Welcome to the Q&A Forum
Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.
Outbound links don't really help in SEO. However, if it adds relevancy to the end-user, it WILL help. Instead of focusing on what you think SEO should be, focus on your end-user. Be RELEVANT.
For your type of website, I would honestly focus your attention on social media and user-engagement/interaction. Having your trailers shared on FB 300 times would GREATLY improve your SEO, traffic, and relevancy more so than any type of link, whether it's inbound or outbound.
Does that make sense?
Hi Samuel,
In my opinion it is easier for a Fortune 500 company to get authoritative links than a new company. Personally, I think blog commenting and forum marketing is not that effective.
If I had to do SEO for a Fortune 500, here is what I would do:
Write amazing content. Write content that provides huge value! Being that you're a Fortune 500, it's very easy to get media exposure and as a result, links. Providing high quality content is where its at!
Next, definitely implement a company blog and start engaging your potential customers, existing customers, and anyone in between. Write blog posts that provide value and are insightful for your industry, typically you can get a good amount of links for a valuable blog post. Look at SEOmoz 
Press releases through a top-tier distribution wire like Vocus are great. They're expensive but do work well. For a Fortune 500 company, it shouldn't be an issue.
Donate to universities or sponsor them in some way, shape, or form. Generally you can get a nice .EDU link in exchange! (In a relvant and contextual manner too!).
Donate/sponsor a bunch of non profits or well-known organizations, they generally have a lot of authority and a link back could be huge from them.
I hope this helps?
I would first, choose which version you want to use going forward. You have three versions: subdomain, non-www, and www. Don't use the subdomain, that is a given. I personally like using WWW instead of non-WWW, however there are reasons to use non-WWW over WWW. But, given this scenario, it makes sense to use the WWW version. I know that the non-WWW version has more pages indexed, but pages indexed doesn't mean much in the grand scheme of things. Given that WWW has good rankings and is more identifiable to a user, I would choose that. Of course, if you choose non-WWW my advice below will remain the same.
Now that you have chosen what version you want to use going forward, you need to do a few things:
Implement a .htaccess 301 server-side redirect and redirect non-WWW to WWW (or vice versa if you so choose), make sure it's permanent. This way going forward, it'll fix your non-www and WWW issue.
Next, you need to redirect all non-WWW indexed pages and URLs to their WWW version. This is not easy, especially with thousands of pages. However, it must be done to help preserve the PR and link-juice so it passes as much as it can through. What I recommend is seeing if there is a plugin or extension for whatever forum software you use that can aid you in this effort, or hire a programmer to build you one. It's actually not that complex to do and I have done it before in a similar situation and it does work. If you need more advice on that, PM me.
You need to take care of the subdomain by setting up a permanent redirect to the main WWW version if someone goes to the subdomain, and also setup redirects for existing subdomain pages/URLs that have PR/Rank/LinkJuice.
From there, make sure that you are utilizing sitemaps properly, that can greatly increase your indexing rate and volume.
I hope that these help, if you need anything further please do not hesitate to PM me or post here.
Good luck!
You sure can!
Try this tool out: http://www.majesticseo.com/reports/compare-domain-backlink-history
Just enter your URL, and it'll show you in a nifty little chart how your link building strategy appears over the course of time.
Enjoy!
There is nothing wrong with using a third party service for link building (it's the same thing as having an internal SEO do it for you, regardless of what people say). However, you need to make sure they're building WHITE HAT links. There IS a difference between a white hat authoritative link that is RELEVANT and links that are spammy. Get samples of their work and test them out on a dummy site first and see if it's XRUMER type linking or real manual links. That's my thoughts on it.
If you change your architecture, properly 301, and do it the PROPER way, you wont see much difference. Within 30 days, you'll be back to normal, in my experience. I've done this quite a few times with a Joomla site and WP site(s).
I personally like using /%category%/%postname%/ --- but to each his own
You'll be fine. Good luck and let us know how it goes.
First, stop worrying. It's not that easy to get someone slapped for paid links. Chances are, Google isn't even aware. I doubt the client is the size or notieriety of JC Penney
Second, start link building heavily and getting a large diversification of links.
Third, you need to do some high quality link building and get organic links from better sources. Bury these top 3 links in a sea of even higher quality links that are organic and I guarantee it wont affect a thing.
Get some press releases out there with PRWeb and get some links from large media outlets, should easily replace those links!
Good luck.
I think the only way to do it properly is with your clients full permission and knowing that they understand the full ramifications. Honestly, my clients would never go for it. The last thing they want is their strategy or their secret weapon (my company) to be known to their competitors. The link juice is minimal unless you have an exceptional blog.
My rule is to never expose a clients name, URL, or strategy unless it's completely anonymous and literally no chance of it getting back. However, you may find some clients okay with it, in that case... GO FOR IT
I'd love to post some of my best work but my clients are pretty strict on me releasing that information, so for now I'll have to keep my trap shut.
YES!!!
This is critical and a common mistake many SEO's overlook. Make sure you use a number that is trackable so you can see the kind of return it generates and go from there.
You can even put it in the title, depending upon the circumstances. I have specific experience utilizing both of these methods and they both worked well for generating leads for my clients!
What they're using is rich snippets.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/05/introducing-rich-snippets.html
You can read about it there. I would recommend using it if possible, they do make it nice for the end-user and result in higher CTR's in my experience.
Do not waste your time using the meta title, we've run experiments and found no boost whatsoever using meta title, just focus on regular title tag, links, and fresh high-quality content.
It does NOT matter where in the tag your title tag is, but personally we put it right after the opening head tag for a good practice and to have a cleaner code layout. But, it matters NOTHING.
Good luck!
Hyphens are always best! Good luck.
I understand exactly what you mean. Like underneath the product there is a box that has basic info and 5 tabs that say "Reviews - Detailed Info - Etc..." and when you click on the tab it shows you more content. This is perfectly acceptable for SEO. Just make sure that the tabs work in a way where all the content is there in the HTML and the tabs use Javascript to hide it/show it, so Search engines see it no matter what. Make sense? In other words, set your user-agent to googlebot and turn off everything and take a peek at your site and see what content you can see. YOu can do this via Webmaster Tools as well!
I don't think that hurts your domain authority. At least, in my experience it never has.
The way to get your DA up is by getting more authoritative links, a higher diversity, and that is pretty much the basis of it.
Work on getting authoritative and hard to get links like .EDU, links from high PR sites, etc...
It's very important to my company that all websites for our clients validate. Why? Because we feel they pay for a service and we want to provide the highest quality service.
It's like building a house and not sticking to code. We'd rather stick to code and do it the "right" way, rather than just have something that "works".
It's also a sales tool! Because none of our competitors build sites that are compliant, our sales guys use this and it works well. We explain what W3C is, why it's important, and although it doesn't help rankings, we feel it's important because it's simply a matter of doing it the right way. They like that!
I would recommend linking to static pages, not dynamically generated pages if you can help it. From my perspective, /biology/ is going to be much better for SEO purposes than /search?q=keyword. Even the SEOmoz Crawler has a metric for overly dynamic URLs/Links and I think Google would much prefer a cleaner link.
Just my 2 cents.
We built an internal tool to do it for us, but basically you can do this manually.
Go to google, type in "site:YOURURLHERE" without the quotes. You can check a certain page, a site, a subdomain, etc... of course if you have thousands of URLs this method is not ideal, but it can be done.
Definitely use subfolders!
By using your subfolders you pass all link juice and PR to the main domain which is mainsite.com. If you have say 10 subdomains, you are splitting the authority/link-juice/PR.
I know there are others who say Google passes the juice between a domain and subdomain, and it does pass some, but not all.
You cannot go wrong using subfolders. You build up one main domain, it's clean, user-friendly, etc...
SUBFOLDERS!
I would set your post title as the H1. That is my personal preference and what i do for my clients.
H1 gets a little more weight than an H2, though it is not much simply because it's too easy to stuff.
I do not have a concrete answer, perhaps someone may. But, in my experience, as long as the keyword is there, it counts. Similar to how exact match domains are such a boost, you know? I am pretty sure as long as the keyword appears, regardless of format, it'll count for that keyword. However, there are other metrics surrounding this to add value like the content around it, where the link is from, etc...
I do not keep an SEO blog. Our company blog is just for generic info that we use to bring in new clients and also for existing clients to see us sharing information openly about the best practices and tips. Honestly, since we redid our website, we have one or two blog posts and never blog and didnt even finish our website, we are too busy with client work. Speaking of that... we need to finish our site lol.
The benefit a SEO blog would bring is fresh content (Google loves it), attract new clientele, share information to establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry, city, and client list!
It's a pretty well known fact that non-US versions of Google are not using the same algorithm and therefore are "behind". This could be the case where you are employing methods that a couple years ago were effective and are working well for .CA but on .COM not as well.
The biggest thing you can do is work on high quality content and build links. Remember, linking is somewhere around 70% of the algorithm alone. Work on getting more .COM authoritative links from sites like NYT, USAToday, etc...
Also, if a good portion of your links are from .CA, that very well could affect it too!
Generally, it's nice to have one page per keyword, as it's the best way in my opinion. However, you can easily target multiple terms on one page using link building and anchor text!
I would say another page never hurts, just write some outstanding content for it and you're good to go!
Proper sitemap that tells the SE's to come back can help.
Write content daily. If you have a blog, ping google when you post a new piece of content. If you show Google that you write content daily, they'll come back.
I did SEO for a very successful conservative news website and Google crawled them 15-20 times a day and indexed things in sometimes seconds.
Make good use of pinging!
Personally, I like to fit in the site name or business name whenever I can. What I recommend doing is disabling any kind of auto-tagging for the site name and enter it in manually only when it fits and if it's relevant.
For example, All in One SEO Plugin for Wordpress by default appends your site title to the end of all title tags, no matter what. I disable this and do it manually so I know I have 100% control over my title tags.
It helps for branding purposes!
This is what I do for my clients and my own website:
-Forum profiles on high PR sites. Start with 100.
-Submit to all local directories recommended by David Mihm.
-Optimize Google Places to be in accordance with David Mihm and above.
-Do a slow-drip to directories.
-Do-follow social bookmarks
-Twitter/FB/LinkedIn/YouTube profiles that are active.
By that time, rankings appear and you tweak from there. I use that as a starting point.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-bing-confirm-twitter-facebook-influence-seo
That should give you some insight! Get on FB, Twitter, and Youtube!
You'll lose link-juice, PR, and authority. You'll get some, but some will be lost. Especially once you redirect it back. Depending upon how long you will be doing that, you may actually want to look into using a temporary redirect.
I'd hire someone to fix it if you can't in-house, that is a big issue!
Meta Descriptions are not used for rankings, so you would be fine by just changing out the state. However, I feel it's a great strategy and best practice to handwrite every meta description to insure the best conversion rate and CTR possible.
You load links into it, it then creates an RSS feed on their end that gets pinged. You can load any kind of link into it and it'll ping them.
Try http://proxify.com/ or www.hidemyass.com -- you should try and find out why you're blocked and resolve the overall issue, but use one of these two in the meantime.
Sure.
We do it because it's a great sales tool. Rarely do we ever find a competitor that builds W3C valid websites. In our sales pitch we talk about how our websites are W3C valid, it's adhering to a set of rules and guidelines and it's cleaner code generally which can increase load times.
We tell them they can display a W3C valid button on their site, most of them like that.
It's also a matter of doing things the right way... you can build a frame out of anything but there is a right way and a wrong way to build a door frame. We choose to do it all according to standards and best practices.
It's almost like a committment to excellence type of thing.
If you're having an issue with a tool, I would recommend contacting SEOmoz support!
Your plan sounds good but here are a few things I'd like to add.
Make sure the dupe pages you're getting rid of are not the main traffic sources. If that is the case you'll want to redirect only a few at a time and slowly go around fixing that. You don't want to switch to new CMS, throw up redirects, and lose 85% of your traffic. Just make sure it's not your main traffic source.
Make sure you use the proper methods of canonicalization. Don't half-ass it.
On the new site, because you have a large and deep site, make sure you have a proper sitemap generated fresh all the time and that the proper weights are assigned and proper structuring. Less levels = better.
Watch your Webmaster Tools.
That is all I have, I think you'll be fine.
Honestly, mobile implementations can be tricky depending upon your website and what kind of content you serve up and how.
However, the best solution in my mind is to check what internet browser your users are using and if it detects a mobile browser, have it display a specific CSS stylesheet that modifies the existing website for mobile users. This is easy to do and in my opinion is the best solution because by creating a separate website you have to create double content, more sites to manage/maintain, you split rankings/possible links, etc...
It works the same way websites do that have IE6 or IE7 or IE8 special stylesheets, it detects what browser is requesting the website and displays the appropriate files based on that.
I hope this helps.
With how great the indexing and reindexing rates out with Caffeine, I would not worry too much about it. I would try and keep the title tag and meta desc the same, but changing your actual page to show a splash page wont hurt anything, unless you plan on it being a splash page for more than a month?
I've used this many times before and never had an issue!
Definitely option 4, from my perspective and opinion. That is the same structure I use for my site and all clients website.
/Services/SERVICENAME
/BLOG/CATEGORY/POSTNAME or /BLOG/POSTNAME
I'd go with option 4!
The best way is to make sure you're using the tag properly and that you have all your angles covered.
There is actually some good posts on SEOmoz about canonicalization, I'll try and find those for you.
Yes, that is duplicate content and is an issue. Robots.txt is unreliable at best and there are very stringent guidelines to using it properly.
Instead, use an actual meta tag of noindex! That will solve the issue.
I want to make sure that you are getting the proper advice. Can you provide me the URLs here, or PM them to me to keep them private? Once I see the problem firsthand, I can reply with the answer here for you. I am pretty sure my advice above is the way to go, but it doesn't hurt to double check!
You need to choose ONE domain for going forward. I don't care which one it is, but choose one. It makes sense to choose the one with the better rankings, at least from my perspective.
After that, you 301 redirect all versions the URLs to the proper URL (which would be WWW if it was my choice).
Yes, mod_rewrite is a server-side redirect that you can choose. Make sure whoever sets them up knows what he is doing. Having a ton of server-side redirects can increase load times and cause issues with site speed if it is not done properly. Don't be afraid of doing it, but just make sure you know what you are doing, especially since you're dealing with thousands of URLs.
You want to use permanent 301 redirects, yes.
Depends on what you are wanting to do.
First, get rid of META KEYWORDS, it is not used anymore.
Second, robots and description are plenty. Ranking factors are centered around title tag, backlinks, and a little of on-page.
I'd work on your links to move up the ladder!
Yes, you need to focus on yourself. In due time he will be removed, it just takes patience. You can also report his website for breaking the ToS for Google, if he is doing black hat stuff. Duplicate content is not black hat, so you'd need to prove that he is doing cloaking or something similar to that.
Focus on links, a broad variety of links, and high quality content. You'll eventually get there!
In my experience and opinion, it's because Google tries to cover and hide backlink counts from them.
To try and gauge it, use this command:
"yourwebsite.com" -site:yourwebsite.com
Exactly as it appears there, copy that line, switch out URL, and paste into Google. Not 100% accurate, but can give you a general idea. You can also look for code with ahref tags and your website, etc... otherwise use Linkscape, it's been working amazing for me and my clients!
The answer could easily be the Google Farmer update. If you are not familiar with this, read the latest post by Rand: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/googles-farmer-update-analysis-of-winners-vs-losers
That will help you understand the latest algorithm update and how you can do something about it.
It sounds like you dropped off due to the algo update and that leads me to believe that Google thought your content was not high enough quality?
I would read Rand's post, evaluate your website, and then have the content analyzed and see if you need to hire a really good writer to build high quality content that is valuable to the users. If you were building mediocre content to target thousands of keywords, specifically long-tail, you need to revamp that strategy and focus on amazing content first!
Hope that helps.
Generally after I change a site structure or do a redesign, some URL's are broken and not working. In those situations, you need to do the following:
-301 the broken URLs to new URLs
-Take an accurate snapshot of where your link building efforts are pointing
-Make sure you don't mess up a page that has tons of highly authoritative links
After you do that and change your structure, it's a great idea to build links to your NEW structure to build back any lost authority and start ramping up those ranking efforts.
Does that make sense?
Hmm, tough question
For me... triple monitors, a high-end Mac Pro w/ Apple Cinema Displays. An exercise ball at my desk so I can switch between that and a chair so I can maintain great posture (I have horrible posture).
The desk should be quality, nothing cheesy or flimsy, big surface area.
For the actual office...
Pool table and air hockey are a must. Unlimited supply of purified water. Unlimited supply of grass-fed beef jerky that was made with no sugar, sugar substitutes, or MSG. Also an endless supply of meats and cheeses.
There should be a nice 60" big screen somewhere w/ xbox/PS3 and cable. Tied into Netflix.
Ability for each employee to customize their work environment, paint the floor, desk, etc... personalize, no matter what they want.