I will try this for sure once I have no campaigns left. Thank you very much for your time Nakul.

Thanks a lot Paul,

I guess I will do both. Just want to try Jesse's idea and verify it if I can. As usual, your info is of great help. I think I should set up the new campaign ASAP like you suggested, it is better for me and my client. Can't risk all the valuable info to get wasted.

Cheers!

No new info yet. I guess i'll wait for the next crawl this thursday. What you say makes a lot of sense though.

thanks Jesse!

The site is completely redirected to the new domain. Does this mean I can keep my current campaign? would be nice.

Hello,

I set a client's website in one of my 5 campaigns in my Pro Dashboard. But my client changed his domain. I don't see an option to change the domain server in the Campaign settings.

Is it possible?

Hey Paul,

Thanks a lot for the info, to be honest I didn't even consider that. saved my life there.

And I hope Google doesn't take long to index the new domain.

Cheers!

Thanks a lot Paul and Mike!

Sorry for the late response.

Yes, the new domain is all about rebranding. Also, their old domain was too long.

Hello,

My client bought a new domain and he wants it to be the main domain of his company. His current domain though has been online for 10 years and ranks pretty well on a few keywords. I feel it is necessary to redirect the old domain to the new one to take advantage of its ranking and avoid any broken links.

The sites are exactly the same. Same sections and same content. Is it necessary to place canonical tags on one of the sites to avoid duplicate content/sites?

Any thoughts?

Thanks

Hi DHStom,

Thank you for your recommendation, I will start working on this strategy.

Cheers

I tried getting links from the non-profit organizations but... one doesn't have a website (and btw I'm considering making it for free) and the other one has terrible organization and no one seems to know who is in charge of the website, how to update it, etc. It is a bit sad.

I'm trying the social media approach but it is quite the challenge. They had less than 50 fans and I haven't been able to reach a 100 yet. I am struggling there too but just with a bit of patience I'm sure it will turn out ok.

I have noticed the strategies I find online regarding SEO and Social Media aren't very successful in Mexico. Mostly because they do not have strong online communities, and without them doing SEO is more difficult in my opinion. Educating people to adapt to certain activities or behaviors one would normally expect is not easy at all.

Hello!

A small company from Mexico that offers cleaning services for home & businesses wants to rank on the first page of Google.

The Good:

Every month they give away stuff (discounts and/or a free service) and they also participate in campaigns that support non-profitable organizations & charity. So there is plenty of material for me to build some backlinks and to create some interesting content.

Their competitors have 0 SEO. I have been doing my homework and none of their competitors websites that are ranking on the top 5 are doing any kind of SEO. But they have had their website for a long time and they probably have a decent amount of traffic per day. Open Site Explorer shows minimal to no websites pointing to them.

Google Adwords has increased their sales. They are using virtually nothing as budget and it is helping, but they want organic SEO.

The Bad:

Blogs seem to be dead in Mexico. And that is one of my strongest ways to create backlinks. I usually get a blogger to write about the company I'm working for to create backlinks and works like a charm in countries were SEO is prehistoric.

Usually it takes me very little effort to accomplish a website to rank very well in this kind of scenario, but I'm having trouble this time.

The Something:

I have been able to boost their rankings with basic SEO in a month but I'm stuck in page #2-5 on their most important keywords.

The Ugly:

I'm out of ideas. And their budget isn't good enough to apply paid strategies.

Any ideas?

Thanks for your quick response Aaron. What you said makes sense, and now I can go to bed with no worries.

Hello,

I got a client who told me that he bought his images from a stock photography website. I know it looks awful and all, but the client can't afford a photographer to get some decent pics.

So, How positive it is to use Alt Text on images that aren't yours? The purpose of using alt text properly is to get traffic from an imaged based search right? So if the business shows up with some stock photography it looks kinda bad.

Is it worth optimizing images in this case? Or just leave em without optimizing?

Changing pics isn't an option.

Thanks

Hello William,

I believe Google Places listings help a ton. Sometimes they show up at the top before any website and I think everyone agrees the info shown in the listing is very convenient and the map does draw some attention.

A client of mine boosted her sales thanks to the Google Places listing. She had better results with Places than with Adwords. It was very interesting, and I think this case isn't uncommon.

With Analytics you can track the source of your traffic and you can get Google Places to show you how many traffic you are getting from that listing. Perhaps with the data you receive from analytics, tho its a bit inaccurate sometimes, might help you and your boss to make better decisions.

I agree with Irving. And it is not rare to stumble upon junk sites who are using redirects to boost their ranking.

Are there any other images or links pointing to your urls with a / at the end? I would take a look just to make sure.

You can request an index removal with Google's Webmasters Tools.

Go to Optimization>Remove URL and type the address you wish removed. I did this with my .html urls after I uploaded my .htaccess file and worked like a charm.

Could you write the urls of the pages you are getting a warning for duplicate content? It looks like you might need some tweaks to your .htaccess file to redirect those pages to avoid having duplicate content.

Hello,

I am trying to achieve 3 different things on my .htaccess I just want to make sure I am doing it the right or best way because I don't have much experience working on this kind of files.

I am trying to:

a) Redirect www.mysite.com/index.html to www.mysite.com so I don't get a duplicate content/tag error.

b) Redirect mysite.com to www.mysite.com

c) Get rid of the file extensions; www.mysite.com/stuff.html to www.mysite.com/stuff

This is the code that I'm currently using and it seems to work fine, however I would like someone with experience to take a look so I can avoid internal server errors and other kinds of issues. I grabbed each piece of code from different posts and tutorials.

Options +FollowSymlinks            
RewriteEngine on

Index Rewrite                                                                                                                 RewriteRule ^index.(htm|html|php) http://www.mysite.com/ [R=301,L]                 RewriteRule ^(.*)/index.(htm|html|php) http://www.mysite.com/$1/ [R=301,L]

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.html -f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.html

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
Rewritecond %{http_host} ^mysite.com [nc]
Rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

Thanks a lot!

Brian's right. My brain thought automatically about expired domains so I messed up a bit.

Buying sites it's still a bit common. I don't do it often though. There are a lot of things you have to take in consideration when you do this and it can be a bit risky.

Where you buy them is very important. I would recommend flippa.com. Also, you might want to check how they built their ranking. You don't want to buy a domain using black hat SEO or you are going to spend tons of time removing links.

Make sure the domain you buy has something to do with your new site idea so it actually helps and boosts your SEO strategy.

This isn't much but it is how I have managed and done well so far. I would like to see what other users have to say, especially those with more experience doing this.

Cheers

Hey Matt,

Thanks a lot for your quick response. You're right, I was just considering those 4-5 factors. I really liked your theories and I appreciate the "How Garbage Ranks" link.

Cheers!

I'm about to work for a local business website that offers cleaning services and products. The keyword they want the most is ruled by a very odd site;

My client's competitor's site has been around for 7 years. (Less than the average of it's competitors. Less than my client's)

Has 1 backlink.

Lower PA MR MT & DA than any other in the SERP.

It's a 1 page site made with Flash.

They do not have FB or Twitter accounts.

So I thought maybe they were ranking so well because of their traffic. But neither my client, me or my coworkers have ever heard of this company.

And yet, they are ranking #1. And the only thing I notice that might have helped is that the title of their page is the exact keyword and nothing more.

Any ideas?

I would definitely start with social media. And I would also aim at blogs. There are tons of gaming blogs out there with a very loyal fan base. I would contact them to try to get a backlink to your site. Is it the website of a new Indie game your client developed? As a gamer myself I keep finding awesome indie games or blogs through reddit and stumbleupon. I'm not 100% sure what your game site is about but I hope this was helpful.

I think they got their rankings from doing old SEO techniques back in the days were some practices weren't penalized. I'm sure there will be a time when Google bot finds out they have unnatural/low quality links and penalize them and lose ranking.

Don't let that discourage you. I'm sure many of us come across this scenario very frequently. All I can say to you is don't join the dark side, be patient and continue working on your white hat SEO and creating great content and high quality backlinks. It's worth it and your effort will be rewarded eventually.

It means the content between comment tags won't get spidered.

I'm sorry if I wasn't clear enough on my previous comment.

Probably creating backlinks with those name variations in the anchor tags might help.

But why spend time and resources trying to make his site show up if people Google his name and/or name variations and not focus on making the site show up when people Google keywords related to the content/services/info John Smith offers?

Crawlers ignore comment tags. They do not have any SEO impact.

Thanks a lot for your response Dave. I'm now confident thanks to the responses on what should I do to solve my issue.

I know it doesn't sound very good but they only have 10 backlinks, and I doubt they are paid.

It seems the previous designer used a template, I am not familiar with the CMS they are using. It's not Drupal, Joomla or Wordpress (I forgot the name but has a sun in the logo).

I will follow your advice on the 301 redirects for sure and erasing the extensions using .htaccess.

Thanks a lot for your response!

Hi there!

A client requested me to change the look of his website entirely. It currently ranks #16 on Google with one of their main keywords.

My problem is:

The current site was made in a CMS I'm not familiar with and all of its pages urls are not SEO friendly (EX: http://www.mysite.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=49&Itemid=95).

It is the first time I have come up with this situation so I would appreciate any tips or links to useful information. I tried searching in SEOmoz and came up with nothing. I'm sure this is a common problem though.

Since they want a static website, for starters their page extensions will change from .php to .html I'm not 100% sure but I think this will be a problem for their current ranking in Google.

Any ideas?

Edit: I forgot to mention that all of the backlinks this site has points to their hompage as www.mysite.com, I guess this is good.

I agree those links aren't enough to be ranking that high, that's why I think they do get a lot of traffic.

And yeah they seem to have those footers on a few of their clients.

Indeed, it appears it is working for them. I think it's good and positive to have a link back to you from your clients website, but what these guys are doing seems a bit sneaky and greedy to me and affects their clients design in a negative way.

Well it has tons of links coming from 50 domains including their own. And it seems they did some SEO on most of them. So probably that plus a lot of traffic = PR5.

What I want to know is: Most of their backlinks come from their clients and they aren't topic related/relevant, so how much link juice are they really getting from them? Also they have like 4 links to them with different anchor text in the footer of their clients websites like this one pointing to them. Is that good? I don't think so but I would like some feedback from a more experienced SEO consultant.

Google doesn't crawl content inside an iFrame so I doubt it can mess you up. I read once it does affect where are the iFrame links coming from, I'm not sure though and if you are using Youtube and Vimeo I wouldn't worry.

I am confused though. First you said you were providing your readers quality videos but later you added "In general they probably aren't seen as too relevant to the overall content on my site..."

Just make sure you are delivering content that is helpful, relevant and interesting to your readers.

Hi wildcat143,

Feel free to create backlinks for any page on your website. I like to mix backlinks a bit depending on what content and section I want to rank up. Keep it balanced if you can. If your website has only a couple of sections I would only focus on my homepage honestly. Big sites like e-commerce sites should have lots of backlinks to their internal pages and their homepage as well.

SEO evolves constantly due to Google's algorithm getting smarter and smarter and more efficient to find spam websites. Don't try to force Google or you might get banned or penalized. Based on this, and because your site is new, I really don't recommend building that many backlinks per day.

Like sterls suggested, Google Places is a great directory-ish nice backlink to have. I also recommend Nokia Prime Place, Yahoo Directory, Foursquare and DMOZ (getting your site listed here might be hard, but it's worth trying).

It requires a bit of work to find directories that are trustworthy. But you can find some on your own with the help of Google. Don't waste your time on spammy looking directories full of ads. It's hard to tell just by looking at them sometimes, but good directories will ask you for a lot of information, your logo, images and will usually require some editorial approval before posting your link on their website.

Hope you find this information helpful!

Edit: By the way what Keri Morgret said is very important. I took that step for granted since I'm more of a web designer but she is absolutely right!!!

Brian-H is correct. I really like all the social media sharing buttons on top of the product page. Wise design indeed.

I believe what EGOL is trying to say is to focus on creating great content. New posts with great content people will share.

I really don't think you should get a new domain. You will earn quality backlinks once your readers start sharing your blog content

301 redirects will pass some of that sweet link juice from your old site to your new one.

Check this out!

Hope it helps!

I would start with On-Page Optimization. Make sure the title tags, images, h1 tags & meta description include the keyword you are aiming for. Make sure the content of your pages has your target keyword a couple of times and use bold or italic at least once to make your keyword stand out. Also make sure each of your pages have SEO friendly names like "www.mysite.com/target-keyword".

What I usually do next is to add Google Webmaster's tools and Google Analytics to my new site. Make sure to create and upload your sitemap.xml to your Webmaster's account.

After that I start creating social media accounts for my website, then wait between 1-2 weeks and start checking if my site has been indexed to Google.

I know SEO consultants no longer do articles submission. I believe it doesn't provide as much link juice as it used to and it might be penalized now by Panda or Penguin algorithms (could be wrong I am still learning).

Try to find a few trustworthy and high quality directories and submit your site on them but don't go too crazy.

Usually this basic strategy gets your site noticed by Google and the other search engines.

Create a blog for your new website and share useful and quality content so you can start using social bookmarking.

And of course try to create a great backlink strategy. I higly recommend you this video. And this amazing beginner's guide by SEOmoz. Take your time and track your progress. Make all your backlinks look natural.

As for how many backlinks per day just remember your site is new so don't go adding 100 links per day. Also, instead of worrying about the quantity, focus on the quality of your links.

Oh yeah, and be very patient!

Buying links is not a valid tactic for sure. And Anchor text linking (exact keyword match anchors)is dying if not completely dead already too. Maybe those websites currently earn a lot of links by creating a lot of helpful content people re-tweet or share. Or maybe their traffic is too high.

And if they have tons of unnatural links they should be getting penalized by Google.

I'm still learning SEO but I believe if those ranking sites have all those low quality links pointing to them they really shouldn't be ranking at all. I would love to see what others have to say about this.