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This might be a slightly ridiculous suggestion - but try to look at everything they have as content.

Do they have a website? yes. Is it maybe good enough to submit to web design galleries.

Do they have a logo? Logo design galleries.

Is their workspace or office nice or creative in any way? Google cool office workspaces and have a scout around for a workspace appreciation website. If you can think of it, there's probably a website for it.

Where your clients are lacking in creative resources you need to pick up the slack!

Hi Dan,

1. mR means MozRank - This is a number between 1-10 which refers to the popularity/power of the links to the site. It is calculated in a similar way to Googles PageRank

2. mT means MozTrust - This is, again, provided as a number between 1-10. It refers to the distance your subdomain is from a trusted domain. For example, how many link 'hops' are you away from a site like About.com (or any other big, trusted brand name). How sure is Google that you are not a spam website? The higher the score, the better.

3. The scores are on a logarithmic scale. Not gonna lie, logarithms confuse the heck outta me, and your best bet is probably googling 'what is a logarithm'

4. The closer the scores are to 10, the better. 8.7 mT or mR, for example would be a highly trusted domain. If you've got sites with scores like that you're probably doing quite well. A score of 1 represents a site with no links or authority or anything, so you can judge in your head the value from there.

Hope that answers your question.

http://www.copyscape.com/

Is this the kinda tool your were thinking of?

Define "best"

Are you looking for 1) the most cost-efficient way to get your numbers artificially up and make your site look more attractive to advertisers?

Or  2) A company that sells qualified, useful visitors who may be in some way interested in what you have to sell?

(2 doesn't actually exist)

Also, apart from a couple of experiments posted on SEOmoz, I don't know of anybody that has managed to raise their SERP rankings through traffic spikes for more than a day or two.

Only as soon as you've found another way to solve the problem that the 301s were the solution to.

Sure no probs!

A domain is basically a website. A subdomain is a domain which is part of another larger domain.

So for example you've got the domain yahoo.com and subdomain search.yahoo.com. They're websites in themselves but the they're interconnected.  MozTrust etc refers to subdomains because it's a more specific answer than referring to domains (which may have multiple subdomains on them)

As I understand it, yes it does.

If you check out the 2011 search engine ranking factors you'll see it's estimated that about 11% of the metrics Google uses to rank pages are related to domain-wide keyword usage. This suggests that, to a limited extent, text used on any page on the domain can be used to determine the subject of the domain's pages.

Also, text in the title of the homepage could negatively effect other pages in incidents of 'keyword cannibalisation'. For example, if you're trying to get a landing page to rank for 'free range eggs' and your homepage title is also 'free range eggs' then you're sending a mixed message to Google about the subject of your pages.

Hey

1. Go to your analytics dashboard
2. Add new profile, name it "exclude indian traffic" or something you will remember
3. Then go into Filter Manager and create a new, custom filter
4. In filter type select 'exclude'
5. Now select the Visitor Country option in the Filter Field.
6. Type in India (make sure it's not case sensitive)
7. Now activate that filter on the profile named "exclude indian traffic", and wait for your new traffic to roll in.

The filters don't work retrospectively, so they will only apply to traffic from the moment you activate them.

Hey,

Google doesn't rank domains, it ranks pages. Domain Authority is kind of like an average of the authority of all your individual pages. A high domain authority score is only relevant in so far as it suggests you have a lot of authoritative (rich in link juice) individual pages - which, I would assume, are linking to this new page.

A link to your wider domain will not be as valuable as a link directly to the page you want to rank. You'll still get the 'link juice' but it will be diluted because it first has to pass from the page that received the link across the other pages on your site and to your new landing page.

There's unfortunately no quick-fix formula you can use to determine how Google values a page based solely on the number of links present - there's just too many other factors to consider.. quality of links, context, anchor text, CTR, social signals etc etc..

.. I think I may be rambling a bit now cos it's late but I hope that helps a bit.

Linking back to them could potentially damage your rankings.

Many link-exchange setups also double as link-sellers, and most are not exactly subtle about it.  As a result of this they can potentially become blacklisted by Google.

There's no way to definitively say whether or not a site has been blacklisted by Google, but if those sites have been blacklisted and then you link to them, you can get penalised. A hyperlink is like saying you endorse these guys.

Check to make sure they are not obviously selling links or doing anything really bad before you link to them. I learned all this the hard way myself

I'm not sure if 'nofollowing' your reciprocal link will protect you from penalisation. I have never tried that myself

There's a Whiteboard Friday from a few years ago in which Rand talks about a couple of different tactics for dealing with this problem.

Another tactic he doesn't mention would be to remove most of the links from your linkbait pages, leaving only links to your money pages. This way a higher proportion of the 'link juice' will be directed to your money pages, rather than spread all over your domain.

Hi Andy,

A non-technical solution would be to have an email template and send it to whoever submits a press release. Something like...

"Dear so and so,

_Thank you very much for your submission to my site. I would be delighted to include your event in my listings. Unfortunately I am very wary of featuring a press release that has been published ad verbatim on other websites. I would really appreciate if you could alter your submission to include _whatever specifications you need .

Once I receive this I will publish your event immediately. "

Alternatively, you could use the rel=canonical tag targeting the original page the press release was published on. This would prevent you being done for duplicate content. However, your page will be less likely to appear for searches conducted for that event. I'd imagine you'd prefer your own pages to appear in the SERPs so this probably isn't ideal. I've never had to deal with this kind of problem myself so I'd be very interested to hear what others have to say.

Hi Steve,

SEOmoz's linkscape doesn't update in real-time, so it could take a few weeks to see any new links. Possibly a lot longer for links from sites that aren't as well connected.

Can always use Google Analytics to see where referrals are coming from - handy for picking out useful backlinks.

Though not on your list, I would go with Perth Hotels. It has the best ratio of Keyword Difficulty to Exact Local Monthly Search Volume.

Keyword difficulty score 60 with 4,400 Exact Local Monthly Searches, according to the SEOmoz tool on Google.com.au.

Ideally you should only have one H1 tag on the page. If your logo is the H1 then that prevents you from getting the most out of any subsequent (keyword relevant) headings.

Unless you're in a tough battle to rank for your own brand name I'd remove the H1 tag from the logo

A page won't be considered a duplicate unless a substantial amount of its content is repeated on another page.

If this text box is say, the size of a Wordpress widget, you'll have nothing to worry about.

Are you planning to use the same customer quotes one every page or do you have different ones for different products? The latter would be better, but it shouldn't be an issue unless this text box is going to take up a large chunk of the page.

Nope.

Google won't penalise a site because of links pointing to it. A webmaster has little to no control over inbound links and so your competitor can't be held responsible for random german sites linking to it.

In general I believe local links > foreign links, but all things equal there's nothing wrong with links from other countries.

Worst case scenario Google can devalue spammy links, but they won't remove a site from their index simply because a lot of spammy websites are pointing to it.

Hi Don,

Text contained within a hyperlink applies to the page which the hyperlink points to.

So, let's say your parent page is named "Expensive Cars", and your sub-page is "Expensive cars for old people". If the text on the parent page reads "This webpage is about expensive cars", then that text will count towards the parent page's relevence. But if it instead reads "This webpage is about expensive cars for old people" - then those words highlighted in blue are used to determine what the other page, the page the hyperlink points to, is about.

The parent page will not be considered relevant for 'expensive cars for old people' because that text is hyperlinked.

As an aside, if you read up on SEOmoz's 2011 search engine ranking factors, you'll see that Google now appears to be favouring non-exact match anchor text > exact match. This means that the hyperlink pointing to your sub-page would be slightly more effective if it said something like "old people's cars". instead of "expensive cars for old people"

Hope that helps

Hi Peter,

Bots/crawlers etc can read your page no matter what order the headers appear in the HTML. The hierarchical order is there for convenience more than anything else.

You should have no problem doing what you suggest in your example. Just try not to have more than one H1 on each page.

Dev

Chances are, from a purely SEO point of view, it would be more beneficial to have your site on mywidgets than on mywidget.

Whether or not its worth it financially will depend on how big a boost you get out of changing the url, and this will primarily depend on the competitiveness of the new keywords you are targeting.

If you do a quick google on "website widgets" or "free widgets", you'll see that the top few sites don't actually have 'widgets' in their domain name, it's 'widget'. This is probably because they're incredibly competitive search terms and those websites are simply far more authoritative than their 'widgets' competitors. The lack of an 's' in their names verges on insignificant in comparison to their massive backlink profiles which have been necessary to put them at the top of the SERP.

Including the 's' is likely to help, but don't count on it doing the job all on its own.

The worst thing that could happen is you go through all the trouble of moving and find that it hasn't made enough of a difference to justify the loss of traffic while moving. With this in mind, if I was in your shoes I would start by experimenting with Meta Titles and on-page copy on a few of my pages to see what difference that makes, before moving the entire domain - temporarily 301'ing mywidgets into mywidget.

One last thing to consider is that a 301 does not pass all the link juice from one domain to another. It's estimated that you tend to lose about 10% of the 'juice' in the redirect. Redirecting from mywidget to mywidgets will result in a more relevant, but less authoritative website.

Hope that helps

Devin

• Agree with Albin. You don't stand to gain anything from putting a nofollow on the links.

Hi,

If your page is ranked 450th in Google that could mean a variety of different things; Google considers the page to be low quality content, duplicate content, it has an algorithmic penalty, it's not authoritative enough, or else it's simply irrelevant to the search phrase you're attempting to rank for.

It would be hard to say exactly what the problem is without seeing the page, but from what you say it sounds like a duplicate content issue. If this is one of a large number of duplicate pages then that could also contribute to Google's perception of your site as being low quality.

There are a few things you can do to try and correct the issue:

If you have 3 different pages each selling the same boots to three different places..  eg "Leather boots London".. "Leather Boots Los Angeles"  and "Leather Boots NY" - then, like you suggested, you will need more than a change of place names to distinguish between the pages.

Try changing more on the page. Meta Titles, Meta Descriptions, Alt Tags & titles on images & unique copy - the longer the copy the greater the opportunity you will have to make it unique.

Linking between pages on your own site with descriptive anchor text is very important for helping Google to identify what the pages are about. Have a look at your site as a whole and have a think about your deep linking strategy.

Finally, Rel=canonicle or 301 redirect any similar or duplicate pages which you do not intend to correct and do not intend to rank with.

Alternatively, to try and determine if it's a separate, low quality issue, ask some of these questions:

How many ads are on the page? How many hyperlinks are on the page? Does the page look spammy - spelling mistakes, weird grammar? How long is the copy - substantial and factual or brief and lacking any specific detail?

However, the page being of low quality does not rule out the possibility of a duplicate content problem.

EDIT: If it's a Dup Content issue then what Alan said would be a far simpler solution!

If the 'technical' side of SEO doesn't appeal then another useful set of skills is media production. Before I got into SEO my calling was working in video and radio production - writing, interviewing, filming & editing. I have found these skills invaluable particularly while working with small & micro businesses. If content is king, then the ability to produce high-quality multimedia content on a low budget will always be a welcome asset. I find it opens the door to more interesting SEO strategies.

The best book on film production I've ever read is Shot by Shot by Steven d. Katz. It's more tuned towards film directing, but it's a great way to throw yourself in the deep end if it's something you'd be interested to learn.

Radio, I've found, is not as useful online - unless producing a podcast. Probably the most critical skill to get your head around on radio is interview skills. Look up Nardwuar the Human Serviette - he's a bit.. different.. but probably one of the most professional interviewers in the radio world today. If he's taught me anything it's research, research, research!

Oh and Photoshop! Photoshop never stops being useful. I'd go mad without it. There are hundreds of great guides online.