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I know this is a bit of a difficult one to answer but would appreciate some opinions.

Hello, We need to find out if links that we setup, which are older than 12 months hold any value? Do new links hold more value than old ones and therefore should we let the old links become inactive? If we do let the links become inactive after 12month will that effect the PA/DA of the site?

Hello, We need to find out if links that we setup, which are older than 12 months hold any value? Do new links hold more value than old ones and therefore should we let the old links become inactive? If we do let the links become inactive after 12month will that effect the PA/DA of the site?

Yoast is great as David Defoe says below.

The canonical HTML tag could be used to specify the proper canonical homepage URL.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

Look at where your links are coming from and try and get rid of any links that may come from spammy websites.

These could be websites that have many outbound links which bear no relation to each other or Sites which have no relation in subject matter to your website.

I recently checked my link profile and found loads of links from Forex trading sites, which all appeared to be really spammy! Cleaned up and saw my SERPs rise back into top 10!

In my experience it sounds like your link profile could be letting you down. Use OSE to analyse your links and try and clean it up.

Hi Ryan,

Yes the Link management system is a custom development. once we have it working for us as an agency we intend to white label it and release for others to use under license.

Only credible related sites! we have been down THAT road too many times!

We too use link builders in India to build links for us across 60+ terms for various clients and managing them is a nightmare.

We recently embarked on a project with our developers to create a Link Management system. The system allows a link builder to log in and 'Post' a link, which is then crawled and checked a number of times over the coming weeks. New links that are found are then confirmed and reports can be produced by client/link builder to show how many new links have been established, thus how many we should pay for. We also linked into SEOmoz API to grab the URLs PA/DA scores so we can monitor quality.

Our clients can also log in and monitor their link campaign progress, which saves use a time consuming report at the end of each month.

My favourite part is the Link Atrophy report which highlights links that have dropped off/disappeared since the last crawl. It gives me an error code for each link to say why the link wasn't found, such as 404 for the linking page is gone, 500 for server error and others for the link just isn't active anymore.

Its proving very useful and a fantastic time saving tool. Not bad for a weeks worth of dev time.

Thanks for your response. You make some interesting points regarding your competitors ranking despite the Dupe content.

Really appreciate your input,

Regards

Aran

Hi Simon,

Sound advice, after a few days of head scratching I worked with the developers to create a new routine that generates page titles as products are added to the site. There are way to many products to handle it manually so the programmatic approach is a must.

We have managed to vary the page titles enough with the data we have to generate 'near' unique page titles and meta descriptions.

I just wondered how others may do it.

Cheers for your input Simon.

Regards

Aran

EDIT: correcting my typos

Hi Mozzers,

Here is a dilemma I thought I'd put forward and see how you guys would handle the situations.

I'm working on a comparison website on which many of of the product names are very similar. There are circa 2000 products, of which many have similar names. Here are a few of the product names for example;

• Airsprung Enigma 5ft Mattress

• Airsprung Double Echo 6ft Mattress

• Silentnight Double Nova 6ft Mattress

The Product name has been used in the page title of the product pages as show below;

Compare Prices on the Airsprung Double Echo 6ft Mattress

SEOmoz is highlighting these pages as having Duplicate Page Titles (and meta descriptions as a similar approach has been used).

How would you handle this situation?

Cheers

Aran

I don't blame him one bit. Its a pain in the proverbial to get PHP running on IIS.

Popular/most commonly used Microformats!

Only used once and I abandoned it as it never gave me any actionable data, but youtube has a Tool similar to Adwords tool, only it focuses on Youtube rather than Google.

https://ads.youtube.com/keyword_tool

Looks like correct usage of Divs to me!

For some of the phrases I'm currently working on all of the top ten SERPs have the phrase in the URL. Not saying its a factor but I wouldn't like to leave it out of the equation just yet.

My best tip for shopping sites is to ensure your content is unique and well written giving as much genuineinformation on the product as possible. I always like to include bullet points to highlight features too.

Allowing customers to rate and comment on products is a great way to build up some awesome UGC on product pages.

Both of these options will help SEO and potentially help conversion too.

Including social sharing buttons for people to FB Like/Tweet Products cant hurt either.

Done and I'm in. Nice work!

I've never personally used a IIS based blogging platform, though I've heard dotnetblogengine.net is ok.

You can run Wordpress on a IIS system with PHP enabled, though it can be tough initially to set up and get it running.

I suppose you would use a combination of operators; intitle:keyword+inurl:keyword+intext:keyword

It seems a bit daft when you can simple Google a keyword and see the top 10 for a phrase! or use Keyword difficulty tool to get an idea of competitions metrics.

You could try the keyword difficult tool in SEOMoz research tools

http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/keyword-difficulty

It will give you a rough idea of the difficulty to rank and also the Page and Domain Authority of the top 10 competitors

Thanks Keri, any ideas when the crawler will be bug free?

Its no fun trawling through thousands of links to weed out the dodgy data before I can rpesent the info to a client.

It appears you have duplicate pages. i.e your homepage is accesible via http://www.fagorarrasate.com/index.aspx and http://www.fagorarrasate.com/. Your Page Authority has been assigned to http://www.fagorarrasate.com/.

Consider setting up a canonical redirect from /index.aspx to http://www.fagorarrasate.com/.

I try and go a little out of the box on things like this, particularly when the subject is dull (i work alot with insurance!).

How to guide are always a winner with niche bloggers. As are Top 10 articles, etc.

Are these articles to be hosted within your site to act as additional content landing pages for particular keywords, as part of link baiting campaign or an external article marketing campaign?

In any case you should vary your Titles, to prevent duplicate content issues. In terms of links I agree with Paessler, vary the anchor text. But if the article is a great one with really useful information etc, why not contact a few niche websites /bloggers and send them a link, perhaps you can pick up a few natural links!

Hi,

Allow: / isn't valid syntax in a robots.txt file, Anything that isn't disallowed is allowed by default.

Other than that all looks good. Perhaps the 200 or so links to blocked pages were indexed before the robots.txt was last updated with the disallows?

Regards

Aran

I've recently been trying to tidy up my link profile. We have been link building for a number of years and I decided to check it out and see how good our profile looks.

I used OSE to give me a report of all external links pointing to pages on my www sub-domain. The results are scary!

I have hundreds of links point to my site that originate from URLs such as the following url which attempts to start a download, use caution!!!

<colgroup><col width="768"></colgroup>
| http://ftp.codeweavers.com/pub/crossover/cxlinux/demo/install-crossover-pro-demo-9.0.1.sh?m=pc&a=bookmarkList.view&target_user_id=1&search_type=tag&keyword=減量 |

Another example (this one attampts to start a .jar download!! Be cautious)

<colgroup><col width="794"></colgroup>
| http://www.breastreconstructionguide.com/compare.jar?page=1892&username=DXDZSW |

All the other metrics reported for the offending URLs seem ok, such as PA and DA. Also, many have meaningful page titles (as opposed to random characters) and nicely formed anchor text.

What I'd like to know is;

Are these links having a detrimental effect on my SERPs?

How does OSE find them since its a URL to a download?

Has anyone else had a similar experience?

Thanks for your time.

Regards

Aran

<colgroup><col width="794"></colgroup>

In previous E-commerce builds I have simply kept the page for out of stock items active and just post an out of stock message on the product page and category level page so customers are aware of the fact the item is out of stock.

If your not getting the product back in stock ever again, then 301 the URL to a relevant page.

Personally, I'd drop the word 'Buy' and have the following

Baby Huddle | Prams | Pushchairs, Strollers, Buggies

I assume this is a brand sub category of the Prams category, thus I'd have the brand first.

Hi all,

I was wondering on my commute to work this morning the effectiveness of Social Bookmarking as part of a SEO campaign.

The sites I work on generally have the social bookmarking widgets and they do get used by website visitors. In addition to this we also bookmark our sites, new articles and other new content within the top 5 social bookmarking sites.

This is all done as part of a wider social strategy.

But could I be spending my time better else where?

Whats everyones thoughts on Social Bookmarking and do you incorporate it in your SEO campaigns?

Cheers

Aran

UPDATE: I note that SEOmoz Q&A only have Tweet, Like and Stumble...

at least our answers agree, so no Atul is doubley sure of how to do it...

Hi Atul,

Add the trailing slash.

/abc could be a page url. Where as /abc/ is definitely a folder.

http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html <-- Everything you ever wanted to know about robots.txt

Regards

Aran

[EDIT: Damn it, Ryan submitted whilst I was answering! Must type faster ]

Ensure there are no re-writes active that may forward traffic from /fred/ to /fred-review/ and you should be good.

I've done a similar thing today,

1. Removed thin, stale pages from sitemap and implement noindex.

2. Begun to revise Duplicate content, however i have many many pages populated by xml feeds on a daily basis. eek...

it may be worth us swapping some ideas/findings.

if I find anything of value, I'll be sure to let you know.

Hi Mozzers,

Has anyone noticed a Google update on the 6th July?

A price comparison site I optimise has fallen off the SERPs for most generic terms, however still getting traffic for longer tail phrases.

Cheers

Aran

Agreed CCA.

I don't get +1's on SERPs, when your google something and you get the SERPs you generally haven't visited the sites before, so why would you +1 at that point?

I've conducted an experiment with several friends in my 'Friends' Circle within Google+

To start I +1'd a clients site whilst signed in to Google. Then I Signed out and went on to tweet the URL for another clients website and finally facebook shared yet another clients website (within another industry)

I asked my friends to +1, tweet and FB share a URL which I gave them.

Now when signed into Google the +1'd website (normally at 9th in Google) is now ranked 3rd with a note under the SERP telling me my firend +1'd the site. The website which received the Tweets is now 9th on Google, it is normally 12th when not signed in. Also a note appeared under the serp saying my friend had Tweeted the URL.

The page that received the facebook shares didn't change in position!

All the people concerned all follow each other on twitter, belong to the same circle on Google+ and are friends on Facebook.

Not a very well set up or executed experiement, I made it up as I went along and put into practise within 5 minutes of conceiving the idea. But interesting results all the same.

If Google+ takes off and people adopt the trend of staying logged into Google when searching, Social Metrics are going to have a huge impact on traditional SEO.

Now all we need is someone to setup a 'proper' experiement.

oh, you missed off Android and the efforts to takeover the mobile OS market!

Kowtow to Google.

Agreed, the number of personalised searches will increase if Google+ catches on. Is this the beginning of the end for SEO?

Hi all,

With the recent launch of Google+ I've looked into the possible effects of +1'ing sites and whether or not it has a direct effect on other people with whom I'm connected within Google+.

So far I cannot see any direct correlation, however I running a bigger/wider experiement with more people to get a definitive answer.

What does scare me as an SEO, is that Google+ users will (most likely) use Google search whilst they are logged in, which, as we know personalises results based on a myriad of suspected metrics such as previous visits, personal +1, etc...

How is this going to effect the SEO world if/when a Google+ attracts more users.

Experienced this first hand when a client called me to congratulate a jump from position 9 on Google to first position over the weekend, which when I checked, the website hadn't shifted, the client was logged into her Google account due to the fact she had been playing with plus.

Thoughts?

Cheers

Aran

Personally I've always avoided hiding page objects, seems to be a little fruitless to put work into implementing an object on a page only not to show it.

If the graphic is simply text and the aim of the graphic is to provide a good looking heading theres no reason not to use Google fonts (or similar) or Cufon HTML5 tags.

if theres any others going spare, I'd love one. EDIT: Good Point Tompt...PM me Thanks

Thats why I ask on SEOmoz, a sensible answer with sensible advice that can be easily put into action.

This had crossed my mind, however I've been staring at the woods so long, I couldn't see the trees!

Thanks EGOL.

I have a clients site, which we publish fresh news content daily and have done for some time. this has built up a huge archive of news over the past few years. All the news resides in a /news sub folder. The most interesting news articles are syndicated through facebook and twitter.

Note: All the news is original content.

The archive is based around a chronological filing system so /news/2010/December would retrieve news articles published in December 2010.

My first question is this, in the Post Panda seo world, since the news in the archives receives little to no traffic, will these be classed as low quality pages, even though they are generally informative and timely news articles?

My Second Question, It's my understanding that a site can be penalised for harbouring low quality pages, thus would I be better to do away with my news archive of around 600+ articles and impose a rule that news is removed from the site after a set period (say 6 -12 months)?

nice catch!