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Thanks for the reply.  I entirely agree with what you're saying, but there was a reason why I asked the question the way I asked it.

Yes, your own site is better.  If there is a reason why you don't want to promote your site directly (without going into what those reasons would be), IS there an external source to promote your message on where you will retain full control of the content?

Should I understand that you think there is none?

Thanks!

Hi All!

After the havoc of Panda and Penguin - are there any article sites that still rank decently for the articles within? I'm not talking about using articles to get backlinks - I want to attract visitors to the articles themselves because of the message within the article.

Yes, I know that for lots of reasons my own blog would be better.  In addition to that, if you want to spread the message - which sites are recommended?

Thanks!

Aviva

Hi Thomas,

Thanks for the response.  It's definitely a good idea - I'm just not sure how much really good content I can write (or can be written) on their topic, still kind of promoting their sites, without looking spammy.  (Which will be an effective deterrent to people sharing and linking.)

I'll start thinking more about it, though. Maybe I can make it work somehow.

Thanks,

Aviva B

Hi All!

One of my new clients is in a semi-grey-hat industry, and is in perpetual danger of having their real websites (of which they have several), blocked by the Chinese firewall (which is where their target market is).

So their idea is to use neutral sites to write information (Squidoo, article site, maybe a stand-alone WP site with a few pages) and promote those pages.  The idea being that China is less likely to block those sites, and then the link to the actual website from those pages could always be changed if China blocks the website listed.

I'm a little dubious as to how feasible this is - how do you promote a Squidoo page?  Or an article on an article site for semi-competitive keywords?  Besides on-page SEO (which may not be enough), is there anything you can really do post-Penguin?

If anyone has any ideas as to the above - or as to how else to effectively market sites when you can't market the site and brand directly, I'd be very happy to hear.

Thanks!

Thanks, Tim!

This is actually an incredible help, because I am dealing with languages that have different characters.  Since most languages have some characters that are more common, if you hit enough of them, you're going to include virtually every search phrase.  If I want to single out English (if my other language is Russian, Hebrew, Chinese, etc.), just use a|e|i|o|u|y  - and you've got it.  And if you're trying to exclude English and get the other language, just use a segment that excluded the vowels.

So... thanks!

All the best,

Aviva (I work with Debi)

Hi All!

So yes, I know that you can see/filter the language that the computer or browser was set to (en-us, ru, fr, etc.), but if you look at the keywords used by visitors falling under "fr", some are in English.

Is there any way to get, say, just the keywords in Russian - regardless of what the visitor's browser language was set to?

Thanks!

Aviva

We've been having the same issue (it impacts on client evaluation and reporting significantly), and I just found a blog post written by SEO staff about a week ago:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/hot-off-the-press-more-universal-results-included-with-your-campaign-rankings

He mentions the change, and says that they are considering giving more options in the interface by which to view your results (i.e. by absolute organic position, not just "natural with universal excluded".)  I would visit the post, comment, and also follow the link to the feature request page for this and vote it up - maybe that'll help the change get made - and sooner.

https://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/21226961-show-the-top-universal-ranking-position-and-top-overall-ranking-position-as-well-as-top-natural-rank?page=1

Good luck!

-Aviva

Thanks, Stubby.  Infomation appreciated.

All the best,

Aviva

Thanks, Stubby!

That's what I've been assuming, but hadn't had any actual verification on.  Can I ask how you came to that conclusion?  Is it just what makes sense (100% agreed over here), or have you done analysis, or an official answer from someone who know at Google... or maybe you get visitations from the world beyond?  (I'm sure they know these things over there.  

Thanks,

Aviva

Thanks Andrea.  A post from Search Engine Land (http://searchengineland.com/by-the-numbers-twitter-vs-facebook-vs-google-buzz-36709) from about 2 years ago also says that the only number Google will give is "more than 1 billion," but that is assumed in the article to be a minimum estimate.

So it could that Catherine Roe was reporting the only "official" stats Google has, but which may not reflect reality 100%.

Aviva

Hi, All!

The figure I've seen going around is 3 billion and is attributed to ComScore, but in the comScore press release that was linked to (actually the one from Rand's article - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/21-tactics-to-increase-blog-traffic-2012) all I could find was percentage of market share, but no total numbers of searches.

Anyone have a source on that?

Thanks,

Aviva

Download the Google Global addon for Firefox or Chrome.  Set up Australia as one of the settings (don't forget to check the box for depersonalizing results.)

Aviva B

Hi, All!

If another site (example.com) links to you, and upon mouseover of the link, you see it's supposed to go to something like:

http://example.com/index.php?option=com_mtree&task=visit&link_id=123&Itemid=456

and then when clicked on you get to your actual site, is that considered a real link? How much of a link?

Thanks!

Aviva

Thanks, CafePress.  That certainly makes sense.   But are you saying that if I contact a bunch of site owners in my niche and offer them link exchanges (and they accept), that's really no different than linking between real business partners?  What about a partners page which links to all their partners via a logo (not much anchor text or any text, for that matter)? Is that as bad as putting a bunch of reciprocal links to niche sites on your page with no supporting text?

Everything I've read about Google recently makes me think they're smarter than that, but I'm looking for a backed-up reason.

Hi, All!

Artificial link exchanges (contacting a vaguely connected site and requesting to exchange links to increase your PR) is, as far as I know, considered an outdated, not-so-smart technique, as Google might devalue them.

Yet, for real business partners to exchange links seems to be an entirely accepted and encouraged technique.

While that would be intuitive to a human who's viewing the pages. how might Google detect when two sites that link to each other are linking because they are trusted business associates (valuable) as opposed to when they are doing a link exchange (devalued)?

Thanks!

Aviva

Hi, All!

I have a little time on my hands that's not taken up by client work or our own marketing.  What would you say is a skill worth learning during that time?

My background is not techie, so while I've picked up a teeny bit of knowledge about code, etc. on the way, I still don't really know how to code, use APIs, etc. So I was thinking something along those lines, but anyone have specific suggestions? And resources for whatever you suggest?

Thanks!

Aviva

Thanks, Ryan.  Good ideas, and we'll see what "the authorities" choose to do.

Thanks for the interest, Keri. It was a few weeks ago, so it's hard to remember now. I think GWT did mention that anchor text - but I'm not 100% certain. Either way, I asked the webmaster to add alt text to the arrows for each menu item, so we'll see what happens. Aviva

Thanks, Ryan.  Point well taken.  I think I may copy and paste this for the client in question.  If they would have to pay a significant amount of money to have it redone, though, would it be worth it in this kind of case?  What would the odds be?

Aviva

Thanks, Kyle.  We're not the design/webmaster team, so while it might not have been a good idea to do that in the first place, our job here is just to tell our client what MUST change for SEO and what doesn't need to change, even though it might not have been ideal.  The challenges of not having unlimited budget...

Thanks,

Aviva

Thanks, Andy.  You've seen sites that have used the tags the same way?

Hi, All!

This might be really obvious, but I have little coding experience, so when in doubt - ask...

One of our client site's has navigation that looks (in part) like this:

<a <span="">href</a><a <span="">="http://www.mysite.com/section1"></a>

<a <span="">src="images/arrow6.gif" width="13" height="7" alt="Section 1">Section 1</a><a <span=""></a>

WC3 told us the

tags invalidate, and while I ignored most of their comments because I didn't think it would impact on what search engines saw, because thesetags are right in the links, it raised a question.

Anyone know if this is for sure a problem/not a problem?

Thanks in advance!

Aviva B

Hi, All!

I was looking at OSE for one of my client's site's pages, and I saw that all internal links were said to be images.  I was pretty sure their menu was CSS, and all the links were text.  So I did "fetch as Googlebot" and looked in the resultant code of one of the homepage to see the main navigation bar. The navigation link for one of those pages looked like this:

`onmouseover="doMenu2on(this);">[](http://www.mysite.com/solution_sub.asp?ID=8)` [```
<code>![](images/arrow6.gif)Anchor Text Here</code>
```](http://www.mysite.com/solution_sub.asp?ID=8)
```

The nav link for a page that does show internal anchor text in OSE looks like this:

onmouseover="doMenu2on(this);">[](http://www.mysite.com/solution.asp?ID=5) [```
<code>Anchor Text Here</code>

So there is an image in the link (it's the little arrow before the text to indicate a sub-category), but the anchor text comes right after it.  Is Linkscape (and therefore potentially Google) seeing them as two different links to the same page and only counting the first?  But it's all wrapped within the same <a></a>tags.

Any ideas on if this is a bug in Linkscape, or a real issue, and what should be done?  Thanks!

Aviva``

Hi, All! Another local SEO question...

For one of our clients, the title on their Place page is <official business="" name=""><city>.  Example: John's Sporting Goods Detroit.  Now, most citations will say "John's Sporting Goods."  Is having "Detroit" as part of the business name in Places problematic (NAP inconsistency) and we should remove it, or is it helpful for ranking for "sporting goods detroit" or is it neither?</city></official>

Thanks!

Aviva

Hi, All!

If you're doing trying to get a foreign site (in English) to rank for local SEO in that country (in English),.do citations in the native language help?  Google does seem to know that the business name in English and the foreign language are the same (e.g. if you search in English, it will return some results in the foreign language with the business name in the foreign language bolded).  And addresses Google can also tell are the same, as evidenced by Google map searches in both languages pinpointing the same location.

So - are citations in the foreign language relevant to help the page rank higher for a local query in English?

Any thoughts?

Thanks,

Aviva

Thanks, Barry.  Great post.  I actually wrote to ask if he could update the post for the asynchronous code - we'll see.

The only issue with that is that I want the old and the new tracked as the same URL - for consistency.  Is that possible? Or would I just implement the code in the above post and then switch the URL in the goal?

Thanks.

I changed the URLs of some pages recently (because the same thing that affects the internal anchor text also affects the URL - grr...) but considered it not a big deal because even if I looked at the source code of the old URL, the canonical tag was now pointing to the new one. The question is - if I had URL destination goals set up for those URLs in Google Anlaytics, do I now have to change them? Or does Google somehow know that anyone getting to the new URL is the equivalent of someone getting to the old URL because of the canonical tag that exists on the old URL source code? I still do see goal conversions for some of the old URLs even since I changed them - but it could be that people are still somehow finding the old URL somewhere - or that Google only reindexed it a week or so after I made the change. Any light to shed? Thanks in advance, Aviva B

Probably not  

Webmasters Tools, when talking about sitelinks (Under Site Configuration>>Sitelinks), only gives you a way to demote sitelinks that are appearing which you would prefer not to appear.  Conspicuously absent is any way to request certain sitelinks.

(If you find a way, though - let us know!)

-Aviva B

Thanks, John.  Information right from the mouth of Google.  Much appreciated.

-Aviva B

I believe that Majestic SEOs CliqueHunter tool does that - put in up to 10 sites and shows which have links from the same domains.  I think it might be part of the paid info, but worth checking.

Good luck!

-Aviva B

Hi, All!

If I 301 redirect site www.abc.com to www.def.com, it should pass (almost) all linkjuice, rank, trust, etc.  What happens if I then redirect site www.def.com to www.ghi.com?  Does the value of the original site pass indefinitely as long as you do the redirects correctly?  Or does it start to be devalued at some point?

If anyone's had experience redirecting a site more than once and they've seen reportable good/bad/neutral results, that would be very helpful.

Thanks in advance!

-Aviva B

Hi, All!

If site www.abc.com was already 301 redirected to site www.def.com, and now the site owner wants to redirect www.def.com to www.ghi.com - is there any concern that it's not going to work, and some of the original linkjuice, rank, trust, etc. is going to vanish?  Or as long as the 301s are set up right, should you be able to 301 indefinitely?

Does anyone have any experience with actually doing this and seeing good/bad/neutral results?

Thanks in advance!

-Aviva B

Hi Dan,

I know I'm not answering your question exactly, because I'm not sure if you can add it prior.  My impression is no, but I'm not 100% on it.  Maybe someone will know how to do it.

But just for another workaround - do you have access to the HTML of existing pages and can you make changes, or is that solely in the hands of the managing company?  Because if you have access you can go in and add the alt attribute yourself to the pictures once they're uploaded.

Good luck,

Aviva B

Thanks, David.

Why would you think Google doesn't have answers to Google search query figures?  Technology is not fool-proof, so their tracking system might not be 100%, but why wouldn't they have or be able to have a record of what happens on their domain?

Thanks, Chris.  It would be great if you could clarify a little - what is choosing to look at the metrics for "phrase match" of a keyword in the Google Adwords tool telling you, do you think? How many people are searching for that keyword as part of a phrase? If that's the case, then any number for keyword phrase <x y="">in phrase match should contain all the figures for <x y="">+ <x y="" z="">+ <w x="" y="">+ every other possible combination where you have an <x +="" y="">.  Bearing in mind that obviously the figures aren't 100%, does that seem to carry through on most searches?</x></w></x></x></x>

Thanks, James.  Why would you add the different match types in?  What do you think each one of them is telling you?

Also, "I don't think any one can give a 100% answer to this question because every one has their own methods to what works and what does not work, people will find different methods which work better for them."  That's definitely true on a lot of things, but the question here is: what metric is Google giving you?  I assume they're probably giving the same metric to everyone, so while you might want to use different metrics depending on what your goals are, the question is why are you using them - what do you think they mean?

Thanks for the thoughts, David.  Just wanted to clarify:

"there is a percentage of users who will put words into Google in an 'illogical' sequence." - Good point, and I definitely hear that a percentage do, even a good percentage, but - the exact same number? Really the same number of people look for <bottles water="">as they do <water bottles="">?</water></bottles>

" it's PPC - no click, no pay, so why worry too much" - I'm not quite sure what the point is here - meaning Google doesn't worry too much about giving accurate data? Or meaning one shouldn't care too much if the data is accurate?  That might be true for PPC, but I was talking about using the data for organic SEO planning purposes.

Thanks all who answered, but maybe I should repeat the key element in the question, and if we could restrict the discussion to this question, how you deal with it and what your basis is for doing so, that would be much appreciated.

To be a little more specific - when you select "exact match" for, let's say the keyword "baking supplies", is that telling you how many people searched for that phrase within quotes <"baking supplies">, or how many people searched for only <baking supplies="">, as opposed to that word within a phrase <baking supplies="" stores="">or with the words reversed <supplies baking="">?</supplies></baking></baking>

Thanks!

I wasn't sure whether to classify this as a discussion or a question.  I'd love "the right answer" but I'm not sure if we're going to get one... Let's try.

When you use the Adwords Keyword Tool for doing keyword research, do you use the numbers from "broad match" or "exact match" when comparing relative search volume of keywords?  (And yes, I know the numbers need to be taken with a grain of salt, but when it comes down to it, you're using the numbers to compare and come to conclusions regarding the best keyword to use - so which match type gives you the data you're looking for?)

To be a little more specific - when you select "exact match" for, let's say the keyword "baking supplies", is that telling you how many people searched for that phrase within quotes <"baking supplies">, or how many people searched for only <baking supplies="">, as opposed to that word within a phrase <baking supplies="" stores="">or with the words reversed <supplies baking="">?</supplies></baking></baking>

Based on some keyword research we had done a year ago where any phrase reversals like <water bottles="">and <bottles water="">were coming out with the exact same numbers, even when it wasn't so intuitive that there would be the same search volume, we came to the conclusion - with the tentative suggestion of the SEOMoz staff on the old Q & A - that broad match would include all instances of the keywords in reverse order, so if you wanted to know how many people were searching for <water bottles="">only, you needed to use exact match.  </water></bottles></water>

That's what we did for about a year (I also think I saw Rand mention that somewhere in a presentation slide recently, although I could be mistaken and I don't recall exactly where it was to check it up) and then based on a recent forum discussion I had where someone was questioning that premise, I did another check with two KW reversals and while <water bottles="">and <bottles water="">still give the same number, <baking supplies="">and <supplies baking="">do not.  </supplies></baking></bottles></water>

So I'm left with a big question here as to what the best policy is.  Google Adwords Help is very vague on what the match type means in the tool (it seems to be talking about only your settings for your campaigns).  So - any input after this long saga?

Thanks!

Ostensibly it's a good way to find out which are the strongest pages on your site for a particular keyword.  It won't be indicative of the strength of the page when compared to anything else on the web, but if any page from your site is going to rank for that keyword, it will probably be the first one that Google shows on that query.

It's not going to tell you exactly what factors are causing it (whether it be the on-page optimization, or the links), so any analysis you would want to do would be the same as you would have to do when looking at a regular SERP.  Google thinks that first page is the most relevant page on your site for that keyword.  Why?  You can get some ideas by comparing them, but it's never going to be 100% obvious.

It's a great idea - I actually never thought of doing that to check for keyword cannibalization within a site, make sure the page I want ranking to actually the first - thanks!.

Hi, All!

This is a question asked in the old Q & A section, but the answer was a little ambiguous and it was about 3 years ago, so I decided to repost and let the knowledgeable SEO public answer...

From David LaFerney:

It’s clear that it’s much easier to get high rankings for a term if your domain is an exact match for the query.

If you own several such domains that are very related such as – investmentrealestate.com, positivecashflow.com, and rentalproperty.com – would you be able to benefit from those by 301ing them to a single site, or would you have to maintain separate sites to help capture those targeted phrases?

In a nutshell – SEO wise, is it worth owning multiple domains to exactly match valuable search phrases? Or do you lose the exact match benefit when you redirect?>>

To clarify: redirecting an old domain with lots of history and links to a new exact match domain seems to contain SEO benefit.  (You get links+exact match domain, approximately.)  But the other way around? Redirecting a new exact match domain to an older domain with links?  Does that do anything for the ranking of the old domain for the exact match keyword?  Or absolutely nothing?  (My impression has been that it's nothing, but the question came up for a client and I just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something.)

Thanks in advance!

Hi, All!

We're working with a client on setting up a support blog for their site (not hosted on-site because it's a related topic, not directly about their business).  We're thinking about a few domain possibilities, but for some of the ones we'd like the .com is already taken.  .info (as well as others) are available, and the client is interested in using a different TLD, but I'm shying away from it because of the concern that:

a) people will look at it more suspiciously (exactmatch.info?  must be spam) - but maybe that's just because I'm an SEO

b) does Google have anything against exact match domains with endings like .info, .net, etc.?  (I know there's never any guarantee that the exact match domain will continue to hold its weight in the algorithm at all, but taking that as a given for now - and we are planning on putting decent quality original content on it).

Thanks in advance for the input!

Aviva

Hi, Miriam!

Thanks for the response.  Still no answer at the Google Places help forum.  I think I may start a new thread with more of an attention catching title and see if that draws a Google rep.  It can't be an account penalty, because I've done a number of places searches and checked a good number of places pages (different genres and locales in Israel), and you either see "Owner-verified listing" or nothing.  I have not yet once seen "Business owner?"  And when I try to "claim" some of the unclaimed listings using telephone lookup, I continually get the response of "no business found..."  I've tried to input the phone number in the format they tell you to: 02-123-4567, and also in the format used on the Places page (with the international code) - +972 2-123-4567 - to no avail.  I'll keep this thread posted in the hopeful event that we find a solution....

Thanks!

Hi, All!

We were trying to advise a client about local SEO, and we ran into the issue of - their Google Places pages (yes, they have several, that's a separate issue) are "unclaimable."  Meaning - up at the top of the page there is neither a "Edit this page - Business Owner?" heading or a "Edit this listing - Owner-verified listing" heading.  When you try to claim it independently using the phone number (all pages have the same phone number, but different addresses), Google gives you "No address found for this phone number" and the option to now add a new page, which is not quite what we're looking for.  This is an Israeli location, and this appears to be an issue with a few other random Israeli pages I checked (I saw pages with neither heading option).  But a number of the Israeli pages have "Owner-verified listing."  How did they get it?

Any help would be much appreciated.  Thanks!

Regards,

Aviva

Thanks, Tait.

Does the Wordpress plugin you mentioned actually add open graph tags?  Because if not, here's one that I found that does - and works quite well:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-ogp/

Worth reading the plugin page on the author's website to make sure you have the installation set up right.