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I wouldn't add phone numbers in the meta description because I want people to click into my website - rather than see a number in the meta description, then dial.
Write your meta description to elicit the click. Google knows when searchers click, they don't know when they dial.
Do everything possible to elicit the click... offer free phone consultations, free beer, anything to get the searcher into your website. Just make sure that you deliver what you use to elicit the click.
I don't know the answer to your question. However, I can say that LOTS of sites have lost their review stars triggered by schema in the past couple of months. For some sites the stars "just disappeared" and other sites received "manual spam penalty" messages from Google with language similar to what you posted above.
Some companies who offer the review services are not helpful when contacted directly and asked what to do about the problem... and Google's response to reconsideration requests often contain no explicit information.
You are not alone. Google seems to think that webmasters should be able to divine meaning from their messages.
how can you possibly do white hat work for that kind of money?
As SEroB says, if they are in a not-to-difficult local niche that might be enough to be effective.
If they are competing in a sleepy little product niche with mostly naive competitors then spending that $300 on one piece of really great content per month (hitting different keywords with each) might be enough to get some traffic flow that will pay back long term. It is possible that the competition is weak enough that a few pedestrian content pages will pull in traffic (but not links).
If the company has a person who can write this content then you might get a couple great pieces per month and use the $300 to promote them.
However, if they face any real competition at all then it might be best to tell them... "What would happen if you sent 10 soldiers out when 10,000 are needed? Right... you got your ass kicked and wasted 10 soldiers."
I think that it is going to take $xxxx/month (or whatever). If you are up for the fight I think I can help you but I don't want to lead you into a fight that you can't win.
Thanks!
I understand your comment about "knowing it when you see it". 
I am not looking for work. We are way to busy here working on our own sites and have not done work for others in over a decade.
I believe that Google ranks your pages on the basis of what they deserve with minor modifications. All of my sites have double listings where they are strong. Some have triple or quadruple listings where they are outstanding on multiple facets of a topic.
There are no "tricks" to getting these. You need content that answers the query, there can be multiple ways of answering the query, and your content needs to blow the competition out of the water.
I have always considered SEO to be "free".
There are quite a few companies who spend over $50,000/month on SEO.
And, if you consider content creation to be part of SEO then an awful lot of companies are spending that much per month on SEO.
All that I put into it is my time, both writing content and working on our websites.
You can place a value on your time. If you are just starting out just assign yourself a wage. If you have an established biz then divide your average annual profits by the number of hours that you work.
If you do either of those you will probably conclude that $300/month is not very much at all.
Let's say we have two domains. The "source domain" where the article first appeared and the "republisher domain" where the article has been posted with rel=canonical pointing back to the "source domain".
If you use a cross-domain canonical the copy of the article on the source domain will remain in the Google index. The article on the republisher domain will not be indexed. Also, any page that links to the page of the republished article will appear in the Search Console backlinks of the source article page.
The above is information that you can verify as fact through testing.
What can not be verified is how Google counts the juice from all of those links that show up in your Search Console.
My personal opinion is that Google faithfully counted the linkjuice when rel=canonical was first suggested "by Google" for attributing the source of republished articles.
However, I currently doubt that the linkjuice from cross-domain canonicals still carries the same value. And, because some people have been using cross-domain rel=canonical at industrial scale, I am starting to believe that manipulative use of rel=canonical can result in the same problems that you would incur from building unnatural links.
I am not doing anything at industrial scale, but because of the above I am not going to use cross-domain rel=canonical in the future and have taken down some republished pages that have been in place for a couple of years.
Two stories...
One of my competitors has their site redesigned about once a year. Twice in the past three years their designer tossed the new site up with noindex on every page. We notice right away but it usually takes them a week or two to figure out what's happened. When the remove the noindex the site returns to normal in a few days.
I noindexed a folder of 80 thin content pages immediately after Panda 2.0 in April, 2011. I allowed the pages to be open to visitors because they had some good photos and data tables on them. The site escaped in the Panda 2.1 about a month later.
Then, I started publishing same-topic articles on the same URLs, using all of the original content that was noindexed. When the article is finished, I remove the noindex. A new articles has the noindex removed about once a month. (It takes a long time to republish 80 pages at the rate of one a month.)
These URLs reside two clicks from the homepage on a long-established and reasonably powerful site. When I remove the noindex the amount of time for the page to start ranking can vary from hours to several weeks. A few times I went into the code to see if I forgot to remove the noindex - and I had not forgotten. Some of these page go right to the top of google for competitive terms. Others have trouble getting reindexed even though we point internal links to them on many parts of the site. We have waited a couple of months for some to be reindexed.
Good luck.
If these files have links, do they count as inbound followed links?
Yes, absolutely.
You can find links from .ppt .pdf .xls .doc and many other types of document files in your Google Webmaster tools account.
In addition, those documents accumulate PageRank and pass it. I have some PR6 .pdf documents. You can also optimize their document properties so that they will compete in the SERPs with a title tag of your choice.
If you publish these types of files, always put an attribution link to your website and don't hesitate to link to content on your website where it would be useful to readers.
If you are clever you can even place "Add to Cart" buttons in these documents.
I got into a Panda problem because I had a lot of duplicate content in .pdf documents - to control the scale and appearance of printed graphics. I was able to use .htaccess to apply rel=canonical to the .pdf documents and attribute them to specific html pages.
These documents can do just about anything that a webpage can do if you are clever.
These weasels steal images from my sites. I believe that they hope to pull in traffic from image search by displacing your images on your site with your images on their site. The goal is to produce adsense revenue using your images. We file DMCA with Google when high traffic images from our site are being used this way. We also file complaint with Adsense. We've done this against hundreds of sites.
There are many challenges to building a really large site. Most of them are related to building the site, but one that often kills the success of the site is the ability to get the pages into the index and keep them there. This requires a steady flow of spiders into the deepest pages of the site. If you don't have continuous and repetitive spider flow the pages will be indexed, but then forgotten, before the spiders return.
An effective way to get deep spidering is have powerful links permanently connected to many deep hub pages throughout the site. This produces a flow of spiders into the site and forces them to chew their way out, indexing pages as they go. These links must be powerful or the spiders will index a couple of pages and die. These links must be permanent because if they are removed the flow of spiders will stop and pages in the index will be forgotten.
The goal of the hub pages is to create spider webs through the site that allow spiders to index all of the pages on short link paths, rather than requiring the spiders to crawl through long tunnels of many consecutive links to get everything indexed.
Lots of people can build a big site, but only some of those people have the resources to get the powerful, permanent links that are required to get the pages indexed and keep them in the index. You can't rely on internal links alone for the powerful, permanent links because most spiders that enter any site come from external sources rather than spontaneously springing up deep in the bowels of your website.
I think that it depends upon the types of sites you are working on.
We work on one large info site and a couple very small niche retail sites. Two people, full time, almost 100% content creation.
Consult an attorney to get up-to-speed on copyright, infringement, and fair-use. Filing DMCAs or taking other actions that exceed your rights or infringe on the fair-use of others can result in a lawsuit against YOU.
Infringement by an upstanding company is usually done by an employee, a content writer, or an SEO who is ignorant about copyright law. Rarely they can be guilty of willful infringement, which can result in both civil and criminal actions.
If upstanding people or organizations are infringing, you can send informal infringement complaints yourself or have them sent by an attorney. It is often better to notify them of the infringement and get it stopped before it increases.
The quickest way to deal with spammy infringers is the DMCA to Google that SEAN suggests. You can also send DMCA to their host. If they are monitized by adsense you can complain to Adsense and they might turn off the ads on infringing pages or turn off the ads to the entire site.
I am not an attorney, but have used them frequently. They usually cost less than you fear and are usually worth more than you pay them.
All of my 301 redirects will still be in place when I attend my own funeral and my business succession plan orders the new owners to maintain them.
If you don't redirect and there are still links out there on other websites, Google spiders will not follow them to your site. Human visitors who find these links and click them will discover air instead of your website.
Great to hear that your content is bringing in good results.
One thing that you might consider, if you don't have it already, is a way to give people easy access to your new content. I have a blog where I make very short posts (these are noindex because they are only a sentence or two) about great content in the industry niche. I make five to eight posts per day (you could also do the same but once a week or once a month) and these are sent out to subscribers by feedburner. This has attracted thousands of subscribers. The advantage of this is... when I publish a new article I give it a good position in the feed - and it goes out to 15,000 people. That instantly produces some sharing, maybe some links and a lot of traffic.
Find a way to build your tribe.
Hi John,
You are placing way too much importance on DA. Google does not use DA in its rankings. Google most likely has never looked at the DA of the websites you are talking about. Your post uses "DA" or "Domain Authority" in almost every sentence, sometimes two or three times.
I suggest stop looking at DA and work to make the best website possible. Don't allow DA to be a decoy that takes you away from doing the work needed to win on the web.
So, get some coffee, and make a map of what it will take for you to have the best possible website in your niche. Then start working on it every day. Make sure you have the credentials needed to be taken seriously and valued by both your visitors and Google. If you don't have them, get them. Education is the key to writing the credible content that is needed to win on the web.
E
Our first priority is to write content that answers the questions that our customers are asking. This is usually easy because we tell this information by phone and by email everyday.
The next priority is to write content that explains how to use a product, how to fix it, how to select it. These articles can take a couple days for the author to research and write. A second person will be working on images or photos or data to illustrate the article. The people who enter the site through these article page often purchase consumable supplies, replacement parts or the primary item described in the article.
Although the cost of these articles are very high, they are usually evergreen and can be on your site attracting traffic and referring sales for a long time. But these are the articles that give your site a reputation for being a great source of content and a trusted place to do business. They are not "quick wins".
They are long term investments. Most business owners would balk if they saw how much time can go into the articles and the average weekly sales. They got to consider that there are 52 weeks in a year and the article will produce its results over time.
I agree. I think that the BBB is not a paid link. You are not paying them for a link. You are paying them for a rating and paying to give your customers a recourse to complain about you. Your rating can drop to a D if your customers complain or stay at an A if you treat them well.
I would not call it nefarious. I would simply call it duplicate content that Google will not be pleased with. Google can see lazy efforts to get links - and you are giving a reward to people who accommodate you. It's duplicate content. Google will likely ignore most of it. If you do this at scale don't be surprised if none of these links are counted.
"Google declared the max number as 100 internal links."
This is old information.
"Avoid Too Many Internal Links" error from Moz "
I think that Moz needs to rethink this, though I know a lot of people will disagree with me... but I am willing to bet big on myself.
You have been lead to ask this question because of the workload of keeping many sites current and dealing with their shopping carts. SEOs would complain about this for entirely different reasons.
I used to run lots of little "hotdog stand" websites. They did OK.
But then I built a big site and it defeated all of the hotdog stands and all of their competitors.
A big site can become an authority in many niches. A big site creates lots of opportunities for cross-selling.
Why not build mytruckparts.com and sell everything there. Redirect all of the hotdog stands to the big site.
Could these be shopped for links and RSS'ed out?
Yes. Lots of people know how to get an RSS feed without your help from a wordpress category. But if you offer links to them then anyone who wants them can subscribe. Lots of people subscribe to our categories by RSS. Also, lots of links go to our category pages from industry niche sites. Some publish our RSS feeds on their own sites.
The person who owns ExampleSite.com.br is smart. They know that some of their visitors have been typing ExampleSite.com into the address window of their browser by habit instead of ExampleSite.com.br. They also know that ExampleSite.com is easier than ExampleSite.com.br.
They have probably used a 301 redirect of ExampleSite.com to ExampleSite.com.br so that any links that go to ExampleSite.com are credited to ExampleSite.com.br.
If this was my site, I might have redirected ExampleSite.com.br to ExampleSite.com, because it is the easier of the two, but maybe the owner enjoys the .br and feels that it makes the site more appealing to the visitors.
Maybe you have an opportunity to walk away with all of the apples?
we didn't think that they would be ranked higher just because of more products
Glad you have your BS meter running.
So should our limited resources be focused on getting better links, better content, or increasing our depth of product range?
A good and reliable answer to that question would require considerable study of your website, of your competitors, of your business niche and of the characteristics and financial health of your business.
It is not a good idea to take action on advice based upon shallow information.
If these pages have good and substantive content then toss them up immediately. Time is money, get them up there.
If these pages have thin and trivial content then don't publish them until you have something good.
*By the way - all these URLs were already indexed in the past, but then redirected.
Why were they redirected? What makes them bad pages then and good pages today???
I have heard many times that Adwords and organic SERPs are not linked in any way. I believe that in my heart.
However, my brain tells me that if Adwords detects something that it really really does not like a signal will be sent to the organic quality control.
Google has not, in my knowledge said that they do this. But if you were Google would you?
Content like this will probably do it...
http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0839/_PMV.HTM
"Many a man who asks for a loan adds to the burdens of those who help him; If the lender is able to recover barely half, he considers this an achievement;"
Nothing is guaranteed when you move domains. I see the following risks....
we are launching all the pages again with new content, redeisgn
Yikes! New content might not be received as enthusiastically by the search engines. It might not be received as enthusiastically by visitors and they will bounce - sending a bad signal to search engines. If this was my site I would keep the content and the internal linking among the pages the exact same as it is now. If the rewrite is not done in a way that preserves the visitor's pleasure your rankings might fall.
These original sites... if they are popular and have a lot of type in traffic, a lot of branded traffic, a lot of brand mentions, a lot of domain mentions, a lot of good will, a lot of navigational search, then you will be walking away from that. Rankings can be supported more by these signals than by links in many cases. No guarantees.
We are in the process of moving 2 sites with higher page authority to another site we own
I believe that (generally) best SEO practice is done when the strongest domain becomes the host of the content. It then has the ability to pass its authority and reputation into the content being moved there.
**What is the health of these other domains? **
If you can't say that these other sites have clean link profiles, healthy content profiles, etc. then merging them could have some risk. It might pay to check these things out before merging. You know the story about "one bad apple."
If I had a project like this I would make one big asskicking site.
In my opinion, that will be better for SEO, better for cross-selling and better for efficient use of your time.
**Anyone seen a dip in rankings from their high-quality blog post strategy? **
Just browse through Q&A here and look for posts with a title something like...... "Wah! my rankings dropped." You can see plenty of people are still getting smacked.
Probably part of the reason is that people who are doing "high quality guest posts" today were doing "spam quality guest posts" last year and have that link profile on their site.... and some of the people who think that they are doing "high quality guest posts" today are really doing "spam quality guest posts".
Google does not update these features very often. We moved some content to another website in February and some of these features are still showing in the SERPs for the old location.
However, we placed 301 redirects on the original pages so that this traffic from Google, existing links from other websites, bookmarks from past customers and many other types of traffic will be redirected to the new destination.
We always put up 301 redirects anytime we move anything and they will be there forever - even after my funeral - and my business continuity plan instructs my heirs to keep these 301s in place. I believe that holding these 301s in place beyond my lifetime is best practice (I am a lot older than most Moz fans).
I think that it will be hard for some people to remember the middle initial. As a result some will type the domain without the initial and your traffic will go to someone else.
I could remember AJSolomon easily if you like that.
andymisiu is kind of hard to remember and spell
...This isn't advice... just what I think.
Sometimes I think that Mr. Cutts will say these things knowing that many webmasters will believe him and stop doing what Google wants them to stop doing. Then later they may make some algorithmic changes...
I think you are right! Thanks for the laugh.
I can't figure out if they are really that ignorant of the rules or if they are just lying.
Probably both! And, they say anything that makes the best story to gain a client, hold a client or make themselves look innocent when things go wrong.
Lots of affiliates are really really smart people. If you require them to use rel=canonical they will know what you are doing and what the result will be. So, if you have great affiliates don't do this to them unless you want to risk losing them.
I am an affiliate and if the program manager told me to rel=canonical my pages to his I would reply.... "you point your pages to MY site or I am leaving".
I would not be linking to them either because their product might go through a shopping cart on my domain.
If I ran an affiliate program and had very valuable and smart affiliates I would produce new content for my own site that takes me out of competition with the affiliates and let them know that they are free to use the data feed or create their own unique descriptions. But that descriptions on my site are off limits.
You don't want your superaffiliates jumping to the competition or becoming your competition. They are not married to you and even if they are they will file for divorce.
If websites have good DA will be trusted as per Google norms.
I do not believe that this is true. I think that DA and "trusted by Google" are very different things. I think that some sites with very high DA are not trusted by google and penalized by google.
I think that links to or from some high DA websites could be harmful to your rankings.
I would like to hear Moz or Google respond to this.
Google might have lifted a manual penalty but algorithmic penalties are still holding the site back.
It is possible that Panda (low quality content) or Penguin (link spam) penalties are causing the current problem. Numerous DMCA complaints or other infractions could have gotten the site banned.
A link audit or content audit might reveal the cause.
"Your site wont get any penalties as long as your site was indexed first."
Who is indexed first does not matter. What matters is who has authority. Authority often wins even if last published.
I have to disagree that an "SEO specialist" would complete any of these tasks, to be honest.
Lots of this stuff is done by robots and the "SEO specialist" (ahem) takes credit for it.
... and the webmasters who want their site to receive genuine "bookmarks" or "shares" or "listings" have content that is either so skimpy or so bad that they don't need an SEO specialist.... they need a magician.
If you do what Jane suggests, and do it exceptionally well, you will not need an SEO specialist or a magician because your visitors will do the bookmarking, sharing and listing for you. Visitors to websites love to tell their friends when they find fantastic stuff. It makes them feel like Christopher Columbus or Indiana Jones and they wanna tell their friends about their discoveries. Also, a busybody or a gossip can be better than lots of SEO specialists. They tell everybody everything - but this works best when you have juicy stuff to talk about.
I don't believe that it "hurts" to put up a temporary site. However, if it subtracts from your time of getting your real site up then that is a sacrifice.
I would rather put up the first few pages of my real site a day or two early than get a temporary site up a week before.
The only exception is that I would want something up ASAP if I knew that important people were looking for me.
Let's say you are the affiliate program and I am the affiliate.
You allow me to use the descriptions verbatim from your data feed or from your website.
If I have a site with more authority than yours then my site will probably rank higher in Google SERPs than your site. And, if dozens or hundreds of affiliates republish that same content then your site could be filtered from the SERPs or demoted because of a Panda problem.
From a business perspective your sales will be higher if every affiliate writes his own content, then, although they will be direct competitors for primary search queries they will cover more long tail queries and that results in more sales for everyone.
Unfortunately it is hard to force affiliates to create unique content - especially if there are thousands of products being sold.
Maybe you could incentivize and give a slightly higher commission rate for affiliates who after six months can show you that they have unique descriptions for every product that they are promoting.
Back to your original question. If your affiliates are all using your product descriptions, it would be in your best interest to rewrite and improve the descriptions on your own site and tell the affiliates that they are off limits. Either use the descriptions in the datafeed or write your own for a bonus commission rate.
TheDude: Thanks for sharing this information. Sorry that this has not worked as expected.
I am surprised that the spectacular prize has not produced a spectacular impact. Really puzzling when free money isn't like throwing gasoline on a fire.
Good luck.
My bet is that Google sees these as low quality pages because there is not much text content beyond a quote and that same quote can be found on lots of other websites. Google is looking to promote pages that have unique and substantive content that does not already exist on hundreds to thousands of other websites.
Although other websites are in the SERPs with simply a quote and some supplemental content, they claimed that turf first, are now well established sites. Newcomers who enter these SERPs without unique and substantive content are going to be placed in the supplemental results or filtered from the SERPs.
Turf in the SERPs has become really hard to get. You will have to do more for these pages to be successful.
Affiliate sites get hit mainly because they are usually just signposts for someone else.
If you want to survive as an affiliate build a content site with a store, a content site with affiliate links instead of ads, or a site with a shopping cart operated by the affiliate program.
Don't bet on anything.
Pintrest can follow or nofollow at whim. Google can honor them or ignore them at whim. What they do now and what they do in the future can be changed without tellin' you. (There are four combinations here... that means that you got a 25% chance of bein' what you want.)
If you are going after these it gotta make sense for reasons of traffic and exposure....
Honestly, most people who see your images there don't know you made 'em and aren't coming to your website. And most of the people who do see your image and come to your website are not buyin' anything - they are just interested in stealin' more of your images.
Pinterest is a valuable strategy for a very small number of websites. Everybody else has been fooled.
OK... take your chances. Thousands of people are still being flogged by Penguin after two years.
I find lots of dupe content too.
Instead of building 30 sites I would focus on one, filling it full of high quality, original, substantive content.
Actually, I don't think that I would make a travel site like these because I don't have the resources to compete and the ability to produce fantastic content for cities around the world.
Lots of people see the sites of an industry ranking well in the search results. Then when they try to make their own site or a clients they discover that they can't rank. That's because they have zero authority and no power.
it is worth it or better stop this project and focus on 1 product oriented website ?
That is what I would be doing.
is affiliate marketing dead in 2013 now?
AM has been really hard for several years unless you have a heavyweight site. You can no longer toss up a site with grabbed content - or even original content and get traction in an industry as competitive as travel.
or my writers
heh... you gotta keep an eye on these guys.
Many universities have a "study abroad" program. These programs usually have a faculty or staff member who assists students looking to spend one summer or one semester studying at a university outside of the USA.
If the program has a website it can usually be found in Google with a query like this....
site:.edu study abroad program
Many universities also have internship programs. These can be arranged through a central office or through faculty members in individual department. Internships are normally served within the USA and within a short distance of the school. Some might be open to internships abroad. You can find them with queries like these....
site:.edu internship programs
site:.edu engineering internships
I would publish unique descriptions. The advantage of unique descriptions is that you are not one of many with the same content in the SERPs. Your pages will have more unique keywords for long tail reach beyond your competitors, and your pages will not be filtered from the SERPs because you arrived late with a weak site displaying the exact same content as others. You are entering a competitive environment. Compete or die.
I wouldn't hire students. I would hire a couple people who have university degrees in English with an emphasis in literature and who have earned excellent grades. These are folks who know books, have bought lots of them, are familiar with their commercial descriptions and can write freely and easily with proper grammar, spelling, punctuation, etc. The competing salaries are not as high as other employees. They will cost more than a rocks-for-jocks sophomore who is about to drop out, but they are definitely worth the extra money for the quality and productivity that comes with them.
I would tell them to start by picking books that they are already familiar with and write some sample descriptions. Before they start writing I would have them use SEMrush on the title of the book and get some sample keywords of what people with commercial intent might include in a query.
After that, I would have them focus on books that are not best sellers - too much competition there. They would also focus on higher price books with search volume - more profit there.
Don't try to save money by attacking with a rubber sword. You know what will happen.