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Just a bit of fun - but seems to have worked.

(What we do is dry and serious, so writing an interesting title is a bit of a relief.)

To be honest we looked at Moz and a bunch in here in the UK called Clearleft - http://clearleft.com/thinks/

Hi Christina

Thank you for the feedback.

We have tweaked the link colour to #0066cc;

It helps the links stand out a little more - hopefully.

Apologies for the title, but a serious point here....

We (like a lot of people) spend time on almost mechanical on-page optimisation. However, we are finally moving our thinking to our visitors and what works for them - not the search engines. I know, about time.

With that in mind we have de-cluttered our content pages and increased font sizes - focussing on usability more.

This is an example of a tweaked page - http://www.compactlaw.co.uk/free-legal-information/employment-law/exceptions-for-unfair-dismissal.html

This is an un-tweaked page - http://www.compactlaw.co.uk/agency-agreement.html

Which do you prefer to read/look at??

Hi Guys

Thanks, very helpful.

We are an ecommerce site and an information site. So I guess we will go with publisher on the homepage and author for content pages.

Though we have tried author on product pages and G displays the author photo in the results. Not sure what effect that has, but I like to see a face related to the product. (We sell information products - legal documents). It also helps our product stand-out in the results.

Thanks again.

Patrick

So apologies in advance for this question, but:

Can someone explain whether as a site we should be using the "rel author" tag or the "rel publisher" tag?

1. We don't really need to distinguish between the people who write our content.

2. We definitely do need to establish ownership of our content, as unfortunately it has been widely copied. We are spending quite a bit of time filing DMCA notices.

3. Do we need to apply either tag to every page? Or does "del publisher" just need to be applied to the homepage to cover the rest of the site?

4. What looks better in the search results? - a person's face or a company logo?

If prefer a face, but understand we need to promote our brand.

Thanks

P

Hi Sebastian

Thanks for the response.

We were also concerned about cannibalisation as some of the links/page titles are:

qualifying for unfair dismissal, unfair dismissal exceptions, unfair dismissal & retirement, unfair dismissal test.

We have some good content on our site, particularly relating to UK employment law.

One section on unfair dismissal is split into 9 pages - there is a fair amount of legal detail.

The question is whether we should combine it all into one "mother of all unfair dismissal" page just to satisfy the Google monster or keep in as it is.

Some of the individual pages rank on page 1 already.

If we change the architecture are 301 redirects the best way to handle the changing urls?

The other more important issue is whether it is easier to read it all on one page or split it.

Keeping G happy may not actually keep our users happy. As the content is quite dense we want to ensure we don't overload people.

Any thoughts appreciated.

The other judgment call we need to make is whether to ask for this content to be removed from the search index. It copies our content, but does link back to us.

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showpost.php?p=29850065&postcount=14

This site also gets huge traffic.

I guess if the posts stay on the site, but are removed from Google search index we benefit.

We declined about 50%.

We really haven't done much in the way of cutting back-links.

But we have removed duplicated content on our own site and quite a lot of thin content in the past 12 months. Though for the thin content we obviously have more to do.

The site content is split up the way it is because the old school advice was to target one keyword term or phrase per page. But it now seems that people are moving much more to writing articles with several different (but complimentary) keyword phrases in each article. Basically a longer article divided into 3 or 4 parts.

I guess that's down to Penguin-panic.

There are many occasions where we have the discussion to stop chasing Google and seo and just concentrate on users.

But that does not help with scraping.

Just a bit of fun - but seems to have worked.

(What we do is dry and serious, so writing an interesting title is a bit of a relief.)