Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I am new to seomoz forum  and this is my first query. Even i asked this query in many forums, i didnt get the right answer.

Sometimes you can get the right answer but not realize it.  Usually the "right answer" tells you to do very difficult things.

Since 2yrs i am doing seo for my site. even i am following all the white hat techniques and doing every submission manually.

It sounds like you are submitting to directories.  That does not work very well these days.

Also one of my sites recently got disappeared from google. I have checked all the pages listed in google for my site's major keywords. I didnt find the site anywhere. Can u hep me why this condition wll happen and what to do to overcome such issues?

It sounds like you are not doing "white hat".

Why don't you tell us exactly what you are doing to promote this site and we will tell you what you should stop doing.

What are the techniques i need to follow to increase site visits?

Build a great website that lots of people will enjoy visiting and find valuable.  This takes a lot of work.

After you have that then share it with others through facebook and twitter.   Share it with bloggers in your topic niche.

We are changing the site from .net to .com. Will that change the picture?

Oh.... be careful, you are changing the URL's.   If doing that then you need 301 redirects.

We are creating an entire new navigation...

OK... and you will be changing the flow of power through your site and possibly the anchor text... I hope that you are using spiderable ways to link these pages.

If you don't understand the answers you are getting then I highly recommend getting an experienced person to check your work - especially if this is an important site that supports and business and its payroll.

If you are simply changing the "template" of the site the rankings should not fall.   Unless you do sin such as changing the URLs or changing the on-page optimization or internal link structure.

If you are redesigning the site one of your goals should be making improvements in the rankings.  If you are doing this in fear of loss then maybe you should have someone advising you with the project.

If your designer carefully preserves the on-page optimization and your internal link structure then your rankings should not go down.

If your designer does not understand how to preserve the on-page / link structure  and knows that changing the URLs is a problem then you need a different designer.

I agree with you, I agree with you, I AGREE WITH YOU!

But why would anyone want to read a blog post about wisdom teeth written by just some random person at a marketing company?

Yep!  It is probably BS, bad advice and the language this person uses will sound like a noob to anybody who knows much about dentistry.

Dentists (and other professionals) hire SEOs because they want the rankings and either don't know how to do the work and they don't have time.  Maybe it's cheaper to hire an SEO than it is to do it themselves so they can be down at the pub while the SEO's contractor is writing this crap.

I sort of feel that the internet is already full enough of advice and information from people that have no idea what they're talking about.

Man has seen the Stone Age and the Bronze Age and the Iron Age.  Now we are in the Age of Bullshit Content. 

I don't have the answer for you but I have a couple of stories that you might enjoy.

One guy writes and wants to send me an article for my website about a technical subject.  I write back and say... "tell me your qualifications".  He writes back and gives me the name of the guy who will write the article (his story changed) and I Google him.  He is a professional in the field so I say, "I'll consider the article."  I get the article and could tell  it was written by a noob in the first sentence.  Joe Pro did not write it.  Some noob wrote it.

A different day I was using google image search and find one of my images on an law firm blog.  They hired an SEO company to blog on a different domain and point links at their site.  Those rats were using stolen images in their articles.

I don't do SEO for other people any more but if I did I would try to sell them on the idea of building a fantastic website with expert content.    That is such a great thing in many ways.  It demonstrates their expertise, it shows that they are generous and it is a great way to promote their website.

So few people are willing to do this that it is often easy to really stand out in your business niche.

I am very confident that you can have two ads above the fold and not have a problem with Panda.  I think that Panda is more about content problems than it is with ad problems.

I own and know of lots of sites that have a leaderboard above the content and either a skyscraper or large rectangle above the fold and beside the content.

So, if you are not slappin' the visitor's face with the ads I think you will be fine.

Thank you, Lawrence.

Good information to have.

One new contact as result of the trust signal is worth quite a bit to them.

Good point.  One new client could justify decades of membership fees.

Jesse,

I really respect that you carefully thought about each member's posting and shared how it might apply to your projects.

It is beneficial for everyone to have these discussions.

Keep up the great work!

This is a great question. Thanks for asking.

I don't have BBB affiliation for any of my sites but am considering it for one of them.

The one that I think it would help the most is an ecommerce site that is successful but does not yet have dominance in the SERPs (although in my opinion it has the best and deepest content in its niche).

I think that displaying the trust mark will help with conversion rates.   I also think that the BBB affiliation could influence Google to improve the rankings slightly.  This is a relatively young site that is still climbing the SERPs.

I would not go to the expense of BBB for an information site that is mature in age and has strong rankings.  The conversion rate benefit is not there and the trust benefit with Google would be very small compared to its current strength.

Looking at your list, this is the site that I think has the greatest potential....  *Metropolitan Massage Business - 2 contractors.  100k annual revenue.  1st page for most relevant serps.  But few #1 rankings.

Looking forward to what other people have to share on this topic.

do you think it is okay to use Google images for your blog posts as long as it credits or includes a link to the site in which you located it?

No.  It's not OK.  If you are using my images then what you are doing is theft.

Contact the owner and ask for permission.  That is easy to do.

Some will say yes, some will ask for a license fee.  Some will say no.

We tried looking at stock art for some license-free photos and had no luck in coming up with good pictures.

I have this same experience.  So, I purchased a very nice camera, professional lights, and have allowed employees lots of time to develop their skills.  We often spend $100 or more for the props to get one photo - and several hours of employee time to shoot, reshoot a reshoot to get what we want.

If you want to use the photo that I have spent that kind of time and money on then I am going to say "no" or ask for a fee to recover at least some of my costs.

How would you feel if you spent lots of time writing an article and somebody grabbed it and republished on their website and outranked you for your main keyword.   That is how I  feel when someone steals one of my photos.  My employees get mad about it too.

WE DID NOT CREATE THESE PHOTOS TO SUPPORT YOU OR YOUR CLIENTS.  We created them to build a unique and valuable website.

What rules or guidelines do you follow when looking for pictures for your customers blog (or your own)?

First I look for public domain photos on a .gov site that are available for free use.  I also use iStockphotos because they have lots of nice images.  Sometimes i find creative commons photos.  Or I see a photo on a website and offer them payment to use it.  I have offered $25 to $500 for use of photos.

If I can't get photos from the sources above we then travel, purchase props, hire an artist or take other steps to get the images that we need.

The cost of photo acquisition should be built into the fee that you are charging your client or into the content budget for your website.

the articles are not evergreen

I have a "news" area on one of my sites.  Instead of making the huge investment in authorship, I simply link with a comment to articles on other sites.  This allows me to provide four, six, eight, ten items per day in just an hour.  Writing (at least for me) would take a very long time.

If there is enough news in your niche and you can select the valuable stories then your site could become the "go to" location for people to keep up with the news.  In my opinion, the human aggregator with some commentary is better than the robots.

If you do a good job and allow people to subscribe by RSS  and email you might build up an extensive list of industry subscribers.  Once you do that the stories will start coming to you instead of you hunting for them.

I like both of the suggestions given by Online Marketing Guy and Anita Clark.  Both are great ideas.

Online Marketing Guy's idea is fast and low cost.  Anita's is high quality and an investment.

Before deciding I would look at the traffic coming into these articles.  Are they getting traffic, are they earning links, is the traffic valuable.  If the answer is "NO" then maybe a greater investment in content is not going to pay.

Now.... if this site belonged to me and I wanted to produce "news for an industry niche"... I sure would not build a second website.  I would add that news to a blog on my primary site.

Divide and conquer has been a battle plan since the beginning of history.  You are doing this for your enemy.   Instead, unite the clans.

If you do a full reinstall it might work.

The problem could be in the pluggins as they are installed - or they could have vulnerability that is exploited after install.  If you were running an old version of wordpress, it could have holes.

The problem could be on your computer and it gets into your wordpress when you upload files, the server could have openings that are being exploited.

There are so many ways for these things to happen.

I would hire a pro.

These types of problems can be very difficult to solve and can come from a variety of sources.

I would contact them and ask how much to clean a wordpress install.  I bet the price is lower than you think.

Which is better in your opinion a short but to the point paragraph, or longer but more generic content about whatever product you are selling in google's mind ?

If you write a short paragraph of a couple dozen words you run the risk of "thin" content.   That is usually not a problem if you only have a few of these pages on your website, but if you have thousands of them then it is possible to be hit with a Penguin problem.

Writing those short descriptions is also a lost opportunity.  If you write something substantive it might rank better and it will also bring you more long-tail traffic from the diversity of words on a page.

So, you have to please the visitor (Jane in Nebraska) and you have to please google.  To do that you can write a very short paragraph that summarizes the product or topic and then add as much supplemental information as you want below.  That gives visitors immediate and short information - plus those who want more will have it readily available.

I had a lot of pages on one of my sites that had very short (15-20 word) descriptions.  When I upgraded them to 100-300 words most of them improved in rankings within a few weeks and they immediately received a lot more traffic from long tail queries involving words that were not included in the original short description but were included in the improved version.

I am currently upgrading the 100-300 word descriptions to articles with several photos and 1000 to 3000 words of text.  These are now some of the best content on the web for these topics and they compete for top positions on the first page of the SERPs, they appear in lots of image searches and pull in even more long-tail traffic.

Thanks....

I think that the people who gave thumbs down want to hear...

"Uh  huh... looks good."

Who on SEOmoz is going to do a competent content review of my article on flame spectrophotometers?

"Uh  huh... looks good." is what I will get.

You said that you wanted a content review.

I told you where to get competent opinions.

If you have a website about hydraulic jacks, ask someone who knows about them.

If you have a site about knitting, ask someone who knits.

Otherwise the reviewer will tell you....  "Uh  huh... looks good."

Maybe write "Confessions of a Blackhat". 

OK... thank you.

I'd just pay some Indian dude to search for my website on different IPs and click through in the SERP.

I think that you will get away with this for a short time unless you are paying to have this dude on a permanent world tour, staying in quality hotels in many parts of the world just to click your links in the SERPs.

Don't underestimate Google.

If I was going to put my good work into a blog, I would not have it on a subdomain.

I would dump BigCommerce.

Sorry... it is much easier to get another shopping solution than it is for me to put my great content out there and get fractional value out of it.

However, if I really liked BC I would see if somebody somewhere knew how to work around this to get my blog into the valuable folder position that it deserves through a technical trick.

There are lots of great shopping carts out there but only one blog written by me.

Tell the boss at BC that his solution is limiting.

If I owned a company that did plumbing, electrical and air I would call it EgolServices.com and I would have ONE website.

All of the links that any part of that business earned would benefit the entire domain.

And all of the trust that my plumbing staff earned would generate repeat business when the same client needed air.  All of the trust that my electric staff earns would generate repeat business for my plumbers.

Why make clients make separate decisions when you are out there doing good work?

The big air conditioner that you want in the house will probably need a more substantial wiring.   Just call EgolServices and they will take care of it.

I think that this is a nobrainer.  NoBrainer.

I wish I had a big stack of books to publish on my site.

I agree with you!

salivatin'

1. Is it likely that the traffic and links to the new book pages would improve the search engine rankings of our existing pages?

This is going to be kickass.   KickAss.

In addition to traffic and links this will make you look like a very generous, experienced and credible company.

2. We already have pdf versions of each book we could post, which are formatted nicely. Should we convert these to html to make them more friendly to search engines?

You can use them as .pdf documents.  If you do be sure to optimize them by modifying the properties of the document to add a title tag.  Also, add links within the documents that allows any linkjuice that flows into them to travel back to your site.

I would probably post these as nicely-formatted html documents, optimizing chapters for specific search terms.  You can then monetize with ads, use them to guide people to conversion opportunities on your website.

3. Of course, we would have to split each book into multiple web pages, perhaps one chapter per page. How much content could each new page optimally accommodate?

I don't hesitate to place a few thousand words and several images on a page.  If you do that to a page that has a free-standing subject then it could attract a nice number of links.

4. Would it be more valuable from an SEO perspective to post pieces of the books over time in a blog format?

I would build a library of html documents (maybe offering downloadable file formats that can be read on mobile devices) and get them up ASAP.

This is going to be KICKASS.

Most people believe that doing 301 redirects causes a small decrease in the value of incoming links.

Do you think that you will gain more from changing the URL than you will lose through the redirect?

If you have a new site that is poorly established then I would not worry too much about the redirect because you don't have much power.

However, if you have a strong established site there could be a lot to lose by doing the redirect.

So, the gain from the nice URL could be     YourPower + X

... but the loss from the redirect could be     YourPower /  X

If I didn't know the value of X I wouldn't monkey with the URLs.

I think that the link structure is far more important than the folder structure.

I have found good writers by looking at the blogs in my topic areas.  Sometimes people have a blog and write just to share their ideas, then if you offer to pay them to write for your website they are really happy to get such an offer.  Some of these people are excellent writers.

This content needs to be of the highest quality.

If that is what you want....  and I agree that is what your goal should be...

Then you need to ask a very specific question so that the recommended writer will be someone who knows what he is talking about.

I don't think that any given writer can produce "highest quality" content about hydraulic jacks, knitting, spectropotometers, celebrity gossip, and energy policy economics.

Highest quality writing isn't a commodity that you buy and sell like potatoes... and even if you are spending a lot of money on potatoes you better know what you are doing.

As you describe your problem it seems to me that you will have lots of very near duplicate content pages on your site.  That can cause a panda problem and is a waste of your website's power.

There are multiple solutions.

1. combine all of these color,etc. variants to a single page

2. use rel=canonical to attribute duplicates to a master version

3. write very unique descriptions for each color,etc variant, optimizing each for a different query

I am not going to comment on the .com vs. .com.au question because I don't know anything about the goals of your business.

However, the blog should be at currentdomain.com/blog or newdomain.com.au/blog (or some other folder name - probably not "blog" because that attracts robots who want to spam your comments)

If you place it in a folder then links to the blog will directly benefit your primary site, while if it is on a subdomain the benefit is fractional.

I see your site at #15 from the eastern USA.

I don't see any special reason why your site deserves a spot on the first page.

If I was google I would rank the homepage of thebestespressomachines.org/ over your category page for "expresso machines".

If I owned your site I would attack with the homepage by reoptimizing.  If I owned your site I would be working on original content.  I see your content on lots of other sites.

The homepage of thebestespressomachines.org/ (weakest competitor on page 1 of the SERPs IMO) has everything that everybody everywhere is searching for about expresso machines.  Then when you click deeper the content can be impressive.

Overall superior site, IMO.

I am willing to bet that old data is being served for WidgetingA.  I believe that updates to the SERPs do not occur for all keywords at same time.

It could also be a sever on the tail end of a database update - since Google has thousands of severs responding to queries and updates to the databases do not propagate  instantaneously.

Those are at least two explanations.  There are probably more.

If you have done this you might make a lot of money.

You might surprise me and have high quality content for these pages... but for the volume of pages that you are talking about I think that it would be really hard and really expensive to have content that will survive.

That's about all I can say.

"hotels new york table tennis"

"hotels boston table tennis"

Just being honest.   These sound like spam to me.

If you have 1/4 million pages of this stuff my money is on your site getting toasted.

New pages are mostly just 2 clicks from my index page.

Here is the way I view 1/4 million pages.

If you have 25 links on your PR6 homepage - each hitting one of 25 category pages, then each category page linking into 100 subcategory pages and each of those linking into 100 individual pages.  That's what it takes to get 1/4 million pages on a site with each being three clicks down.

If your homepage is a very strong PR6 then you might have a chance with such a content structure.  If it is a weak PR6 then I think that you will need more links into the category pages or deeper.

If all of these links are from internal pages of your own site you might see a bit or rankings decline on your site's historic pages.

Do you think new pages could harm ranking/indexing of my existing destination pages?

YES.   If these pages are thin content or have heavy page-to-page duplication it can trigger a Panda problem for your website.  This can result in a site-wide ranking reduction.

I know people who have lots of pages built from commonly used geographic databases such as GNIS and their sites have been hit.  Probably because they have a common template with different fields of data inserted.  Their page get indexed, rank for a while and then they see a huge rankings and traffic drop.  Historic pages suffer along with the new pages.

In a span of three months you are going to go from 30,000 pages to 1/4 million pages.   If these pages really are unique, genuine content with minimal duplication - not cookie cutter pages - then you have a chance that they will be indexed and stay in the index  --  if and only if your website has enough linkjuice.

To get these pages indexed you will need many powerful links connecting deep into the mass of new pages to send spiders in and force them to chew their way out through the unindexed pages.   These links must be permanent.  If they are not then google will not spider these pages very often and they will be forgotten and drop from the index.

For 1/4 million pages you will need at least a couple hundred links from PR4 or better pages (each without a lot of outbound links) to supply enough spider action to get the new pages indexed, hold them in the index and make them competitive.  So, be sure that your plan to enlarge this site will have that.

If somebody gave that site to me I would go back to basics.

I think that the category and product titles have not been planned with keywords in mind.  I would talk to the business owner and determine what keywords he needs to be visible for in the search results. Then a detailed plan of systematic categories and product types would be developed and the goal would be to fill all of them.

Then I would make no more than one page for each product type.  That page would have several photos (sometimes a lot of photos) and each photo would have a generous description.  I would tell the business owner that I need those descriptions.  If he is not willing to write them I would ask him if he wants to be competitive or if he wants to fart around.  If he wants to be competitive and bring in long-tail traffic then he better get writing and do a good job of it.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words so the owner of this business should have no trouble describing the product.

I would spend the time needed to do an assessment of these pages.

** how many of them have external links

** how many of them pull traffic from search or other sites

** how many of them are currently useful (are people looking at them)

I would delete (and redirect the URL) of any page that answers "no" to the three items above.  These are "dead weight" on your site.

Also, if these are .pdfs of print ads then they might simply be images in a pdf.  (test this by searching for an exact phrase from one of them in quotes and include site:yourdomain.com in the query.   Keep in mind that google can read the text in some images embedded in pdfs.

I had a lot of pdfs with images on one of my site and got hit with a panda problem.  I think that Google thought that the .pdfs were thin content.  So I used rel=canonical to assign them to the most relevant page using .htaccess.  The panda problem was solved after a couple of months.

Also, keep in mind that .pdfs can be used for conversions.  You can embed "add to cart" buttons and links into them and they will function just as on a web page.

If any of these pdfs are pulling in tons I traffic I would figure out how I can put the pdf to better use or create webpage (and redirect the pdf) to best monetize/convert or whatever you business goals dictate.

Can a bot navigate via a back button?

I don't think so.  They can follow links but they can't "click".

I see 6000 pdfs as an amazing opportunity.  Get links on those pages and it will funnel a lot of power through your site.

If that was my site, we would be on that job immediately.  Could be a huge gain for some easy work.

Go back and rework our .pdfs so they at least contain a link back to the homepage?

Yes!  Absolutely!  And, link them to other relevant pages.  If  these are reference documents they could be pulling in a lot of links and traffic from other sites.

In addition toAs well as configure the hyperlinks so they open in the same window instead of a new one?

In my opinion, this is not an SEO issue.  This is a usability issue.   I would have them open in the same window so the back button is available.

.pdf documents are crawled by bots and they accumulate pagerank just like .html pages.

You can include links in them to other documents on the web and bots will crawl those links and pagerank will flow through them.

.pdf documents can be given a "title tag" equivalent by opening their properties and giving the document a title.  This title will display in the SERPs.  .pfd documents can be hard to beat in the SERPs if they are optimized and have links from a competitive number of other web documents.

Lots of document formats behave this way.  Excel, PowerPoint, Word for example.

In my opinion, .pdf documents can trigger a Panda problem for your site if you have a lot of them with trivial or duplicate content (as in print versions of web documents).  They can be given rel=canonical through .htaccess to solve the Panda problem but Google often takes a long long time (sometimes months) to recognize the canonical and use that instruction.

I have read a number of ppl suggest that the best way to learn SEO is to build a low stakes site and experiment and measure how the effects of those experiments.  Agree? Disagree?

I think that you should build a really good site... Work on it at least 20 hours per week for a long time.   Then you have more skin in the game.

Are there any businesses out there that write world class guest blog articles for subjects that match my business?

World Class?  Probably not, but if you get an article of that quality you should post it on your own website.  That is the type of article that attracts a lot of attention and has the potential to rank #1.

Also, i've read that doing this for links is really moot because the blog posts get archived and become pagerank "unranked" thereby offering little link value after about a month or so.

This depends where you are posting.  You should be able to dig down through historic posts and see what happens to their posts after a few years.

Once they get archived do they still get counted by google and does the anchor text and page rank still count?

If they are being archived you don't want to do this.

Honestly, it's best to post unique and valuable content on your own domain.  If you start giving it away you are feeding your competitors and creating new competitors.  Do you really want to do that.

Maybe SEOmoz should open a "Guru Bar" like you find at the Apple Store.

I have experience republishing lots of content from universities and government agencies.

Their content on my site often outranks the same content on their site.   It does not matter who publishes first.  The content that I republish was on these other sites for weeks and months - sometimes years - in most cases before I republished.   What matters is which domain google favors for that topic.

I get lots of links and traffic using their content.

As you get more and more duplicate content out there on other websites you increase your risk of getting hit with a Panda problem.  For that reason, I have cut back on the amount of republishing that I do.

I never give my articles to other websites for republishing.  In my opinion that feeds your competitors and creates new ones.

The only way that I would give one of my articles to another site is if that site has ENORMOUS traffic in comparison to mine and my goal is to "get the word out" about something.  If you are republishing on other sites because you think you will get a link or a bit of temporary traffic, I believe that is a mistake and you would be better off building unique equity for your own site.