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example.com

and

example.mtv.com

Are 2 different domains.

In this case example.mtv "example" is the sub-domain of mtv. This could mean he has switched host, or owns both domains and just moved his example site to his mtv domain. In this case your competitor has given up his domain authority for example.com.

Open Site Explorer can still read sub-domains if your competitor recently switched then the lack of information is probably because he just recently switched. Meaning, the indexing agents haven't had a chance to index his new site. The only other thing I can think to mention is when researching sub-domain url's make sure you leave out the "www".

You are tasked with creating a Facebook page for an industry which has a distinct lack of social media presence.

During your research for your industry or client you find none of their competitors are using social media to any large degree.

Reviewing the whys, you find that the demographics of people using Social Media outlets like, Facebook, Twitter, Pin Interest, and LinkedIn do not really fit with the industry.

Do you view this as a great opportunity for your company / client and push forward with creating a Social Media presence?

Or, do you inform your company / client based on your research, social media isn't a viable use of time or money?

Examples:

Plastic Manufacturing
Industrial Laundry
Tractor Trailer Wholesale
Copper Mining Equipment

I am interested in how the guru's handle clients / companies that don't necessarily fit the mold of social media, but ask and are willing to pay you to make it happen for them.

I am hoping this to be a good discussion as I don't see any right or wrongs in these situations. What would you do?

Each campaign can have the same keywords.But will use a keyword slot no matter what keywords you use.

The rational... If you're tracking multiple sites and the same keyword for each site, you are actually tracking the keyword 3 times, just for different domains.

Very good advice Nakul.

Long established websites do have the benefit of tons of solid links because when they started they all there was. If you're pulling in #3 spot that is great. And you are doing the correct thing in trying to contact folks that are linking to them if you have better / more recent information. We fight the same battles for old established companies that still out rank us for top keywords even though their site looks like they were made during Clinton's first term, and haven't been touched since.

Climbing up the ranking should be a little easier now (depending on your industry) due to social media. Get the buzz, forum and blog links and eventually you'll get the spot.

Hi Chris

If Google sees a link to the page it may still list it in its index even though when they got there they saw the noindex tag so they didn't crawl it.

The rational is they see a link from your main site with some anchor text and index the link based on the anchor text they can't crawl it because you say not to, but they still have some information about the page from your anchor text.

Here is a direct Matt Cutts Quote:

"Our highest duty has to be to our users, not to an individual webmaster. When a user does a navigational query and we don’t return the right link because of a NOINDEX tag, it hurts the user experience (plus it looks like a Google issue). If a webmaster really wants to be out of Google without even a single trace, they can use Google’s url removal tool."

REF: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-noindex-behavior/

You can block access to the test site (which is what we do) via htacess (if you're on a Linux Server) and use the Google Index Removal Tool to strip out the currently indexed pages.

I hope that helps.

Certainly doesn't hurt to have multiple product images, if that is applicable. I just don't see a good way to make a gallery work for your type of site. But there maybe......

Hi Veeters,

I'm not sure where you're thinking of adding pictures, but in general the best blogs, and content sites do a good job of including images inside content articles.

For example if you read any of the SeoMoz blog post you'll notice a very good mix of text and images, search engines not only like this, but users don't much care to be hit with a big ole wall of text. Images help keep people interested and also gives the post a good overall look.

You maybe able to integrate your unused images in some of your content (I noticed a few pages that were very text heavy example: http://blog.shakes4life.com/), if the images are to large you can thumbnail them and use something like LightBox, or ZoomView so users can get a larger view. Using images in this way will also give you opportunities to add alt text to further emphasize some of your content.

Lastly, it wouldn't make since to add images to a page that isn't go to rank for anything, what will happen is people will just steal your images and use them on their pages with content to out rank you.

Hope it helps,

They certainly add to the user experience. Personally I don't like ones that auto start, just like I hate animated gifs.. very annoying.

That said if properly implemented the code to the image and alt / title text will be in the source of the page and thus crawled by the Search Engines. I don't see how they could harm SEO unless you driving people away from your site with external links or something...

I don't have any hard numbers as what is too much, so I can't speak to that.

My approach to building backlinks is try and act like a user of my site. Go to sites that have blogs, or forums that discuss your industry and add links where appropriate. For new sites, I try to build a link a day. For established sites, I try and get a link a week. If your users are engaging, you should encourage them with your content to help build the links for you.

Maybe I have a little to much faith in Search Engines, but it is their job to know when a site is relevant to a specific query. You do your part on creating a good user experience on your site and your customers / consumers should be reacting to it positively by speaking about it on forums, blogs, and social media, these are also known indicators to search engines about the value of your specific page or site in regards to the topic being discussed.

Google has been cracking down on link networks, link rings, spam sites and the like. For a long time sites were manipulating the natural back links by buying or exchanging links with each other. This you can understand Google must take seriously with people's livelihood at stake.

If you're a new site, then spend some extra time getting the word out about your site. If you're established, time maybe better spent improving content, adding cool tools or features and making your users want to link to it for you.

Also Karl, Alexa does a fairly good job at tracking inlinks with referring URL's which is pretty helpful.

Your site is here: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/wholesaleclearance.co.uk

And of course Open Site Explorer here will give you some details as well.

Those are very good questions.

I don't know of any tools to help determine if a link is good or bad. I generally look at the site and know if I want to be there, but when you're dealing with thousands of links it would be awful nice to have a tool to help.

HI Karl, do you have a Google webmaster account? This should show you who Google sees as linking to you.

For EN-US .. sign into Google Webmasters, click the Your Site On the Web nav link, then links to your site. (It maybe called something different for EN-UK). You can export them from there. There are several free tools that will check your inlinks but since you referenced the penguin update as the problem then I'd use Google for my source.

Hello ypl,

You asked:

1. how would you factor in their page rank, visitors, page view and social media info?

2. if they don't have much traffic, with PR3 (we are PR4), which means we can't count on too much traffic from them, but, will backlink from such places deemed as quality link by Google?  I do  understand the higher number in PR and traffic is better, but, in our case, they don't come by often.  Is it still worthwhile to do the lower sites?

The 3 things I am conscience of when getting a backlink from any source are as follows:

1. Is the site or the particular content on their site being discussed relevant to your site? Meaning you don't want to ask a blog site that specifically talks about politics linking to your site if you sell bicycles. If the site blogs about a wide range of topics it certainly would be acceptable to get a link from a post that is discussing bicycles. There is a caveat to this, and that is it is perfectly acceptable for a few links from non-relevant sites or articles to link to you. I mention this so folks may understand links that are coming from non-related sites or topics can negatively impact your site if they are in the majority.

2. What is their pagerank and how many other external links are on the page where you will appear? If your site is have a PR4 page they want to link to and they are PR 0/1 I would be a little standoffish. However PR 2 or 3, certainly appropriate.  All things equal it would take about 600 PR3 links to push you from 4 to 5. Throw a couple 4's or 5's in there and that number goes down. (ref:: http://curiouslittleperson.com/backlinks-for-google-pagerank/) .

The second part is how many other external links are you looking at. If you are offered a spot on a wall of links even if the PR is 4 or 5, the juice passed to each one is watered down. I find it most appropriate to be on a page where there are at most 5 other external links. This really depends on the amount of content on the page, for example http://www.instructables.com/ writers often articulate very well on how to build a gizmo from scratch, these articles can be quite long and sometimes are paginated. If you sell a product they use and purchase from you, you may end up on a list detailing the parts needed on page 1 of the article along with 10 other companies, or they may link to  you in article with anchor text. The latter is better of course.

3. Does the site look like a site that you would appreciate a link from? What I'm really getting at here is does look to spammy, allow in-appropriate ads (xxx),  look like a dynamic smattering of content, or hasn't updated content since Clinton's first term? I will go on to finish answering your second question in that, even if the site doesn't see a lot of traffic, if you get 2 or 3 visits from them and they turn into customers the link was well worth it for that alone. There is something to said about quality rather then quantity.

The short answer is yes a pr3 link to pr4 is great and actually about what you should expect. Don't get caught up to much with traffic, while it is important it isn't the end all of the value of the link. In general if the site is well laid out, not spammy and will offer you anchor text rich backlink and the site or article is relevant to your page or domain then certainly take it.

Hi Mohit,

Seems like a waste of time to me when you can put a simple meta tag in there.

I can speak to the first scenario, that is exactly what the purpose of the rel="canonical" is for. Dynamic pages in which have a purpose for url appendages.Or in the rare case where you can't control your server (.httaccess) for 301 redirects.

As for pagination, I may not have the best answer as I have also been using rel="canonical" in those cases as well.

Yes I noticed this too, we just got their IP address and blocked their IP through .htacess.

A dash is considered a word separator. Similar topics can be found here in regards to dashes vs apostrophes, though this mostly references is in regards to a URL.

The problem you're up against is one that I've personally dealt with on my site o-ring vs o ring vs oring vs o'ring.

Do you use them all? Do you target just one? How does Google treat each one?

Well there is NO good answer I have seen. If you target more then one variant and they are treated as the same keyword then you maybe hit for spamming, but if you don't you may lose potential traffic / sales.

The only thing I can offer is more of a suggestion then anything. Go to Google and plug in the phrases in the keyword analysis tool found in the adwords account tools. In my case I found that three of the 4 of my keywords had the exact same monthly searches. This told me that those 3 words at least are being treated the same. So we picked the correct US English spelling and targeted that word.

In your case, I would assume AK-47 and AK 47 are the same so really are left with targeting just the 2 you have been AK-47 and AK47.

1000 quotes isn't that much, I'd push it out asap.

Please see Matt Cutts from Google response to this same question.

As for your options, I'd certainly try to keep it on the same domain and utilize it on the appropriate pages.

Only thing I saw straight away was you are using a canonical tag to point to a different domain...

http://www.turnstile-factory.com which then is redirected back to you.

Your canonical tag if needed at all should point to your domain & page root.

You should also deal with root/index.php 301 it to just root

Hope that helps,

Don

I would not recommend actively pursuing none-related sites guestbooks. There are several reasons why.

1. Typically they are nofollow, and if they aren't then they are spammed to hell and back.
2. Not related sites can potentially be seen as spammy if you get a crap ton of links from un-related sites you can be penalized.
3. The link juice gets diluted every time somebody else post a link.

Sure if you happen to be on a site, there is no harm in occasionally dropping your link related or not.

Related sites guestbooks still have the same potential pitfalls but may be worth a smidgen more time. Notably if you see your competitors there.

The main thing is don't over think it. If you see your competitors there and the site isn't riddled with spam, say nice job on the site, I like x article and move on.

Wow it took me 4 months to notice it

I was asked the same question recently by a person selling Sunglasses, thousands of them all with straight copy + paste manufacturers descriptions.

The only solution I can come up with that is anywhere near feasible is to create unique landing pages for the main keywords. In your case a landing page for Green Cogs or his case a landing page for Prescription Sunglasses. You can hopefully develop a few pages to get ranked and hopefully turn them rankings into customers.

With that strategy I also recommended employing a Review Section which would hopefully turn those customers into reviewers, thus generating unique content on each product page.

That is my best solution to date...

I was pretty impressed by the amount of data they can present to you and how quickly the site gets it to you.

Hit your GA account click the Home tab then click the Real Time (Beta) link in the navigation.

It is pretty impressive.

GoogleAnalytics.jpg

A website developer should be familiar with warnings and recommendations from Adwords campaigns and Google in general. Not "every" thing they suggest is applicable to every site, but your developer should know enough to explain why or why not each issue has or has not been addressed.

The "where did you get these" may actually be a fair question as he is trying to ascertain where he needs to investigate. If you gave me a list of warnings and suggestions about any of my sites I would also be prompted to ask where you got them from if you did not tell me "Somesite said this & that".

To my knowledge there is no penalty associated with design elements being re-used across multiple sites. As long as the content is unique there shouldn't be an issue.

I certainly wouldn't recommend making a duplicate E-commerce site that sells the same products, but that has nothing to do with the design elements The main concern in this case would be competing keywords, link building and SEO tactics in general.

Hi Dorian,

To my knowledge the Rel Warning from SeoMoz doesn't mean something is wrong, rather that the tag was detected.

I believe this is because if you can, you should properly redirect 301 to the correct URL instead of saying hey don't index this as what you see but what I say (which is what rel canonical does). However, there are cases with dynamic URL's this isn't always avoidable so the tag does server a purpose.

Rel Canonical may not be what you need here.

First question you need to ask yourself is the login page something that needs indexed by Search Engines? If the answer is no, block it with your robots.txt then use  -> rel="nofollow" on your login links.

If you have a reason for your login page to be indexed then you'll need to use the meta rel-canonical tag to point to the absolute root of the page.. based on your URL I would assume it is "http://irishdancingdress.com/wp-login.php"

Hope that helps

Interesting post there Brent, I would say in the case outlined there, it appears that apostrophes are not needed. Google Keyword tool does in fact return no results for the correct spelling for "boy's clothing". Other keywords I would not say that holds true.

An example from my industry is an o-ring

If you use Google Key Word Tool you'll see (all possible spellings)

• o'ring
• o ring
• o-ring
• oring

all have the same global monthly searches which to me means they are all being treated as the same word.

Now take the word o-rings

If you use Google Key Word Tool (all possible spellings)

• o'rings
• o rings
• o-rings   are the same BUT
• orings   is different

All this tells me is before I decide on the keyword and spelling of such keyword you should probably look it up.

As for the OP question, it is very interesting and I'm sure nobody can say for sure which is correct. Here in the past we tried to optimize for both variants, but I feel this runs the risk of being potentially spammy. So, we decided to spell the word correctly, and let the search engines decide if they wish to return us on SERP's to grammatically challenged searchers.

I would also urge you to look at the Google insta results, if you type in boy's clothing you get the "showing results for boys clothing" search for "boy's clothing" instead? message. Though both keywords will give you the same company as #1.

HI Ketlad,

I'm not 100% sure on your model, but it seems pretty much like a Huffington Post, which is take others content and regurgitate it? If so Egol has a point to a degree which is, you're dealing with big names and little control over what content is generated. If Hulu or Youtube post a video sure you may have a page for it, but if somebody is already at their site why would they go to yours to watch it?

I understand there are a crap ton of video sites, most of which I personally would never visit unless they had something nobody else had and I was pointed to the site by another person. That said, it should provide some insight as to what you can do. Try to understand why people go to these types of sites and what you can do to fill those desires. Additionally getting the word out about your site can be done by visiting forums and blogs and posting (not spamming) links to videos that may interest the community you are engaging with. Granted 3k to post links on a forums and blogs per month sounds like a lot but if your assistant uses the correct approach it could certainly bring traffic.

If you have the resources, skills and knowledge to understand why people use X site, and you can fulfill those desires and even make it better then you could do really well. You may have to take things to the next level, maybe a virtual museum that a person can design, and take people on tours of their favorite videos.. I know few sites are doing this with Pictures now, surely videos would be better. Anything you can do to put some power in the users hands give them control over what they see how they see it, and what they can do with it, would be a plus.

That is just my thoughts I hope it helps.

Apple could being doing it, to make other webmasters try it.

Apple is Apple I mean they could probably pass on most of the little stuff that so many people obsess over. They could be running a nefarious plot to make other sites follow bad seo practices thus diluting those sites rankings. Who knows, but it would be hard to hurt their selves with little things.

Hi Mark,

My understanding is having Nofollow links will dilute the juice this passed to the dofollow links.

You can read more on that on from Rand.. here

I will veer off a little from what Mark said in that having the navigation in the footer as well as the top header area, maybe okay if the site warrants it. Most all cases I would follow Mark's advice, but in a case where the navigation in the bottom can be perceived has "helpful" to the user, then it would be okay to use it there as well.

In the end you can't always do everything that is considered "Good SEO Practices" simply because it helps your SEO, you must also follow good site design and useability practices. If having the navigation in the footer helps the user, and is aesthetically pleasing then I would say it is okay. The real trick of course is to merge Good SEO with both aesthetics and useability.

Hope that helps,

Don

That was a very good question, and I had to respond to this so I can reference the responses later. I know we use Thomasnet, and I have for years thought they were extremely overpriced. Very astute observation.

Also your question was phrased as in the Domain, and you asked about the URL. I actually gave advice based on the URL.

The domain is a little more important then the URL since the Search engine would look at it and say wow a whole site dedicated to apples. Again, it would be impossible to target much more then 1 or 2 keywords in a domain name so you don't have much control over it. If you look at the big companies, their Domain name is also their brand name. Pepsi, eBay, PayPal, Amazon, Zappos, Microsoft.. in these examples the domain name (accept Pepsi) doesn't really denote any type of service or product.

A keyword in the URL is somewhat important, but not enough I don't think, to completely change a structure to accommodate it. If you're building a new page, and you know ahead of time the page is about apples, then of course you should name the page apples.html(or whatever).

This logic is, how I think the search engines treat a url, if the keyword is in the url then the page is likely but not necessarily about that subject. So they will give some credence to the keyword if found in a URL. The thing is you can't put every keyword that relates to your page in the URL and I believe Search Engines know this.

In short, it does help, but I wouldn't move the world to accommodate it. If you're making a new page certainly name it appropriately, if you have a page that is preforming horribly then sure change it, but don't spend your days worrying about about a well established URL.

HI Melvin,

In general Iframes aren't good from an SEO perspective.

There are some other similar questions about this in Roger's Belly

http://www.seomoz.org/pages/search_results?q=Iframes

We had a very similar issue. To solve it I did just as Elias suggested, I created  a case statement in php and then generated as much unique / specific to selection content as possible.

As much content that you can change while still being relevant to the person's click.. I would.

HI csblev,

Forum links / blog links are very important. For 2 reasons.

A. They typically are text anchor links like... you should try "Open Site Explorer". This gives Search Engines text to relate to the page based on what other people think is important about your page.

Compared to a link directory which usually is just your company name or url linked to your home page.. little value for any specific keywords except your company name which you probably have locked up anyway.

B. Secondly on forums / blogs that relate to your industry is where you want to be for direct customer purposes.

I've given this advice before, but I'll do it again.

Personally, if you have the time I would invest it in your business appropriate forums  and blogs. Find where your potential customers interact with each other, go to their forum and "engage" the community. Offer them free advice, answer questions and in general share your knowledge. By proving yourself helpful and when it is appropriate you can drop a link to a product page or an article on your site. The biggest caveat I can say is don't run around hitting up forums and spamming them, every forum that you want to be on has some sort of moderator that will remove your post. And personally if I'm on a community site and I see a blatant spam post, not only will I not click it, I will make a mental note to never go there.

I don't know what industry you're in, but if your site is much better and a leading authority then these types of forums should be picking up on you on their own. And your users / customers should already be generating some of these links for you, if not.. you need to ask yourself why not?. Sometimes forums need a push so it certainly doesn't' hurt to follow my advice above, but you may need to focus some attention on what you can do to make people want to link to you, rather then going out and doing it yourself.

Hi Martin,

I had the same question last month. A couple of the regulars were kind enough to give some advice, which was do nothing with them if you already have a site targeting those keywords.

You can read my question and those responses here, if you like.

I hope it helps.

I think what maybe getting overlooked is the fact that Google will or can separate words in a url. I have no official proof of that except if you go to Google and type something like "Bike Shop" the words "bike" and "shop" will be bolded in domains that contain the characters bikeshop.

This if nothing else suggest that Google can at least bold 2 words they are being treated as 1 word.  Maybe Matt Cutts couldn't say this directly since it hints at something in Google's algorithm. Giving  non-descriptive advice like "if it is well indexed I'd leave it alone" is better then saying don't worry we are breaking domains apart alphabetically to ascertain words.

It almost seems trivial to worry about something like that when there are so many other things that can be done SEO'wise. I've been on both sides of the fence and have taken solace in the words of Matt Cutts if it is already well indexed leave it alone, if it is a new page or one that is preforming crappy then use / change to dashes.

Hi Logan,

I was faced with the similar question a couple years ago when I started with my current company.

The short answer is no, do not change a url that is currently using underscores to hyphens if it is well indexed.

If you're making a new page, then you should probably use hyphens instead of underscores.

Matt Cutts (Google) Hypen vs Underscore

Matt Cutts (Google) YouTube Video

Hi Dan,

I have seen this question a few times, and Matt Cutts even took a stab at answering it.

I'll cut to the quick and then give you a link if you want to follow up about the information I am providing. The notion of 100 links per page started years back when Google and other Search Engines didn't have the ability / power to follow all the links, they instead just suggested, to ensure sites get proper attention limit yourself to about 100 links per page. Nowadays search engines can follow kabillion links, but keep in mind the more links a page has the less juice each one is worth. So the rule while not set in stone still seems to apply.

The truth is having more then 100 links is okay.. but be aware of the above information.

Ref: Seo Moz Post

Ref: Matt Cutts (Google)

Hope that helps

Yep, this I agree with this. 98% of the directories I see on the web are a waste of space and actually offer no value to a person looking for something. At one time they at least gave value to a business as a backlink. There are a few exceptions in each demographic as some directories actually have real content and good information along with their listings. Efunda / EngTips / IndustrialLinks to name a few in my demographic.

If you're just looking for a jumping off point, then those directories are worth some time, but I would agree with Keith that the value of such directories are at the very least waning.

Personally, if you have the time I would invest it in your business appropriate forums  and blogs. Find where your potential customers interact with each other, go to their forum and "engage" the community. Offer them free advice, answer questions and in general share your knowledge. By proving yourself helpful and when it is appropriate you can drop a link to a product page or an article on your site. The biggest caveat I can say is don't run around hitting up forums and spamming them, every forum that you want to be on has some sort of moderator that will remove your post. And personally if I'm on a community site and I see a blatant spam post, not only will I not click it, I will make a mental note to never go there.

I don't to derail your post getting into Dmoz.org specifics since its covered so many other times here and well.. just about everywhere on the web. I will say of the 10+ sites I've been part of submitting to them, so far 75% of them are approved, the longest one taking about 1 year.

If you haven't check it out yet SeoMoz.org has a very good listing of directorys / sites to get on if at all possible and or appropriate for your demographics.

http://www.seomoz.org/directories

**if you want to see the next page, you click a crawlable link that goes to **

**mysite.com/main-category12-24 **

**The site does not offer a view all function. **

Would applying the rel canonical tag be appropriate in this instance, or do I have to let Google crawl and index each page independantly?

In this example you actually are talking about 2 different pages and in which case it can be appropriate to use the rel canonical.

Example take a look at a popular plateform like Oscommerce.

The Index.php page generates the following pages

• index.php
• category pages
• sub category pages

These are referenced by the software by the cPath (category Path) and would look much like this

• index.php
• index.php&cPath=1
• index.php&cPath=1_5

To a search engine these are all unique pages. Additionally, since many e-commerce platforms follow this type of module but also have ways to make the pages more SEO friendly you can in some cases access the same page via different URL's which is of course bad, due to duplicate content. In these case a rel canonical is very appropriate.

For example Oscommerce has a SEO friendly URL modification which turns the unspecific URL like index.php&cPath=1 into something like electronics.html However unless some sort of redirect is used you can actually access this page via either URL.

To simplify the answer the rel canonical tag is most appropriate for pages that generate dynamic URL's but content changes very little. In my examples above the pages are very different index.php and a index.php&cPath=1 page, however there can be times when you have interactions on those pages which would create a new url like say adding a product to the cart or a product selection filter, or any score of interactions that may change the url from index.php&cPath=1 to index.php&cPath=1&addToCart1&Product_ID=414&return in this case rel canonical would be very much appropriate as the page is not really changing you're just executing an action.

Never heard of any of them you mentioned. The most valuable would be Dmoz.org, though I think its "value" maybe waning, and its not a guarantee for any site.

http://tools.seobook .com/firefox/rank-checker/ (Intentially put a space in there)

RankChecker will report back to rank 200.

See:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/iframes-seo

Short answer it won't do much good.

This is what we use

Replace html with php

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.html?\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^(.)index.html?$ "/$1" [R=301,L]

I'd remove the last 2 lines from your post and add that in...

Hope it helps.

Hi John

The first line removes the extension

The second line adds them back in a specific order IE you want PHP to execute first.

If you got it going that is what counts.

Good luck,

Don