he definitely knew what he was talking about. I can recommend.

Hi, I don't understand what the problem is - everything seems to be working the way it should. I checked your original page and it redirects. Cache of it shows cache for the new domain which is what happens when you 301 your old domain.

I would say do what sounds the right choice from branding and business perspective. Search engines are pretty good and picking up domain migrations and there are tools to help you do that effectively (301, Google Webmaster Tools). To me .com does sound better.

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.