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Found this one:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^blog.mysite.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /blog/$1 [L]

Source: http://www.scriptygoddess.com/archives/2007/06/13/redirect-a-subdomain-to-a-directory-using-htaccess/

If this happens often you should consider using http://www.tynt.com/ and modify your attribution settings to suit your needs.

I would suggest Majestic SEO to get solid backlinks and Excel to filter out URLs that do not belong to a desired section.

I have payed around anchor text and found that all of the following work rather well:

phrase

word phrase

phrase word

word phrase word

phrase 1 phrase 2

Even these:

for more information on phrase visit: URL

phrase: URL

image link alt="phrase'

Without seeing specifics I can't say more but I woudl say if it makes sense to have the two phrases together then have it together by all means. In terms of dilution - I would not obsess over it to much if the link anchor looks natural.

I have done SEO for Serbian and German and our texts were written in a natural unaltered language. This presented no obstacle with the rankings.

Carl from what I can see there is no suport for canonical in bigcommerce at this stage - perhaps in updated releases. There is afair amount of discussion around this issue however the issue remains unresolved. I would try writing to them and request the feature to be included in the upcoming update.

Oh, this could be a very long reply, however I will condense it to the following:

If you're link building for an Australian domain for Australian market and you have 1000 link opportunities. You should certainly focus on the followings:

1. Australian domains relevant to your niche
2. Australian domains that otherwise qualify (eg main local directories)
3. International domains relevant to your niche

(The order of 2 and 3 is a bit of a struggle for me when deciding which one to attack first)

Basically it's all about time management and if you have a limited number of hours to work on your domain (and that is always the case) you will need to find a way to prioritise.

Also look at obvious opportunities such as joining your local chamber of commerce and relevant industry associations in Australia.

Local directories wortth mentioning are here: HotFrog.com.au, TrueLocal, Aussieweb, Start Local

More here: http://www.aussietycoon.com/showthread.php/1112-A-list-of-Free-Australian-Online-Directories.

Hi Ken,

When you say campaign profile do you refer to SEO Moz or Google Webmaster Tools or backlink profile in general?

Note that 3rd party providers use mostly their own crawlers and you therefore depend on the freshness of their data. If you're talking about Google, link: command only gives a sample, whereas Google Webmaster Tools does provide more detailed backlink information - however in  my experience still lagging by 1-8 weeks in some cases.

Time will surely reveal your backlinks if they are accessible to search engines. If they are hidden (eg blank forum profiles) and nothing manages to get to them then to index they will not show up at all.

I would start by creating an inventory of your linkable assets and taking a peek at your existing natural links in Google Webmaster Tools. Try to understand why those who already chose to give you a link did so and try to create more cause for linking through content and value on your site.

Once that's out of the way you can move onto finding references of your brand online and create links where they don't exist and they should:

• Mentions of your brand
• Your logo (try tool called tineye for that)
• You URL (but not linked)

Also cover all meaningful directories relevant to your niche and location.

Another great way to get links is by thinking about your business relationships (suppliers, customers, office space, partners...etc). Here you can gain good value through nice contextual linking situation or a testimonial.

Occasional article, blog post/guest blogging, blog commenting can help - though I would advise against use of your key term instead of name in blog comments. That's something spammers tend to do.

If you run out of ideas you can always take a look at your competitor's links using tools such as:

• Majestic SEO
• Linkscape

Or you can use free tools including Yahoo and Google's own link: command.

For more try to read material written by http://ontolo.com/link-building-tools and informatoin already available on SEOMoz http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-building-101-the-almost-complete-link-guide

Good luck!

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.

How was the list lost. Was the account terminated and re-created or did the hijacker affect the user base? Do you have a mailing list? That would seem the easiest way to regain the lost user base and give you a chance to wash the list as well and retain relevant followers only.

Yes Matt Cutts also said that the anchor text value does not always go across or that Google does not guarantee it will work 100%.

I haven't gone in-depth with this but from my own observations the situation was clear. Presence of mobile version of the site will set Google's preference on choice of which site to display and not affect the actual position.

Has anyone tested to see if links to mobile site page version count towards the standards site and vice versa?

The question is why use 301s for internal navigation? If it's for moved pages then it's appropriate.

Google in fact encourages 301 as a most robust solution for sorting out moved pages (apart from fixing it on the core level). Secondary to that would be use of canonical, some webmasters even go for meta redirect or good old 404.

By my observations there is nothing that can harm you, even chained 301s work - unless you manage to do something really exotic!

Hi Casey, I thought it might be also interesting to know that we're not using anything "moz" when talking to our clients. The reason is that SEOMoz metrics are a part of proprietary system and not directly associated with search engines. We of course use tools for internal research and find them quite helpful.

We do reference Majestic though, probably because they provide very simple and solid figures in terms of link acquisition velocity and link quantities. Though we need to disclose that their crawling data is not equal to the one of Google.

Google has endorsed use of breadcrumbs in several of their videos. They are a helpful device for website with complex structure or hierarchy such as eCommerce sites. They not only aid user navigation but also help search engines get a clearer picture about your site's structure. For example if you're using faceted navigation you could end up on a product page that has a long URL and ambiguous placement in the site's hierarchy. Breadcumbs can aid with this. Another neat thing is in the SERPs when you get little: Top Level > Main Category > Sub Category type links under your snippet.

I would use it at the top only, it's become a bit of a standard and people know where to expect it. Referncing it twice would be just a doubleup of the same set of links.

I have used PowerMapper and am relatively happy with it. It fails miserably on large scale websites. I've spent days researching website structure visualistion and found that there are no rubust industry strength solutions out there available to general community. We're in the process of writing our own software for that reason.

I have one guy in the company who is obsessed with it so no matter what I do he will go back and ensure we comply! I've seen at least one W3C nazi in each web company I have had a chance to work with

That one single hour in each day when I get in the "zone" and do week's worth of work in a single shot. Still figuring out how to extend that for the full 8 hours

Haha... thanks. It's really strange that nobody jumped in to offer answers. I'm really not expecting profound knowledge a single basic thought or a tip will do. As far as the PR team goes, they actually have a dedicated person for blogging and social media. The only thing is that I am not sure if the two departments communicate regularly. There's an idea.

I am currently compiling material for a creative session where I will sit down with our client's PR team and look at ways to maximise SEO value while they do their usual PR work. Apart from obvious link inclusion in the written material (resource box / in-text) what are the other tactics that can be used to help SEO?

I am not only thinking about content but also distributiuon and technology / platform as well.

My (random) thoughts are around:

• Talking about specific website locations, features, media
• Generating curiosity
• Using existing media contacts and chanels as link opportunities
• Using interesting and user-friendly yet smantically rich content
  • Use of synonims
  • Referring to related terms and concepts
• Integrating social media
• Referring to PR material in blog and social media? (maybe bad idea)

Note: I've recently been introduced to platforms such as HARO and MyBlogQuest (by Peter Gregory in this related posthttp://www.seomoz.org/q/are-press-release-sites-useful) and wondering if there is anything else out there that's new and exciting?

URL rewriting is a common and safe practice and as goodnewscowboy points out: http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/a-simple-guide-to-htaccess - just test it and see that nothing funky is going on with your site and note that the above examples are not customised to your particular site / page structure.

Search engines are good with picking up 301s for new pages. If your pages are already in index and have links the only downside is that you may lose a bit of anchor text focus (I remember Matt Cutts talking about this in one of his videos) but link juice should pass through just fine.

Interesting question

When it doubt view the cached version of your site and click to see the text version only.

Example: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.google.com/&hl=en&strip=1

I include location in my local listings as a matter of habit. Have not dropped it to test and see if it has any effect. Keep in mind that there are other signals Google uses to work out the relevance of a local listing: Location (proximity, completness of the profile / information, outside references in directories, mentions of numbers...etc). I read a really interesting article about this recently here: http://ontolo.com/blog/phone-number-co-citation-analysis-local-link-builders

RewriteEngine on RewriteRule ^page/([^/.]+)/?$ index.php?page=$1 [L]

If you're using the numbered (e.g. page=102) IDs:

RewriteEngine On RewriteRule ^article/([0-9]+)/? article.php&article=$1   [R=301, L]

Conversion optimisation.

Our Current Sitelinks:
SEO Services SEO Packages About Us Contact Us Advanced SEO Topics Link Building Viral Marketing FAQ

Our Past Sitelinks:
SEO Services
SEO Packages
About Us
Contact Us
Advanced SEO Topics
Link Building
Me Nofollow! Blekko Search Engine

Removal of: the two above introduced two new sitelinks which were much more relevant.

You're welcome. If the .de site hasn't been online until now then it will be some time before you will earn Google's full trust of course. One thing we've noticed was that websites with higher pagerank / links / trust / authority get indexed more thoroughly (deeper, wider...etc) so enabling for a nice natural link growth would be important in the early days of the site if all that content is going to be indexed by Google. Remember that Google's pagerank is more or less invisible to webmasters these days and when it does update it's really stale as far as data goes. So don't obsess over a toolbar pagerank and think about ideal places to score a great, authoritative link from.

Best of luck with your site release!

Just to add that I would personally be scared of having domainname.co if I know my competitor has domainname.com - too easy to spell it wrong and send free traffic the wrong way.

For one of our clients we have purposely trimmed down the title tag two merely two words and reduced the description to a one liner thus creating lovely white space with reading clarity which makes eyes focus on it.

By doing so we've improved our click through rate by 20%.

Sounds like Google likes this feature and will not remove it unless they figure users don't like it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpbpfjzEBAM

1. Type in your brand. Usually pops up (you can check if you have it in Google Webmaster Tools)
2. 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.

Going offline.

Have a TV or radio ad and tell people to search "your keyword".

I believe this was successfully executed for phrase "seo found" in Australia. http://www.google.com.au/search?q=seo%20found I was first suprised to see a peak in search volumes in Google Keyword Tool and was later told that they had a massive advertising campaign for this phrase.

This is something I intend to try in the future.

seo-kwt.png

I am not a big fan of internal link nofollows and find the whole thing more or less pointles and it's better to let Google crawl through your site freely. Site architecture /structure is crucial. One thing we did recently was remove links which lead to same pages and trimmed our link count down by 30%. Another feature we've introduced was a featured box which contained products which we knew needed some internal link love. Typically ecommerce sites have popular products by no way to specify which product pages to feature manually (or at least in a controlled way).

Are you using faceted navigation at all?

I can tell you exactly what happened to one of our client's websites. We went into a similar debate over a .de and .com domain and as a result of inability to come to an agreement (between SEO and developers) both were released with no canonical handling whatsoever.

The outcome was good, perhaps due to a bit of luck. What happened was that Google figured out that this was another geographic region site and allowed for both pages to be indexed, cached and found in results (one for google.de and the other for google.com.au / google.com). So when I searched for the same sentence in "quotes" it would bring up both results without omitting.

If I can make an educated guess, it would be a mix of geo location (contact details, tld) and the fact that layout added a substatntial amount of difference to both sites (as one layout header, nav, sidebars and fotter were in german and other in english).

In what timeframe are you looking to add german translation to your pages?