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All search engines technically 'read' titles that are longer than 70 but will only display 70 or less. Anything longer is displayed with an ellipsis ( ... )
As the title is the first thing that users will see, having content in it longer is of no benefit (if you cant read it, whats the point?)
Theres a good write up available here about it:
http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/title-tag
(If there is a search engine that does display over 70, it's likely not much of your audience is using it)
Hey Ross,
As Pedro says, keep the blog on the same domain (in a subfolder). Sub-domains are treated as separate websites as far as search engines treat them so probably wont be as good for the sites SEO kudos.
It's easy enough to add a blog to a domain but not have is within the same CMS. (An apache rule can handle this easily)
Best bet to get traffic through to the blog is to utilise the newsletter traffic; send views from the newsletter whenever possible to articles within the blog content. EG: Blurb about content in the newsletter but to read the article, click thorugh to the blog post. This way the newsletter doesn't contain all the key wood and info richness. It raises awareness of the blog to newsletter recipients and ensures traffic initially while the blog finds its feet.
As for the blogger/wordpress.com i'd lean towards not going down that path so much. Not haing the content on your domain doesnt give you all the link juice/keyword kudos. Linking from the site to yours (and vice versa) might help a bit, but not as much as having the content under your domain. If you set up both, then you've got both a maintenance and a duplicate content issue.
Share the blog posts socially (if viable).
Hope that helps a little. Good luck.
Odd. . .
I thought it might have something to do with spamming as these are heavily spammed terms (same results don't show up for Viagra either). But then i found this post, which a google employee is asking for examples. Sounds like a problem more than a 'feature'.
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/AdWords/thread?tid=4930bd33634b1755&hl=en
As Ryan said, rel="author" would help.
Another thing which might help is an app called Tynt. It adds a little snippet of code for whenever your content is copied from your site, then attributes it to your domain by attaching a link when that copy is pasted. It's not fool proof of course and the url can be removed, but I like to think of it as one more 'safe guard' to attributing content to your site (plus it's good for link building).
One bit of advice I found useful is if you do link to other content on your site in your posts, to use absolute paths to your own domain, this way if your content is just scraped you at least get the direct link to your site as well and added kudos as being relevant to the topic even if the post is picked up by someone else.
Of course, none of this is fool proof, but it's just a couple of added aspects that might help your site benefit a little if your content is stolen.
30 does sound fairly small based on the 23000 you've mentioned, and Nebraska's answer sounds like it may be on the money. Another thing to keep in mind is that actual clicks to a term are often a fraction of the amount of searches. EG: 23000 searches might equal 3000 clicks (random number). Also keep in mind that a term might have PPC results which could could be taking traffic. And the fact that you are number 3 (based on these numbers - only receives on avg 7% of traffic that view the result) is also probably playing a part. Then there's the whole localised/personalised search result aspect that may be influencing it somewhat.
This profile picture is added due to the use of the author tag in the posts submitted.
Theres a good rundown on how it all works here
Hey Brian, If the EDU advice in the SEOMOZ Professional Guide to Link building is correct, (it discusses the EDU myth and if it holds more value than that of a normal link/URL) then i'd imagine that a ccTLD would be a more beneficial link for localised results/sites than one from a non ccTLD, just like any other domain would be. You'd still get the EDU kudos but with the additional benefit of it being more targeted to a region.
eg: a link from an edu.ph would be more beneficial for a Philippino site, than a straight .edu would.
Great. Thanks guys. I guess it was more a question of 'do you think there is a limit to outbound links'.
EG: If you're a computer company, then getting a link to your site from apple.com would be gold. But if every computer website in North America got a link from the apple site, would that devalue either a) The link value or b) apple's domain value.
I know thats an extreme example, but thought it might shed some light on the 'how many links it too many' question.
Thanks again.
Hey Atul, There's a bit of chatter about it on the analytics blog here:
http://analytics.blogspot.com/2011/08/update-to-sessions-in-google-analytics.html
Looks like end of day refers to server time of the site as per the analytics account settings. As for the different traffic sources, from what i can gather it would show as two sessions now. Different origin, different sessions.
Sounds like theres gonna be some wacky stats in a lot of analytics accounts over the next few weeks.
Hope that helps.
Hey Marc,
There are a few webinars SEOMOZ put out that you might find useful:
http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/seomoz-pro-overview
http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/using-open-site-explorer-to-uncover-new-marketing-opportunities
http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/seomoz-pro-tool-overview
Those should get you started down the right track. Good luck.
Depends on the purpose of the page too.
EG: If your call to action of a page is to call a phone number, then a high bounce rate is acceptable due to the purpose being met.
Bounce rate is a great metric to measure improvements and calls to action. Try and get it lower by all means, but there's no silver bullet with bounce rate or magic number.
As David mentioned, a bounce could mean elimination of an unqualified lead, either way it's quality over quantity in most cases.
Good luck.
Hey,
It's a little old, but Rand did a video about this that might help.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-domain-trust-authority
Ultimately it comes down to how important your site is seen as been. If no one is talking about you, then you're perceived as not that relevant. Links are conversations, so the best probable metric to increase your score.
Sorry, that was a bit of a misleading sentence. I just meant the servertime that's seen by analytics. The only other instance would be if your GA is linked to your adwords account, then it'd feed off the timezone defined in your adwords account.
Hey all,
I understand the functionality of PDF files being indexed and how to remove them if required so in this post I'm not requiring any advice on 'how to' as such, but i just wanted to get a general opinion/consensus of if you deliberately allow PDF files to be crawled/indexed.
Whether or not you guys optimise the files for search.
If you do disallow them from being crawled and indexed, why?
Generally the pro's and con's you may have found about have searchable PDF files as part of your indexed content.
I guess you gotta ask if there any benefit of that page/content being crawled or indexed?
The view cart pages I would've thought would be completely dynamic and built/based on individual user interaction and have not much (if any) relevant content that would benefit your site. I'd guess that blocking this page is pretty standard for shopping carts.
Not too sure if this helps, but i found this site that put together a handy little list of recommended excludes for a few popular CMS's.
We recently had to do this too. URL's changed completely and it was a bit of a pain. It wasn't wordpress/drupal but 301's are the best way. Took a little while to clean up the stragglers too. But if you ensure you point all you can to the new pages your SERPs should carry over fine without penalty I've found. Get those new site maps submitted asap too.
Just going to echo Mcarle as far as photographers go.
A friend of mine is a great photogrpher but it's not since interacting with other photgraphers - sharing, commenting and being shared amongst influential circles has work really started to come his way.
Majority of the 'Hot on Google' posts i see in my feed are photography based posts too. The exposure is massive, but just like search you need to have the good content to make a dent. I love that there is little to no posts with 'instagram' type photos and the ones that do float to the surface are outstanding.
I think it all depends on the level of branding/brand awareness you want to have.
If you have a site that you want to be closely related to the blog content, then i think you'd be crazy to not have it at least similar to the main site. For me it's a question about brand recognition. If the blog content can give you brand awareness kudos, then definitely don't stray (to far at least) from the main site appearance.
The other question you might wanna ask is if a completely different looking site would confuse the reader. Jumping from one site to a completely different site may make the web experience for your visitor a little disjointed, which again may affect your brand awareness/experience.
As Steven mentioned, you gotta be careful when doing this. As there is often a very long 'leash' as far as content on forums, i've heard of instances where adding a forum to the main domain has harmed popular SERPs for keywords and domain authority. Especially since Panda.
Perhaps check your numbers for your current forum first. See if you can notice anything that may be harming or improved with the current forum site and fix those before you migrate in.
There was a conversation about this earlier in the week that might help you out a little more:
Good luck
I noticed this a little while ago too, it lasted for a little over a week but eventually showed up again though. I looked around for feed back on it to see why and came across a couple of instances (a little more elaborate than what I was experiencing albeit), but this post talks about it a little:
http://www.ghacks.net/2011/05/07/google-search-new-layout-style/
It's possible you or your results might be part of a test case for a new google release. Were you logged in? Maybe try from a different IP see if the results are the same...
Dunno, if that helped at all, but just something that might put your mind at rest a little.
PHP includes are serverside so from a visitor and search engine perspective will render fine to be indexed as if it was straight up HTML.
Thats correct in most cases:
It works likes this: a robot wants to vists a Web site URL, say http://www.example.com/welcome.html. Before it does so, it firsts checks for http://www.example.com/robots.txt, and finds:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
The "User-agent: *" means this section applies to all robots. The "Disallow: /" tells the robot that it should not visit any pages on the site.
Robots can ignore your /robots.txt. Especially malware robots that scan the web for security vulnerabilities, and email address harvesters used by spammers will pay no attention.
More information available here about:
I had a similar issue and found it was due to (in the case of a MozPro crawl at least) the bot crawling a JS command in the head. One of the commands included an anchor tag that was being read as a link rather than in context of the java script command. Check your JS files/scripts. It might be in there somewhere.
Hey Dan,
There was a great article by David Mihm about this and the factors that various industry types felt were a key influence in not only Places pages but local search in general, that might be a good resource for you.
NAP consistency (name, address, phone number) appears to be the most important factor. The physical street address and how that relates to the location of the person doing the search, so your residential address on the listing is likely an issue if you're trying to rank for CBD.
It also seems that the authority (on both topics and location) of your actual website - when properly linked up to your place page - plays a big role too. So make sure your site is associated/and features info about the categories and location your trying to be found for. Make sure your categories are the most appropriate for your market - adwords tool would be good to establish this.
Good luck.
No negative issues i could see either.
Maybe a performance improvement you could make by combining your JS calls (just from a decrease in load time - but that'd be very minimal), but from a bot point of view I reckon it looks good.
Hmm, it's an odd one. Is their anything in the root called refelxology.php? If so, check it out to see if that query is being pulled in from anywhere in particular.
Otherwise, a couple of things you could do to get rid of it.
I know that doesn't answer why it's happening, but at least it will take care of the crappy result for your clients.
In appache you can set a re-write rule (for 301's) that would apend everything from the # tag to the redirected url.
EG: website.com/training#1. You could set the rule redirecting the website.com/training to go to awesomesite.com/training and attach the #1 if it existed on the new page.
We've done it on our site a few times.
Hey all,
Rarely, but sometimes we require to take down our site for server maintenance, upgrades or various other system/network reasons. More often than not these downtimes are avoidable and we can redirect or eliminate the client side downtime.
We have a 'down for maintenance - be back soon' page that is client facing. ANd outages are often no more than an hour tops.
My question is, if the site is crawled by Bing/Google at the time of site being down, what is the best way of ensuring the indexed links are not refreshed with this maintenance content? (ie: this is what the pages look like now, so this is what the SE will index).
I was thinking that add a no crawl to the robots.txt for the period of downtime and remove it once back up, but will this potentially affect results as well?
Give this one a try Erik.
http://www.tamingthebeast.net/articles3/spiders-301-redirect.htm
Be sure to assign in your webmaster tools if you are using either www. or no www too. (site config - settings). Choose one of the options to ensure you don't get both types showing up in your SERPs.
Good luck