Welcome to the Q&A Forum

So, for today, should I be using the meta keywords tag or not?

I think that it is worthless for ranking a site with any important search engine.... but I still include it on my site because typing that information makes me think about my optimization priorities.

Any quick explanation for things like this?

If you watch Q&A very long you will see this same question asked over and over and over again.

My personal conclusion after seeing this is.... Google uses something else to determine SERPs.

Redirecting these names will bring you nothing more than the type-in traffic for those exact domains.

I am willing to bet a month's pay that very few people type localaustinplumbingservice.com or someotherridiculouslylonglocaldomain.com

After I analyzed their website, I noticed that they have over 700 pages indexed. However, their internal linking structure sucks. It's basically all 700 pages in one directory.

What do you recommend?

STOP!

Do not do this until you have clearly defined two things.

1. Why you are doing this.

2. The goal that you want to accomplish.

Any actions that you take without considering BOTH of those questions are shooting without taking aim and not  knowing what your target should be.

You might not need the redirect because linking structure and directory structure are completely different things.  Redirects could cause a significant loss of power for this site.

I need some inspiration too...  I hold a #2 where I will probably never get #1... and a #3 that I have been working to move up for a couple years - but I am workin' every day.  I'll get them eventually.

I set up a gift website 3 months before xmas.

I cant get them into the top 3 and cant understand it. Ive done the following to try give it a boost.

Consider two things.

1. You started a few months ago but your competitors have been fortifying their positions for several years - or more.

2. Moving up the rankings from position 6, to position 5, to position 4, to position 3, to position 2, to position 1.... is not an exercise like picking petals from a daisy.  The guy who currently holds each of those position has teh ability to fight back.

My two cents on your story is that you have done a great job so far... congratulations!  But you have not earned the remaining positions that you desire yet.... and maybe you never will depending upon who currently has them or who is going to appear out of the blue tomorrow.  The most dangerous competitor is the one who has yet to arrive.

I would discriminate these pages on the basis of income or search engine traffic rather than use their informativeness.

I have semiinformative pages that pull lots of traffic and make lots of money - and informative pages that make next to nothing.

One of the big problems with blogs is that they present your content in chronological lists and category lists.

Sleepy.....

They don't present your content in interesting ways like this or like this or like this.

So, if you can figure out a way present your best, most popular, most recent, etc with a bit of flair and eyecandy that will double the mileage that you get from all of your current visitors.

I would make a homepage that WOWs the visitor with your huge library of content then modify your 1,2,3,4 list by adding 1A... promote my new stuff on-site.

Maybe you have this already?

From my experience as a publisher...  Most PR firms are spammers who wear a suit to work. 

I have sites that get lots of traffic from image search and can tell you that the value of an image search visitor can be very very low for most topics.  However, if you have a product that people shop for using image search (such as antique glassware) then image search visitors can be genuine buyers.

I have tried a lot of different ways to make money from websites and find that for sites that do not sell a product that it is really hard to beat the return provided by Adsense.  I would try Adsense first then look for something better - which you may never find.

If I were to take the same content that's on this blog and post it on a Blogger account we have, would Google consider that duplicate content?

Duplicate content is duplicate content.

I can tell you that if you have a link connecting these two sites that at least one of them (maybe both) will be filtered from the SERPs.

If you don't connect them with a link then there is still a good chance that google will find them and filter one.

Take a look at the suckerfish dropdowns at htmldog.com

http://www.htmldog.com/articles/suckerfish/dropdowns/example/

I dont think it will take much effort

I think that all of the time and then I find out that those guys are really smart and very hard to beat.

Probably RyanKent is the SEO for the guys I am trying to beat... I think it would be pretty expensive to beat him, might take a very long time, and a lot of work and maybe impossible.

Now imagine that you are talking about the same keywords that RyanKent and I are fighting over.  Do you think it will be cheap to beat both of us working really hard to beat each other?

This is why smart SEOs don't work for somebody who says... "I'll pay when you get me #1".

================================

Now imagine second situation... You say "I'll pay when you get me #1" and I take the job and hit the site with a big ton of links and you pay me... then I yank the links. 

This is why smart website owners should not say... "I'll pay when you get me #1"

If you can get review stars, GO FOR IT!

Just tossing out a story.....

I had a website that was getting a ton of traffic like you are talking about.  The cause was a computer lab that was using a page on our website as a "start page". They were not spammers.  They were fans.

Great!

With most of my sites, I have a very strong interest in the subject of the site and I put an extra amount of time into making nice content.  I am sure that if I kept track of my time it would be quite expensive - but in the long-run I believe that I get my money back in better rankings.

If I was doing SEO for clients it would be hard to convince them to make the same large investment up front.

I don't allow comments on my websites because I don't want to spend a lot of time deleting the marketing spam and deciding what to do with the political folks and crackpots who would also be posting.  That decision costs me a lot of great user-generated content but I am OK with that.

My most important thought is...how can we compete with companies that are doing these practices trying to get that quick buck?

I honestly don't worry about these guys because I don't think that their methods are extremely effective.  In other words, once you have done enough work to get above them they are off of your radar and don't bother you anymore.  So, just keep working until you have them beat and your mind will move on to other things.

All though the text is relevant, it's not really useful for my visitors.

What's the goal here?

Are you trying to get useless traffic or weight down your website with a bunch of crap?

I would give these texts to my competitor and hope that he puts the dead weight on his site.

I believe that a small compact site with highly relevant pages competes better than a huge site with a ton of irrelevant crap.

I want my sites to be lean, mean fighting machines... not fat, out-of-shape wimps.

..............................

You asked about linkwheels.  Don't do it.

Not an answer to your question... instead saying what i would do if I had a lot of small websites that were variants of a single theme....

I would redirect all ten of the satellite sites to food.com and have a huge kickass site there.

I would do that because all of that content and all of those links likes and tweets happening for a single site would make it very powerful and hard to beat.

You will do more damage with a pump shotgun than ten slingshots.

I would close the hotdog stands.

We are trying to write create content, and unique content, but at the end of the day auto insurance in one city is pretty much the same as in another city.

If I wanted to assure my success and if I knew as much about auto insurance as was required to be successful selling it then I would put in the time needed to create unique content for my website.

Instead of trying to weigh how little you can do to keep from getting whacked... put your mind on figuring out all of the things that you can do to assure you will kick ass.

I get these calls too.  I am so tempted to tell them that we can kick their butts... but just ask them not to call anymore and hang up when they try to continue the pitch.

Thanks,

I was assuming that these had product dimensions, how to use, etc information.  I would want all of that content on my site.

If these are certificates then I would link to them as .jpg images and that eliminates concerns about link juice.

Just saying what I would do if this was my website.

My employees would be told that getting that pdf data onto the product sales page is a top priority job... and I would call the car dealer and order my new Jaguar.

I believe that the reviews must be made through an approved third party such as Google Checkout or PowerReviews.  Reviews on client websites would not be used.

A consulting report is a product.  If your clients provide reviews then you have an opportunity to receive stars.

SOme of the starts are from google shopping, but review sites such as PowerReviews can also produce stars.

PowerReviews and similar services are not cheap - making it difficult for the small guy to compete with Amazon.

I think that this is a good way to sample the traffic.

If you have a static html site you can write a Perl program to read your blog feed and rewrite it into a server-side include file.  Then you can add that include to your homepage - or any other page on your site.

If you trigger that Perl program with a cron job on your server you can have your server-side include updated daily, monthly or hourly.

You can also have the Perl program make server-side includes by category and these can be added across your site on relevant pages.

One advantage of this is that when you publish a new blog post you can BAM... get hundreds of links into it within an hour of publication - or you can trigger the Perl program manually.

Thanks Robert,

I think that this is a question of weighing an improvement in optimization against a loss of external authority (backlinks from other websites).

If these are brand new pages with no accumulated external authority then there is very little loss in redirecting and a gain in optimization.  That means DO IT NOW - before any valuable external authority accumulates.

However, if there are a lot of external links into these pages then a percentage of that accumulated authority will evaporate through the redirect.   The more powerful these pages, the greater the loss.  In this case the decision to redirect becomes more difficult.  Only google could calculate the value of the improvement in URL optimization compared to the loss of external authority.  If it was my site I would value the external authority much more than changing a url from /toys/ to /chew-toys/

So, I would give two different answers to this question based upon the characteristics of the website webpages involved.

If you have viable subdomains with good unique content and links of their own I would say that the answer is  YES.

In early 2011 I redirected two subdomains page-by-page into folders in the root and the results have been kickass.

Both of these subdomains had 40-60 pages.  Each of them had a lot of traffic and inbound links. One had more links than the root domain.  Now my rankings and total traffic are significantly up everywhere.

Lots of people think that google treats subdomains as separate sites.  This makes sense as on lots of sites subdomains are operated by a diversity of people.  So if you increase the link popularity and domain popularity of your main site by the redirection of a subdomain then it should, in theory, rank better.

The people who redirect subdomains and say that they "got nothing out of it" usually have subdomains that are  worthless cabooses on the butt of their site.

How much ranking power do you think that an optimized URL delivers to a page?  Consider that title tag is enormous, links are enormous..... URL is probably tiny tiny tiny.

Now consider that the authority that these pages carry will pass through your site.

So, if this was my site I would be asking... How much of my external linkjuice is hitting these 20 pages.  If none then I would not expect to lose very much by redirecting the pages.  But if these pages had lots of offsite assets pointing to them the URLs would have to be really fugly before I redirected them.

I am going to respond in two different ways.....

1. If the manufacturing site is sooooo important that you feel compelled to link to it 10,000 times then maybe you should only have one website?

2. If I owned two websites on the same topic I would seriously consider combining them for SEO reasons.  That gives you a single site with all of the strengths of the two sites together.

Clans unite when facing a foe instead of dividing themselves to be conquered.

Have you thought about adding a simple text screen to the beginning and end of the video?

To really make it unique you could do unique voiceover....   Get these from Hillbilly Widgets in Bugtussle, West Virginia  304-594-3334

In the eyes of Google, your website is no better than the destinations of your links.  So, if you have lots of links to spam then Google will think that you are a spammer.  Linking to manipulative sites puts you squarely within their web.

So, if you want to be trusted by Google you need to be liking to great sites.  I link out a lot and only link to site that are clearly superior to my own.  I have no problem with sending a visitor to a website that has better information about a topic than I have - because that is why my visitor would want and that is what Google is looking for too.

Those links to better website make my site a richer information source.

Pages or posts?

It depends upon your target.

If you are making arrows you can grab any stick, make the arrow quickly and shoot it without aiming carefully.

Or, you can be really picky to get a really straight stick, spend time to make it balanced and attach and trim your fletchings with a great amount of care.  These arrows are used sparingly, aimed carefully and fly straight and fast.

The arrow made with any stick is a post on a blog... the finely crafted arrow is a page on a website.

But in the end it depends upon what you are shooting... if your arrows are tipped with a suction cup then any stick is all they are worth... but if they are tipped with a razor sharp broadhead then it is a waste not to be making the finely crafted arrow.

Pick five articles on your website and go to the SERPs to see how each of them rank for several relevant keywords.   Record your results.

Then, on each of those pages place a box in the sidebar that contains links to five fantastic pages on high authority websites that are about the same topic.

Wait three months then go out and check those rankings.  I will bet that your rankings go up.  I have satisfied myself that this is true.

I have a few competitors who have "links.html" pages on their sites and they are still doing pretty good. So, I don't think that a links page is doing any damage to their rankings.

Do you know how the site owner feels about that page?  It could have links on it to genuine business partners, cousins' businesses, etc.  So, I would at least check before yanking it down.

I would also worry about the Curse of Maluk

http://forums.seochat.com/google-optimization-7/warning-ref-link-partners-5513.html

I have always been taught that external links really hurt your site and that basically 1 outbound link cancels out 1 inbound link because they balance each other out.

I am going to refrain from making comments about your teachers. 

If everybody linked to nobody the web would not be 'The  Web".  You know that.  Google knows that.  So you should be able to conclude that linking out is good.

The question that you should be asking is... "Who am I linking to?"

Let that be your guide.

My rule is to link out generously and often.  But always do my best to link to sites or to content that is either superior to or complimentary to my own.

An article with abundant links out to high quality sites on the same topic is a richer resource than the same article with zero links - and I think that google will rank it higher.

But, if the Pope sends me a great article with a link to a payday loan site then I will hit the delete button.

Here is an observation and then a suggestion....

**Observation: ** A person who owns a successful blog or  website get lots of crappy articles sent to her by people who are simply trying to market their crap to her audience or take advantage of her success in some way.

That's just a warning to let you know that your offer to this person better be mighty good and look like she is going to gain a lot more out of the deal than you will.  That means your content better be spectacular.

**Suggestion: ** Find someone who already accepts guest bloggers or who has multiple contributors to their blog.  If a blog or a website does not already have guests or multiple authors there is probably a reason.  Don't waste your time trying to change people's thinking.

When you find some potential blogs or websites send them an article or an infographic or a blog post that they can publish and know that it will not be duplicated anywhere else on the web.  Be sure it is good enough that the blogger will get more out of the deal than you will.  If you don't have that you will not get a deal because other people are not going to go on a crusade for your brand.

I don't think that I would use a tool for this if someone gave it to me for free.

If I am seriously working in an industry on the web I should be looking at enough SERPs, watching enough news and subscribing to enough data feeds that I know who the influencers are.

And really, who the influencers are is not really the right question. The right question is who are the influencers who can help me in some way... and that takes singular study.

So the tool that I would be investing in is my own knowledge.  I think that the type of tool that you have been looking for is a program that is usually written by somebody who probably knows about as much about your industry as your dog.

That's my two cents.    waiting for a programmer to throw a bone at me

If you go to Google and search for a highly competitive keyword the authoritative sites will rank highest.

It is very easy to be relevant - any idiot can do it.  Becoming authoritative is very hard.

many SEO agencies build low quality links

For most clients they would have to be magicians to get anything better.

I have an on-page ranking report of 'A'

Great job!

Now you are ready to begin the battle of resources.

I would be really really really really mad if they did this to me.

they say it's for Accessibility

This is such BS...  (they know they are full of BS and they are so dumb that they think they can make you believe that it is chocolate)

Since they ask for more cash in order to remove it

Weasels!

Thanks!. I am going to look into this.  I'll let you know if I learn anything.

Thanks for all of your input Dr. Pete. The example that you use is almost exactly what I have - hundreds of .pdfs on a fifty page site. These .pdfs rank well in the SERPs, accumulate pagerank, and pass traffic and link value back to the main site through links embedded within the .pdf. The also have natural links from other domains. I don't want to block them or nofollow them butyour suggestion of using header directive sounds pretty good.

@EGOL: Can you expend a bit on your Author suggestion?

I was wondering if there is a way to do rel=author for a pdf document.  I don't know how to do it and don't know if it is possible.