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What are the perceived negative effects, if any, of doing a silo structure?

I spent some time using a silo plugin for a wordpress site early on, and also spent some time with a theme that had a silo format, but ended up switching over to a flat site architecture, I just did like the theme for wordpress that used silo, and the plugin seemed like junk.

I'd love to take a look at a well run silo site if you know of one.

I really enjoy topics like this, thanks for asking such a great question.

Yes you would change it, but you would most likely do a 301 redirect from the old site to the new site so you do not lose pagerank.

Hi Brant,

AS Donnie mentioned, The More About This Place area are not links per se, but are mentions of your site around the web.  This can include your current site and old site.  Your new site will more than likely be mention the next time Google updates its info for Google Places.  The more citations(mentions of your website the better.

The BEST thing you can do at this point is make sure the directories and review places have your proper NAP, also known as Name Address and Phone number.  Again, Donnie mentioned reading David Mihm's website to review the local factors for SEO.

Make sure your NAP and website match ACROSS the web, everywhere you can list it appropriately.  So there may be some major updating on your part, and that can help gel your info across the web together so your site becomes more powerful.

Could you let us know the address of your blog?  I'd like to take a look how it's structured before I answer.

If the buttons are slowing down your page loading time to that significant of a degree, you might take your Commodore 64 into the shop.

If the load times are actually that slow, I would take a hard look at who is hosting the websites in question.

I have read many times that footer links hold less value than links mentioned in the content areas of pages and posts, but that does not mean they do not have reasonable value.  When coming from a site with a higher value of trust, these links will have even more juice.

If somebody offered me a mixed amount of anchor text from 300 different footer links with differing IP"s, I would take them in a heartbeat(as long as they are from reliable and trust worthy sites of course.)

The great thing is, you know how the link building has been done for your competition, and now the real work begins.

While there are no guarantees as there are many factors beyond links, you most likely have an excellent shot at getting your client to the top if you put in the effort.

Hi Steven,

While I don't feel it's necessary to defend SEOmoz, or SEO for that matter, it is impossible to know exactly what do to implement perfect SEO techniques and rank in the top spot for each industry.

However, SEOmoz is one of the few places I have watched webinars that collect vertical data, and process the statistics to made heads and tails of it.  I do remember reading a Google Best Practices Guide from 2010 that did something similar, but not as well as SEOmoz.

The more I read and learn from this site, the more I realize that SEO is not abut tricking Google and other search engines.  It is about relying on the best practices to create high quality, relevant websites that Google will appreciate.  I continue to believe that if SEOers stay consistent in their practices, Google will end up changing their algorithms to suit SEOmoz's standards.  Search engines will be chasing our sites, and our clients sites based on the excellent product we are helping produce.

SEO can be an extremely frustrating if you are looking for black and white answers.  I find the best practices approach to be much less frustrating, and easier to manage in regards to expectations and results.

Edit

I also wanted to mention that I wish people would have more ideas to consider in reference to best practices and techniques.  This is how SEO will evolve, and rarely do people have a chance to be in on the ground floor with cool stuff like this.

So do you add it to each page as well as post?

I don't believe it does, but I do try to stay consistent in my citations, listings, and links.  I prefer www, but to each their own.

The biggest issue will be in the need for proper 301 redirection so errors are not found.  There are plugins via wordpress to help you along with that.  As long as wordpress properly redirects old post locations to the site.com/blog location you should have many issues or loss of rank etc.

I would recommend contacting your host(hopefully not being godaddy) to help you in the transition/swap to make sure nothing is lost. as some server side issues need to be changed to cause the least amount of hiccups.

Pay attention in your webmaster tools after the move to make sure you're on top of any issues.

Lastly, you are not changing domains, but are changing the permalink structure of your site.

Thank you for clarifying and sharing your knowledge.  I think it is easy to get stuck in a link building rut with little variance when working on local, so this will very much help.

HI Dan,

The only way there would be value in purchasing those, IMHO, is if you had a stellar piece or hardware or software that may have a chance at dominating the industry.  An informational site would not be worth the potential high cost of such ketyword rich domains, as software or hardware companies that dominate them have no need for this.

The keyword rich domain name ship has already sailed.

I agree with you Alan in respect to the need for geo modifiers.  I was just thinking of my own individual brick and mortar business.  Making me extremely selfish in my questioning.

Do you see any value in linkbuilding for a local brick and mortar business without the geo modifier in the anchor text?

Utilikilts.com

While most people currently search with the geo modifier, my belief is that many will no longer use this modifier in the future as they become comfortable with the understanding that searches know where they are located automatically.

I think it is important to be ahead of the curve and work on terms that may not be readily searched for, and that includes simply typing in the "keyword" only into google and looking at the local results.

For that reason I would love to know if backlinking for the "keyword" only will have an effect without the geomodifier to influence the local results.

I was under the assumption that it made no difference if the site was set for local under webmaster tools or not, and Google would figure it out.

Is this actually of benefit in local search?

As far as the local search volume goes, I am unsure how that matters, since their are two sets of results with and without the geo modifier.  So how can backlinking influence the one without the geo modifier?

If anyone here is familiar with local SEO, you may have noticed that there are different local results for:

"city + Keyword" and just the "keyword".

When building links will you end up targeting both with a geo modifier in the link, or is it beneficial to build links without the geo modifer for the keyword?

HI Alan,

I'd love to know your setup in regards to using Hootsuite and Tweetdeck.

I put together a system to work with my block, where Hootsuite posted to certain areas in Ping.fm, but I am unsure if it was as streamlined as it should or could have been.

Trying to get Google to undo a negative could never be a fun proposition I assume.

For local SEO I believe David Mihm, Mike Blumenthal, and Andrew Shotland are some reasonable ones to follow.

Without getting into the good vs. bad conversation, my mind wanders into the necessity of giving anything away for clients to give you a review.

If a company has a strong client base, it could be as simple as asking for a review via:

• Face to Face Meetings
• Social Media
• Email
• Mailers

With a properly worded request, and an easy to follow link, many clients will give you the review without any incentive.  Simple loyalty goes a long way.

While I am sure more people might fill reviews out for a prize/gift, but is that the way a business receives accurate, non-biased reviews?

Reviews are great for a number of reasons, including SEO and placement in Google Places pages, but they also serve a different purpose.

When a person gives an honest review, positive or negative, that information can be passed on to the business owner to continue what is successful or look at the needed changes to get back on track.  This actually happened with my business recently, as there ended up with a few complaints about my staff.  I had to look long and hard for solutions to tighten up the ship, and luckily those truthful reviews didn't get lost in a bunch of ego stroking fake reviews.

Honesty is always the best policy, and false or inaccurate reviews will be found out at some point.

I find this frustraing as well at times, but guess what?  I had to start somewhere too.  Hopefully many of the people who have found a quality source, such as this site, will be guided in a great direction.

At some point in the future it will be absolute common knowledge that the meta, title etc. will have to optimized well, and the SEO questions will revolve around schema.org, seo strategies for specific industries and networking etc.

I believe things will evolve rather quickly, but some will have to still start at the beginning, and some will have evolved into cutting edge industry leaders.  In any industry this is how it begins, and what you are asking is what will separate the best from the rest.

In such a fledgling industry, I would love to see more outside the box thinking and speculation on where SEO should be heading.  I've had responses about this from some leaders in this community, and many mention that Matt Cutts says SEOers should never be chasing Google.

While some might be chasing, it would be wonderful to see honest speculation to stay ahead of the search engines, where the value added by SEO experts is what Google and the like will start to consider as superior, and change their algos to have an affinity to the best webdev and SEO practices.

My opinion is that both have properly optimized websites, with the listing in the A position having the potential of strong backlinks and extremely well optimized site(although I have not done much analysis.)

Since the listing in the A position is rather far from the city center, and it has not even claimed the Googles Places listing, any optimization that has occurred locally would be from info Google has scraped from the web.

The listing in the B position has claimed/verified their Google Places page, but has done a poor job optimizing it.  However, it does have a city center location.

I believe a company that wishes to compete in that market listing could do well if not better than the current top listings by doing appropriate SEO on the local and organic level.

Hi Michael,

Good question.  There are a number of ways listings can show up ranging from organic only results, local only results(google 7 pack, and a mixed result of organic and local.

In your example, the organic/local mix is what we are seeing.  In this case many optimization factors are taken into account that include local and organic factors.

A well optimized page + strong organic seo is what would be needed to give a company the best chance at ranking in a high position.  This would include a verified and well optimized Google Places page.

It really comes down to the overall revenue and industry.  Mom and pops gasp.  The Target and Deloitte type companies do not.

In my opinion, as a small business owner who gets contacted by SEO folk on a weekly basis, I would hate to hire anyone who thinks I have deep pockets.  I am also of the opinion that chasing people/companies because you want the big score is the best way to ruin your SEO business.

The key is being able to explain the value of SEO and internet marketing in a way that makes sense.  Whether that is to a mom and pop business or a multinational company, they have to see the value.  If you are turned down often by these "stingy" folk, you may be doing or saying the wrong things.

That has to be it.

It truly depends on what was done with the domain previous to them coming for purchase, or before you "found" them.  There is also the potential that someone purposely built up the rank only to abuse it, and the rank has not dropped yet.

If the PR's are legitimate and rather high, I might consider turning them into effective blogs on the subject they are dealing with and trying to maintain or improve it.  I also might see if I have clients that might need the domain for their business.

I do know that Google pays attention to this stuff, so if utilized poorly it could have a negative outcome due to "trickery."

I think you might be referring to localeze or whitespark?

While I have read that the importance of a business name matching the domain name exactly could be deemed extremely beneficial, having the city name in with the appropriate keyword, and proper optimization should make for an extremely strong listing.

If you are starting from scratch, I think it is extremely beneficial to have a keyword rich domain that includes the name of the city.  This of course depends what other words you have go with the rest of the domain name of course.

I do not believe you will win with a keyword rich domain name alone, but again...it's a fantastic place to begin.

I can't see how you could beat MozCon.  While I am not in the business of SEO, I asked my wife if I could go to Mozcon for my birthday gift.  She laughed and said I have serious problems, but it would be a kick to listen to an meet the people who are so far ahead of the curve.

I would most likely focus attempt to utilize the geo modifier as often as possible, but may not do so EVERY time.  There are enough variations as well so they don't become redundant.

IT services in Boston, MA

Boston IT Services

Information technology services Boston

Just a few examples of how they can change, and they should be built with each targeted area.  You may consider doing IT services occasionally, but you have to figure out if you have the means of defeating the large budgets of IT Service companies you may be competing with.  Their size and budget towards SEO may be insurmountable.

Analyze your competition too, and try to dissect what they have done, and try to catch up.  Follow that up with solid networking, SEO, and back links from reputable sources.

Sounds like a big job, and one that is hopefully lucrative and successful for you.

While this isn't a scientific answer, based strictly on my opinion, I would use a .ca for a local site, and a .com if organic is more important.

I have never tried it, but when a person in Canada types in Google.com are they automatically redirected to Google.ca?

Lightbox should have zero negative impact in regards to SEO, providing you have effectively labeled your photos.  I love the look of it, and although has a similar effect to flash, they have nothing to do with eachother in regards to negative SEO.

I would purchase both the .com and .ca if I were in your position.  If they are not available I would probably consider purchasing a .co which are becoming a bit more popular.  The .ca and .com's are a no brainer, and owning both is essential.

The strategy I feel works best is to make sure the anchor text is variable, and targets not only the homepage but deep linking which will bring value to other pages in the site. I am of the opinion that repeated anchor text to the same page could actually be harmful if misused, and that the variances of anchortext with appropriate geo modifier will be just as if not more beneficial in the long run.  Google is quite dynamic and its ability to connect the dots in the future will only increase.

Keyword research is also important when deciding which keywords and keyword phrases to target.

It all really depends I guess.  Is Johnston a city or suburban community?  If I sent something to your address and put Des Moines on it, would it arrive?

How many people search for hotels in Johnston versus Des Moines?

Either one you choose, you'll have to get everything to match.

Hey...

Unless these articles are going to extremely reputable sources, I would not bother with any article submissions.  I would concentrate on adding content to the website and/blog, and consider doing guest blogging on other sites you may be networked with.

Article submission for the sake of SEO is not the best idea following the drop in rank of many of the large article databases.

Also, every article submitted to these places should be unique if you were still choose to use them. Often times the sites will check for dupe material.  While I have read that there will be no punishment for the dupe content by the search engines, it may not help your cause.  It would just be a waste of time an resources.

If you were to publish an article that goes viral, or possibly a higher end press release, I could see how this might be more powerful and well worth it.

While Des Moines may not be a metropolis, I'd imagine that the keyword "hotel" and city modifier is competitive in any/every market.  It may not be New York or Las Vegas, but well established sites who have spent a bit of time optimizing their sites would have a leg up.  In addition, the larger chains with their 1000's of backlinks and power PR's would also be tough to get ahead of.

The listing/description is lacking, as there is not much information on the page you are trying to optimize for.  This could be greatly improved with better copy speaking about Des Moines, the attractions, location, and that specific hotel.

Backlnks are a must, and my analysis would revolve around that, including where the higher ranking competition is listed.  You need to be there too.  In the meantime start building them in reputable directories.

Make SURE that your name, address, and phone number are EXACTLY the same everywhere in all of your listings.  Not having this together can create serious problems.

Make sure you are registered properly in the local search engine areas: Google Place, Bing Local, Yahoo Local.

Familiarize yourself with the new edition of:

Local Search Ranking Factors Vol. 4 by David Mihm

Best of luck.

I am fairly confident that Google doesn't go around slapping websites with linkfarm status unless they are certain that they are up to no good.

I would recommend doing proper navigation with appropriate subdivisions.

If you did a website about Animals, which is obviously a huge subject, you would start with:

Animals - Homepage

Aardvark - Antelope - Bears - Birds and so on

You would then follow up with the proper subdivisions sorted by species of said animal, or by color, or whatever.  There is a chance that on each subpage you may choose to not have subdivisions in the main navigation, but actually in the body of the main text for that animal.

If things are done properly how could this even be considered a link farm?

You do mention 100 links per page, so if it is appropriate that is fine, but I do not know of many subjects that are worthy of 100 links or more per page.

Hi Jason,

Just keep on working as Rome was not built in a day.  Pay no attention to the overall rank until you have completed the transformation.  If it has been done properly rank should improve.

My best advice is to try to stick with a single project until completion.  Try not to mix up the work you are doing since you will just be left with problems all over the place with no end in site.

Once you have completed them, add a blog.  It is most likely not THE reason nor the ONLY reason things seem to be dropping.

Stay the course.  1000 points of light.  Stay the course.

Hi Ryan, So what do you think the best future content and interaction with search engines will take us? Ray Kurzweil spoke about the fact that he uses his models to predict the future of technology before we have the ability to create it.

While some might see this as a pointless exercise, it has kept him on the cutting edge of tech, and allowed him to hit the ground running as our technology advances. Social Media and Web 2.0 are ones that seem to be currently at the forefront but may not be 100% utilized by everyone. This seems apparent to me, and I wouldn't consider it "chasing" Google by implementing the use in an SEO or marketing strategy.

This is also not predicting, but simply following a logical game plan of what should be done based on Matt Cutts comments and testing. I personally see the use of optimized video as playing a major role in the future, and many people who have been utilizing it for years already are just ahead of their time.

I am wondering what impact the "Semantic Web" or Web 3.0 will be playing, and how to prepare appropriately, and possibly in advance.

I just finished watching a documentary on Ray Kurzweil, Transcedent, and began to familiarize myself with his book, The Singularity is Near.  During Ray's explanation of prediction through data gathering and extrapolation, he predicts that by 2029 AI and humans will have merged.  We can debate this at another time, but I was wondering if any of the statistics/data is used by SEO professionals to predict where SEO may be going in the next 12-48 months.

It has been my experience that SEO is very reactionary, and very few put their neck out on a limb to predict where it is going.

I was just hoping that some of you may share your thoughts on what you are focusing on and where you are steering your clients in order to be ahead of the curve without hurting current placement.

Anyone care to share?

Hey Mike,

While this might be what it is meant for, it has been more often used for the backlinks in the author profile area.  The more articles, the more links.

Hi Mike,

Your question is extremely valid, since much of the time to know that an answer is valid, you'd have to already know the answer.  Especially with SEO information that continues to change so quickly.

A recent example: I looked up a reference to use utilize for an answer I was giving, and found out it was "in the shop" according to SEOmoz.  They now consider it invalid, but I had thought it was gospel for about 15 months.

The biggest thing would have to be the continuity with the other answers and familiarity with the poster over time.  As a non-professional SEOer with excellent results for the projects I have taken on, I try to be careful to judge the source too quickly.  In my case, I do not want to share my website publicly since it is my own business that has nothing to do with SEO, so in my case it's not a great way to judge my answers I believe.

Good question.

Could you possibly reverse the changes of the robots.txt to a previous "working" version where your site was getting indexed quicker?

This could be worth testing out, but without an example/proof I find it hard to believe that a place with no Google code will end up ranking higher than with.

What about 100 drunk Popes?   Good analogy.