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I like your idea of posting them on a Facebook page. I think that's a great compromise in this situation.

Okay, so my response may have seemed flippant, but really, after everything we've learned in the last year I can't believe the discussion still is all about "what Google likes" and no one is talking about "what my readers like."

Ben, I went and looked at your blog and I think it's awesome. It's full of great content. If you have loyal followers, and they like your content, why on earth would it be a bad thing to say "Hey guys, I know you like my content, so here are some links where you can read some of the posts of written elsewhere." I think that's a cool idea. If you want to, make them "no follow" - I don't think it matters. Google is smart enough to see that you are an author referencing your other work. Readers love that. What's the first thing you see when you open up a book? You see a list of other books by the same author. Is that only self-promotion? I don't think so. You are making it easier for people who like your stuff to find more of it.

Forget about Google. Would your readers like it? I bet they would.

Understood. Yes, it's a bit of work (I just did over 550 removal requests myself), but I would proceed with removal requests. At least then you'll be able to see whether or not Google has actually removed them. Good luck!

Hi LL,

This might be a stupid question on my part, but are your catalog pages actually in Google's index yet? If not, obviously wait and see if the bots respect your "no index" direction. If they don't and those pages end up indexed, then submit the removal requests. No need to go through all that work if they aren't there.

If they are already indexed, then yes, I would submit the removal request.

I just wasn't sure if this is a brand new site or if you are working to resolve existing issues on an older site.

Dana

Good explanation BB. I had to give you a thumbs up for using the word "eviscerating." I love it!

Maybe the keywords bringing you traffic aren't what you expected? It seems that you might have some alternate keywords that are helping you out-perform your competitor. Also, keep in mind you are only looking at one month. Watch it for a couple of months to see if things flip flop.

I say this because one site I do SEO for is a very tight niche business, with a lot of competition. One thing I learned from SEMRush and Google Analytics was that the industry term that everyone was (and still is) targeting online, is not what customers tend to call the product. I started going after these alternate terms, and the results are pretty astonishing.

It sounds like perhaps you have a better assortment of effective keywords ranking in the top 20 of Google. But again, it's only one month and it's estimated. That's why I would suggest watching for several months to see if the trend stays the same.

Did you pay for any featured links in any directories? Or perhaps maybe someone did this prior to you coming on board. I can't say for sure, but this is a very likely scenario. Again, focus more on the number and quality of your linking domains. I have seen fluctuations like this before and they aren't necessarily cause for concern.

For example, I am in house SEO for a company that does audio video installations. For a couple of months our products were picked up and listed in a trade magazine online. This temporarily inflated our links being reported in Webmaster Tools. Here's what that looked like. While this looks like a decrease, the number of linking domains actually has gone up:

<colgroup><col width="68"> <col width="64"></colgroup>
| 4/17/2012 | 20,339 |
| 4/20/2012 | 20,156 |
| 5/1/2012 | 18,812 |
| 5/8/2012 | 17,576 |
| 5/15/2012 | 17,432 |
| 5/29/2012 | 16,280 |
| 6/7/2012 | 13,544 |
| 9/21/2012 |

13,362

|

Good question BB. Think about how news stories are published. Say you make page one for something. That news site might have 3 or 4 thousand pages. Say they have links to all the latest headlines on the right hand side of their template and that your news is in that list. As long as you are a headline, boom, you are linked from 3 or 4 thousand pages. As soon as your story is no longer front page, those links from all the pages go away and you retain just the one from the article that remain in their archive. In this scenario, you lost a lot of links, but you didn't lose any linking domains.

That being said, my guess is that you might have lost 100,000 links, but those links were from a small handful of linking root domains. If you lost 100,000 linking domains, that would be truly alarming. I am guessing that's not the case.

Hope that explanation made sense. What were you able to see in Ahrefs?

Any number of things could have happened William. How many links did you have before the drop. Some fluctuations are normal, especially if you released a new product or made it into a news story, your links can skyrocket for a time then settle back down. Or, it could be that you had a lot of links from bad directories that Google has de-indexed (same is true for blog networks, etc.)

Have you tried viewing your link profile in http://www.ahrefs.com ? You might get a better idea of what's going on if you look there. Interested to know what you see there? Hope that helps!

Dana

You're welcome William. Cool on the Canada thing. I didn't know SEMRush could do that. SE Traffic is the number of visitors coming to the site from keywords ranking in the top 20 of Google's SERPs (per month). SEMRush updates once a month. You can view when the latest update took place down in the lower right hand corner of the site footer. It looks like their last update was September 3rd. Hope that helps!

Dana

Yes. It is a recipe for disaster. The problem is it's still working for some people, which is frustrating I know. You mentioned that she has been using this team for the past few years. What does the site have to show for it? My guess is that there's no proof that the site is benefiting from all these low level spammy links.

You need to find a way to show her proof that it's not helping. Has she been tracking her traffic and domain authority over time? Is there a correlation between those things and the link-building activities, either good or bad?

The other thing that I would do is show her an example of what happens to a site when all of that goes South. There are tons of examples of those.

If none of that works and you can't convince her that her business is too important to play games with, I'd maybe leave her to do the damage herself. You don't want that on your shoulders when you eventually move on to clients who do #RCS  [Real Company Stuff]

Although it's not real time, you might find SEMRush helpful. There is a free and a paid level. The paid version allows you to see even more about competitors and what their approximate SE traffic is. Also try Quantcast. Again, not 100% accurate, but you should be able to determine if there's an industry trend happening. Hope that helps!

Dana

Have you tried reversing the words? As an experiment, I would create a subcategory page or even a landing page for "Bed Head- - Tigi" - My assumption is that Google is seeing you place more emphasis on Tigi branded products. I know Bed Head products because my kids use them. They call them "Bed Head" and never refer to them as "Tigi."  I think it might be worth testing that assumption with a landing page campaign reversing the words. Just a though!

Dana

According to Dr. Pete's MozCast (http://www.mozcast.com) September 13 and 14 there was a lot of hot activity at Google, although they have not officially stated there was an update. That doesn't mean, however, that there wasn't an update to the algo. It looks like your site is still indexed. The only red flag I saw when I looked at your source code was that you use absolute instead of relative links. This can negatively effect pagespeed and could play into algorithmic ranking factors. If you ever decide to replatform your site, say from blogger to WordPress, the absolute links will make that harder too. I would suggest going through the site and changing your abdolute links to relative wherever possible. Good lunck and don't panic. Watch your site for a week or two. It may bounce right back to where it was before.

Dana

Since you are just starting with a Video SEO project, I would strongly encourage you to go the route of a service like Wistia. I just wrote a blog post on the whole subject located here: http://www.danatanseo.com/2012/09/creating-video-seo-strategy-is-hard-but.html  There are references to other helpful resources in the post too.

Good thread and I agree with everything Brian has already said. One additional option that hasn't been mentioned is possibly using Repost.us . If your client's blogs are on WordPress, there is a nifty Repost.Us plugin, very easy to install. He could then use this to repost the content on his main blogs, without having duplicate content issues or problems for his SEO. It would get the content where he wants it, preserve authorship plus give a link back to his main site. He would also have the opportunity of monetizing his posts if that was something he wanted to do. Hope this is helpful!

Dana

Thanks so much Brian. I knew there had to be a way. I appreciate your quick answer.

We recently implemented AddThis social sharing on our Website. I am seeing an undesirable side-effect. In Firefox and Chrome browsers, some kind of tracking snippet appears to be appending to our URLs. This is not happening in IE (or if it is it isn't visible). I am concerned about how these URLs look in the address bar to our visitors and I'm also worried about potential duplicate content issues arising when a spider crawls the site.

It appears to only be an issue with our product detail pages. The category pages all seem fine. [I am sure this is because social sharing button are only installed on the product pages].

Here is an example: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/product/williams-sound-personal-pa-377#.UFnvkVG-7Aw

This URL should be: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/product/williams-sound-personal-pa-377

Is there a workaround for this problem?

Has anyone else experienced this issue and found a solution?

Thanks!

You are correct. No head shot. But I have it on good authority that very soon Google will begin using a thumbnail of the brand image that's been uploaded to the Google+ brand page. They have a vested interest in doing so. It makes the SERPs more attractive and it also makes Google+ more enticing.

This is a great question. There is a lot of confusion about rel=author. It is my understanding that for e-commerce, if the "brand" is speaking, that rel=publisher is what would be most appropriate, not rel=author. I have the same scenario on our newly revived e-commerce blog. There are times when we will want to list someone specifically as rel=author, i.e. if they are an expert on a particular subject, but most of the time we will want to post as rel=publisher. This is done by creating a brand page in Google Plus as opposed to an author page. Still, Google+ has the problem that a brand page must be attached to a Google profile, which must be an individual person, not a company. I would be very interested to hear others address this whole issue.

Dana

I had a great English professor whose response to the question "How many words should be in our reports?" was always "As many words as it takes for you to say what you need to say."  I'd advocate these things for your landing pages:

1. Forget about how many words are on the page
2. Target keywords and synonyms of those words
3. Forget about density
4. Write something that contains value for a visitor

The days of calculating density of keywords on a page and having that help your SEO are long gone and it might even hurt you. Just write a great page using words that correctly describe your product, service or main "reason to be." I believe the rest should happen on its own.

Hi Tian,

I have tthree suggestions, one of which may get me impaled here, but I'm going to say it anyway. The first thing I would do is search in Google for blogs related to your product line. I imagine there could be a pretty broad spectrum ranging from daycare centers, parenting coops, parenting bloggers, anyone who is writing about kids, playground safety, etc. Make a list and then visit these blogs looking for posts that might make good places for you to post relevant, well-thought-out comments. Don't worry whether or not some are no follow, just get in a groove of writing 2-3 comments a day.

The second is to do a bonafide, real press release for your new business, announcing the launch or opening of your English Web site. I know people poo poo press releases. But IMHO, I believe a press release that is real news (which I believe yours would be), is still valid and valuable. Press releases that just regurgitate ad copy or announce every time a CEO sneezes are not news worthy, and it's those kinds of press releases that have given PRs a bad name. If you can find a Press Release service that is more focused on your niche, then that's even better. Our niche is with Christian church products so we opted for a press release with Christian News Wire and it was very effective.

Third, okay people, try not to throw things...I still believe that presence in some directories can be a very good and valuable thing, especially for a brand new site. We too recently launched a niche site. We launched in January 2012. The first thing I did was #1 and #2 above, and I made a list and budget for which directories we were going to submit to, starting with Yahoo.dir  I'm not advocating going crazy and submitting to 100's of directories, just be selective. For example, there were some smaller directories focused around our niche [religious products]. They weren't big directories, but they were very relevant, USA-based and their editors responded to direct emails. Business.com, Joeant.com, Exactseek.com and several other directories are excellent and worth the expense. Here's SEOMoz's list of directories: http://www.seomoz.org/directories  Just be careful to research the directory before submitting for some key things:

1. Age - How long has the directory existed?
2. Country - Where is the domain registered?
3. MozRank and PageRank
4. How many inbound links does the directory have, where are they from (.edu, .goc?)
5. Browse through the directory - If you see a lot of garbage & or links, move on

Using these three strategies, we are in the top 5 of page one in all three SERPs for every single one of our targeted keywords. Of course, being in a niche where not very many competitors are doing a good job helps too! Good luck. I hope this is helpful.

Dana

Thanks Zeph - You go right ahead

This is a really good thread with good comments all round. While I am very fortunate that the CEO of my company has a good understanding and healthy respect for SEO, he doesn't run the company in a vacuum. There are 4 other owner/stakeholders that are constantly asking me to prove ROI. We have an issue with a meta refresh on our home page. It's been there for 5 years, sucking page authority out of the life of our site. I finally made enough noise (and got some great support from SEOMoz) to convince them to spend $1,000 to get it fixed. The thing is, and I am sure this is the case with many clients, if they can't see that something is broken, they won't believe it's broken. A lot of times you can hold what you consider to be proof right in front of them, and they won't see it because they don't understand it.

Yes, perhaps the hardest part about being an SEO is being able to explain what we do in terms that people who know nothing about SEO can understand.

Personally Micah, if I had hired your agency to do SEO for me I would demand to see the SERPs. I think tracking the progress of targeted keywords and sharing that with clients is crucial. Otherwise, how do they know what kind of impact your work is having? That kind of transparency can go a long way to building trust between your clent and your team.

I think one of the problems we have as SEOs is using too much "SEO-Speak" and not enough "Business Speak." We need to translate what we do into business terms that normal business people who know nothing about what we do can understand. I think the worst thing we can do is come off as arrogant and make our clients feel stupid. By the time I'm done, I want my client to feel like a genius...if for no other reason than they were smart enough to ask me for help

Perhaps one way to re-open the content discussion is to show him that content, aka "conversations" are taking place online about his topics/products. Those conversations are going to take place whether he writes content or not. Does he want those conversations to be able to define his business, without his participation? Or would he prefer to be part of the conversation? I think it might just be a matter of showing him that conversations are going to take place regardless of what he does or doesn't do, and that ultimately it would be much better for him to participate. Hope that makes sense!

Trying to get to a good solution for what I was wanting has inspired me to write a complete blog post on everything we are working to accomplish with our Video SEO. After search high and low, I did find exactly what I was looking for. It is a tool called "CaptionBox."  There is a WordPress plug-in available. Information on the page explains that it's a legacy product, but we are going to install it anyway. For more information on SpeakerText's answer to my question as to whether or not we could still use their product despite not being an Enterprise customer, stay tuned for a blog post within the next 3-4 days.

Here, Here...I second the motion!

Thanks very much Danny. Yes, I understand that I didn't necessarily need to create a separate Google account for the brand page, but to keep my personal brand separate from the Celebrate Communion site's brand was my goal.

So it sounds like I really am stuck having two Google+ accounts, both under my name, but attached to different brands.

My concern is that I manage multiple sites.Our main site, CCI Solutions needs a Google+ page. I don't want to open a third "Dana Tan" Google profile just so I can create their Google+ page.  How do agencies set up Google+ pages for their clients? Whose Google account do they attach the business page to?

There was some debate at MozCon 2012 about this issue. I have my personal Google+ page which I didn't want attached to the brand of one of the sites I manage. I saw no other way to create a new Google+ page for this brand except to create a new profile under a different gmail account. The problem is, I had to put in my personal name to create the profile (you can't put in a business name, Google won't accept it), so now I have two "Dana Tan" author pages in Google+, the second one is where I built the page for this separate business "Celebrate Communion." Unfortunately, this has muddied the waters because people are following me in both places (it's fragmented my circles). I would like to add customers who are already on Google+ to my business pages circles, but the business page won't do it.

Is it possible to build a Google+ business page without all of this brand confusion? If so, can you send me directions? I have found nothing online that says you don't need a profile to do a brand page.

Also, once the page is built, what is the best way for me to reach out to customers with google accounts? I don't see a good way to do that on businesses pages either. On my profile page I can load all the emails into my contacts list, but then those contacts can only be added to my profile page and not the brand page.

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Dana

Yes. One of the things that is very illuminating is that they have 27 writers for the blog. I used this example to try to convince my own company to not make the blog the realm of just one person, but to open it up to a team of people. This gets a wider variety of content, more content and less writing for each person. With 27 writers, they can post once a week yet each writer is only having to write 2 blog posts a year. I'd say that's pretty manageable!

I'm not sure that they count because their really an airline, but they do a lot of online selling and that's Southwest Airlines. Their blog is one of the best http://www.blogsouthwest.com/  - I just think it's a great model for a business blog. I think they are getting upwards of 200K visitors a month too, pretty amazing.

Funny you should ask because I just found an awesome one today. I actually sent around to my team and recommended it to them earlier this morning: http://www.getelastic.com/

I like http://www.workingperson.com  - especially like their usability. Another great one from a content perspective is http://www.bhphotovideo.com

We have used a site called http://www.usertesting.com to help us identify usability and navigation problems in need of improvement. Their testers are excellent and the fee is extremely reasonable. You will be amazed at the information you get from just 3-4 tests. This might be more meaningful than any usability comments you receive here. I am thinking that your site and content are more targeted for the general public than the SEO community. Just a thought!

Here is a link to an insteresting thread on this topic in the GWT forums: http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/1yhb_xcdtZ0

Judging from what top level contributors have said there, linking images and text links pass the same amount of PR, with a very tiny amount of advantage to anchor text for a text link versus anchor text from the image alt text. Ultimately, do what's best for the user. In this case, for e-commerce, I think the image link taking precedence is just fine.

Dana

Hi Peter,

Given that the site is 10 years old and that the URLs were already updated once fairly recently. I would leave them as they are exceot for those that have more than 3-5 keywords, or those that contain "stop" words like "and" "the" "of" etc. This would be pretty easy to do if you dumped all your URLs into excel and sorted them accordingly.

If you feel very strongly that your search traffic would improve if you changed them, I would suggest picking one section or category of the site and doing those first. Monitor what happens. If you get good results, then go ahead and change the rest.

Hope that helps!

Dana

No worries.I think your post looks fine. Here's my recommendation (and much of this is based on advice given by Everett Sizemore in his webinar on technical SEO for E-commerce).  Even if your site isn't an e-commerce site, I think what I am going to recommend still holds true.

My recommendation would be to keep the news, downloads file and forums subdirectories in place. The reason I recommend this is from a content management and organization standpoint. Even if your site isn't large now, you probably want it to grow significantly. Once it does, or if it is already a large site, managing your content from a hierarchical and organizational standpoint will be so much easier if you leave those subdirectories in place. Imagine trying to move to a new platform at some point int the future and having ALL of your content only one level down. When you go to list out all of your URLs, without that subdirectory in them, you'll have no idea from looking at the URL where that page is on the site.

Also, if the site is well-established (say, more than five years old) and has built up some decent authority, be aware that 301 redirects to pass authority, but they don't pass ALL authority, so you could be devaluing your existing pages by making the re-writes.

If you feel the site is young enough and would be strengethened in the long run for SEO and UX by having shorter URLS (which I do think is a good idea) then here would be my recommendation:

http://domain.com/news/article-title-shorter-1234

http://domain.com/downloads/file-title-shorter-d1234

http://forum.domain.com/forums/topic-title-shorter-1234

I hope this helps! and by all means check out Everett's webinar located here: http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/ecommerce-seo-fix-and-avoid-common-issues . I think his advice applies to this scenario even if it's not an e-commerce site.

Dana

Thanks George! Fantastic detail and I think between your suggestions and Ben's too we are going to get further to solving this than we've ever gotten before. Perhaps we'll even solve this. That would be so great. As I mentioned, the company identified this problem 4 years before they hired me, and it's never been solved. I feel like part of why I am there as there SEO strategist is to pound away at these problems until they're fixed.

Thanks so much to you both. I can't wait to go in on Monday morning and use these suggestions to solve a five year old problem! Awesome.

I'll let you know what happens. If we fix it, I owe you and Ben dinner! (at the very least)

Thanks Ben. No apology necessary, it's all good. Your suggestion in combination with George's could lead us to an answer. This is definitely going to get us closer to finding the problem than we've ever gotten before. The company has been aware of this problem for almost 5 years but hasn't ever identified how to fix it. I've only been there a year now and I'm on the warpath to fix these technical issues. There are so many of them causing duplicate content problems that any SEO I do is undermined by problems like these.

I really really appreciate your reply and suggestions!

Dana

In our GWT and Google Analytics traffic reports, I often see some very oddly formed URLs. Here's an example

http://www.ccisolutions.com/storefront/www.ccisolutions.com

and here's another
http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category//www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/CEW.cat

What strikes me about this particular URL is two things:

1. It renders this page http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/on-disc-printing, but not with that URL, the URL stays http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category//www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/CEW.cat
2. When I break this URL into pieces

http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/CEW.cat
and www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/CEW.cat,
both redirect to: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/on-disc-printing

This makes me wonder, is there something (a rule?) in the
backend (maybe the .htaccess file?)that was set up that says

http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/CEW.cat
= www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/CEW.cat
 (or maybe vice versa?), and as a result an odd URL for the page is being
written automatically?

This scenario worked on every category page I checked. All had the same results. For example, I tried:

http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category//www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/AAA.cat
and it rendered the Live Sound category page, but without redirecting to the
user friendly URL. This URL stayed unchanged in the address bar

When I broke it into pieces, like

http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/AAA.cat
and www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/AAA.cat, both of these redirected to http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/sound-video-lighting-equipment-experts

Have any of you ever encountered a problem like this? Any sugeestions as to what might be causing it and how to remedy the problem? It is definitely causing us a duplicate content headache. Thanks!

Dana

You are very welcome!

I do think that it has disappeared from browser tool bars. I always check it manually here http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php  Given that there isn't much authority established on this new URL I would link to it from your existing domain as long as the new domain doesn't have any insidious (nefarious?) inbound links from its past. I am interested to know what others think.

Dana

Yes. If you compare both URLs in open site explorer, it's pretty clear why the one outranks the other. You have many more inbound links to http://www.vipgoldrj.com/paginas/ensaios.html  I am attaching a screen shot to show you. Hope this helps!

Dana

ukVfr.jpg

Does this new URL have any domain authority, backlinks or PageRank?

I agree that 99% of the time multiple H1 tags are not best. However, imagine your Web site is a trilogy with three completely separate volumes. In a case like this I think the site title tag might  "Trilogy of 3 books" - and then there could very well be a blurb about each separate book on the home page. The titles of each one of those books could be an H1 tag.

Now, one could argue that each of those "books" maybe should have its own Web site, that's probably another discussion

Given the way Alex describes the separate magazines, I am thinking they wouldn't like having the 301-redirects from a branding perspective. I like the idea of adding an attribution link to the original article. I have doubts about the "noindex" because I think that in many cases Google completely ignores this attribute. I'm not sure that's worth going through all the trouble of doing.

Have you tried putting the "duplicates" back to back in Open Site Explorer? I am really curious to know what that looks like.

Yes, multiple H2 and H3s are perfectly okay as long as they make sense. Think about the outline of a book or research paper. You could have Chapter 1, followed by several or many subchapters, and each of those subchapters or subheadings could have subsections. As long as those headings make sense in terms of the structure of your content, it's perfectly ok. There are even times when multiple H1 tags are okay. For example a very big site, or business, that might have three different arms of the business that all want to be represented equally on the home page, might possibly have multiple H1s (although be really really careful with that).  Hope this helps!