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Depending on the thematics and neutrality of your content that you want to create, I would suggest adding an additional category of .edu and .gov.uk for the UK market. I actively look for and write in .gov.uk sites and this makes up about 5% of my Root Domain link profile. Not sure these days how Google determines the domain link quality of an academic and government sites but pretty sure they are still deemed as being of high quality and trusted.

Granted these types of domains are tricky to get content on but worth trying out.

David

Hi there,

I've been doing work in Japan for some time now and although I would probably have my URL's in Japanese I found that if I hagoo sound meter data, correct charset for that language and good links from Japanese domains when the content of my pages are served pretty well. See example here - http://www.instantatlas.com/whatisinstantAtlas_JP.html

I would say that most traffic from the above page actually comes from Yahoo Japan than say Google Japan (it does come but not in the same volume). I have a Chinese equivalent and traffic to this landing page comes from Baidu. I would like to point out that for both pages they will drive Japanese, Chinese and English queries from these countries.

We are about to embark on an overhaul of this page to include easier navigation, structured data etc.

Happy to share outcomes on these change over the coming weeks if it helps.

Best

David

Not quite Hacking but despicable all the same.

See this video clip from the UK investigation programme 'Dispatches' - 'Click farms': how some businesses manipulate social media - Channel 4 Dispatches video trailer. I'm not sure if you can see the programme outside the UK but you should get the general idea from this 'Guardian' posting.

People bent on fraud and shortest route to quick gains will try anything Christopher

http://www.theguardian.com/media/video/2013/aug/02/click-farms-social-media-video

David

Ah! right no worries Gary, the people I'm thinking of focus on UK and US public health, write for Virgin etc.

Sorry I don't think I can get you a match on this one.

Good luck though, hope you find suitable people.

David

Noticed today that when I search (non-personalised search, incognito etc.) some of my pages on Google ALL references to authorship have now been completely removed.

Does anyone know when this change occurred? I might be a bit slow this week (or last week) with concentrating on projects.

I know like others that photos went some time back but now there are no author details being displayed. Just the page title and description.

David

Like you Vince, I went through the process of disavowing a number of links with Google and Bing and yes a week or so later I started to see a big rank dips. The links had been sending traffic that skewed my bounce rate and visitor page time rate, quite literally adding 1000's of visitors a month. Now after a few months the site has returned to its normal monthly stats and rankings are back to normal. But it took about 2-3 months for this to all work through.

I know how you feel 'Why did I do that? darn it' but I think like Tom says it's better to stick out and not remove the disavow file and focus on building good content for people to link too.

David

Hi Maureen relating to what Keri was referring to on DA doing down. I see on my main site that for August in OSE my DA has dropped a couple of points but so have all the competitors I measure against.  My KPIs such as lead generation, inbound inquiries etc. have not dipped as a consequence.

Like Thomas comments I tend to see subtle impacts on my site's SERPs when comparing tools such as MOZCAST but that is more a short term issue and generally they resolve upwards over the longer term - which is a better metric.

David

No worries Gary.

I have just one thought in mind, maybe have a read of this article by one of our content writers. See what you think, if the author's content is not quite what you are after no worries. - bit of a long shot but good writer (ex journalist).

http://instantatlas.wordpress.com/2013/11/22/calling-denise-from-derby/

Best

David

Thanks for the info.

I checked GWMT tools for any related notifications to this but nothing that I can see.

I suppose there has been much talk of late about the actual effectiveness of authorship in SERPs influence and may be the decided to pull it.

HI Matt,

Yup I think you are right, nobody is really coming back with an option for this so I'm opting for Excel for now.

Thanks for coming back.

David

Hi,

I was wondering if any one knows if the French government has changed it's stance in recent years to the ownership of domains in their country. My understanding is that it can be pretty difficult to own a domain there if you do not reside there. In the past I have had people register domains using their passport as identification to prove their domicile in that country.

We like many others have sites with .com/fr etc. and we do have one domain that is a .fr and seriously out performs the .com version.

Many thanks for any input on this question.

David

*** UPDATE - Sorry no need for a response, I've just been informed that businesses who are located in a Member State of the European Union (EU) are allowed to own .fr domains which the French government needs to comply with.

Best,

David

Hi Craig,

To me it kinda looks like an 'Exact Match Domain' issue and that over this year's algorithm updates it may have now flagged your domain as of low quality. The fact that your site is very young as well and that this looks like an EMD for your target search query it's likely it is now going against you.  There is low historical data that the search engines can go on so it's likely to be devaluing your site to searchers.

Ref. "We have read keywords in the URL might be the issue, even though the page optimizer in MOZ says to do that. We are wondering if this is the issue or there is some other problem we are not aware of." A page's URL yes is used as an indicator of a page's relevancy but this is more about domain name address name rather than a page's URL.

This article is somewhat old but still helpful http://www.seroundtable.com/google-emd-update-15776.html

Best

David

Many thanks

Yip I'v read these articles (except John's posting). I think though as EGOL is mentioning that the actual removal must have been pretty recent. I for instance could still see authorship details a few days ago.

Maybe it was today, maybe not

David

Hi there,

I would definitely be looking at the Moz Keyword Difficulty tool and other tools like SEMRush http://www.semrush.com/ both are great for gaining competitive insight.

Your second question is well if they are competitors then surely you would be wanting to at the very least have a competitive positioning of your online content with them. I have different competitors for instance for different keywords, I have common grouped competitors and niche competitors, they may be domestic, foreign, a specific vertical and so on.

If you were starting out on employing an SEO strategy then your question actually might be construed as a little back to front, as I would be wanting to analyse my own site's keyword phrase conversions to determine which are the most effective, have the highest CTR etc. and then utilising tools such as the ones mentioned to see who am I competing against with my best converting KWs. Plus you would be able to identify any mismatches of who you deem as your natural competitors against ones that you are not aware of from the analysis you carry out on your own site traffic data.

Hope that helps a little.

David

Many thanks Chanan much appreciated. I've had a look myself to see how my boards are ranking for keywords and phrases and currently they are not ranking in Google images. However I am ranking 10th for a specifc phrase and the phrase needs to reflect the name of the board.  Which is fine and I am now changing the board name to reflect a better keyword phrase and see how this develops over the coming weeks.

So in summary Pinterest is showing promise I think as a tool to employ in your SEO arsenal.

David

Yup many thanks,

I guess I've been not been monitoring this one well. I was aware of these posts but not when the authorship was completely stopped.

David

Listen to Peter he is spot on.

If you are going to try and go down this approach, you will get nowhere and you will also have unhappy clients. Your client needs to really understand the new online search landscape and get thinking of what content can we deliver that will be of real value to our visitors.

As well as GREAT content you should also be building in best SEO practice to your content.  Check out the Web Developer's SEO Cheat Sheet posted by Danny Dover - http://moz.com/blog/the-web-developers-seo-cheat-sheet-2013-edition.

David

Will do & thanks for the link.

David