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Yes, adding canonical tags will help. Or just 301-ing the other URLs to the SEO-friendly one.

Yes, we try not to crawl garbage directories, no matter how large they are. Check out Dr Pete's post, Where's The Love, DMOZ?, where he talks about how a lot of the large directories that are spammy (or even ones that aren't) aren't index by either OSE or Google, especially as the categories get more finite.

We currently don't have a place to suggest sites. However, you can head here to vote up the suggest feature for a place to submit/suggest sites for indexing.

There is definitely some reason that Google thinks your site should rank higher in one and not the other. Perhaps in English (though you were totally right about those French results even when you push 'English only'), there's more competition for the keyword? Is your site a local one? Perhaps Google feels based on location that your site is more relevant to those that live in the French-speaking areas of Canada?

Yes, we do pull from local directories. (Though some, like I believe Yelp, do block our crawlers.) However, our crawlers do not crawl the entire web, and our data only comes from the sites that we crawl in order to ensure quality. We do try to crawl all the major sites.

You can definitely define permalinks in Wordpress. Now there could be some other issues going on, but one of the easy thing about Wordpress (from an SEO-perspective) is defining those permalinks.

I'm sure why everything's under /index.php/. It seems like something is not installed or set-up correctly.

If something else, you'll need to set up 301 redirects from the old pages to the new ones. Yes, you'll lose some of your link juice and your URL structure as it is on the new site is not as strong.

Give how you labeled your question, I'm assuming you're asking about the SEOmoz PRO app.

In your keyword section in your campaigns, you can set labels for different keywords that you're tracking. This will help you filter them.

While we just launched automated reports, we unfortunately don't have the ability to filter based on your labels for those reports. However, I highly suggest requesting that feature.

Right now, you'll have to go in once a week or month to download the reports based on the filter. Or you can have the entire keyword rankings and filter in a .csv file.

I'd give it a month before you'll see that bounce back. I wouldn't expect the same rankings as before as Google will be reevaluating your pages, but you should have a pick up in traffic.

You'll definitely lose the authority inherited by the current long domain name. Especially if shorter domain is a brand-new domain. That said, these days everything you put through Twitter (why I assume you're looking for the shorter domain) is auto-shortened by their service, which Googlebots read through.

Check out this post: Which Type of Link Anchor Text is the Most Effective? [An Experiment]

Awesome!

Keywords can definitely flux per season. We've also been scrubbing some of our data, and Lavellester is correct that if some of our data sources change their opinion, our tool will change too.

There are a lot of factors to consider what you want to do with it. Personally, I tend to stray away from microsites due to 1) it's a lot of work for a team to build out more than one site & keep it maintained and 2) as far as the linking aspect, Google is getting smarter to tell who owns what domains, who owns the same domains, and how they're linked.

The Keyword tool will not give you local or regional suggestions. You have to set it to do it. It will though assume a country and native language for you based on your profile information. You can reset all this depending on how refined you want your keyword research to be or how broad. See my image below:

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Hi Neil,

The reason #2 is lower because a "session" is a period of time. A session is either 30 minutes or once a person closes her/his browser.

For instance, if you had a cupcake shop and I Googled "cupcakes" and came to your site. Then popped out and Googled "buttercream cupcakes" and came back to your site in less than 30 minutes without closing my browser, my searches would count as 2 in #1 and 1 in #2.

Hope that helps!

I think you should worry less about SEO best practices, which you seem to have a firm grip on, and more about how your customers would navigate through your website to find these pages. What are they looking for? What are your competitors doing? What feels natural? What do you want your navigation to look like? How could you naturally clusters your different type of pages? What would /trading look like?

That's awesome to hear!

So you can use the MozBar to set up local searches when you're not local.

I'd suggest building out content in subfolders on your site, instead of being microsites to link to your larger domain: www.example.com/asheville

Why would you want to put content on your microsites that people are going to want to link to and then only have one link pointing from them to your main domain? Additionally, Google is smart enough to realize that you own all the domains and you could get penalized. And, as someone who spent years in e-commerce, having more than one domain to maintain (when it sounds like you have one domain you're taking care of) is a pain in the butt.

I'd also add that if you using Google's Affiliate program, the links are their own which then redirect to your site.

Check out this awesome post on IIS.

Hey Luanne,

Could you clarify your questions? What reports are you looking at that are giving you problems? Do have screenshots?

Thanks

Erica

key-phrase.example.com

Anytime, you can get your keywords in the URL of your image, the better it will do for rankings. But do realize that subdomains do not boost your main domain's rankings like a sub-folder would. But I suppose this all depends on what the end goal of having your images rank is.

That does seem a little odd. I tried finding info on how many links Google claims to have indexed, but couldn't find a reliable source. We indexed 38 billion domains and 387 billion links in our last Linkscape update.

That said, with how our crawlers work, if you're getting backlinks on domains with loads of other links on the page (which often happens if you're buying links), our crawlers will not grab every link on the page and that would definitely lower your backlinks profile with OSE.

There's not much you can do to really control what Google's Auto-Suggest suggests. You can, however, spend some time at least optimizing a page for the plural version of your brand. (I wish Google understood plurals better than it does.)

Check our what some of our community members suggest to do to influence Google Instant. They're very creative.

OSE's data comes from our own crawlers. The simple fact is that our crawlers do not reach the same amount of data that Google's do. We're working on it and continually improving this. We use our own crawlers because we believe in the quality of getting the data for ourselves.

Hope this helps!

The most effective thing is to go out and find bloggers, who do reviews, in your client's niche. A lot of amazing content can be created with reviews. Make sure to tell the bloggers that you want honest reviews and that they need to put in a disclaimer that they received the product in exchange for a review. If you're in the US, the FCC requires the disclaimer and has shut down blogs and penalized companies who don't.

So this looks to be a problem not with Google Analytics (GA), but how your site search functions or possibly how you set up your on-site search in GA. It should show you what search results page people searching end up on (see my screenshot, which is of my own comic book blog).

GA is either ignoring some of your parameters that contain the search term OR your search has a process that shoots a different URL first and then redirects to the final page.

Can you give an example of the URL on a search on your site?

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Are you looking for people who have separated B2B and B2C on public websites?

The only example I can think of is ExOfficio (used to work for them), but their public sites always been B2C and they've had different 3rd party solutions for B2B orders.

Can you take some screenshots of what you're seeing?

I highly suggest reading our URL best practices. I've particularly found the URL cheat sheet really helpful when deciding my URL structure.

When I worked in an e-commerce shop (selling clothing), we built our URL as: http://www.mysite.com/category/subcategory/productname or http://www.mysite.com/mens/shirts/bob-vines-long-sleeve-shirt

Categories in URLs are really helpful for association with groupings of products in search. (I wouldn't go more than 2 levels here.) You also want to put relevant details to the product in the product name that the customer might be searching. Things you want to think of: what will a customer call this product, special parameters, year made, color, brand (if you sell more than one brand), etc.

I'm surprised it's pulling anything after the ?. Usually those parameters are saved for things that aren't a real page. In your example, it's GA's tracking code for your RSS feed.

So I went into my own Wordpress sites in my SEOmoz account, and I'm not getting the same warning for the overly dynamic URLs. (In fact, I'm running 3 Wordpress blogs on my domain.) This to me says there's something up with your Wordpress.

Do you have the latest version up and running? Do you have a plug-in that's causing problems? Is there something not on the correct setting in your robots.txt?

I'd definitely check out how much bandwidth you're using with your hosting company and if you need to expand it to compensate for the increase in traffic.

I would start with your client's most valuable pages and make sure those are optimized. Then I would work on the other categories/product pages that your client's long-term vision for the company is reflected in. For example, when I sold outdoor clothing, the company was expanding into outerwear long-term, so I made sure to optimize my outerwear categories and product pages, especially to get into keywords that we weren't known for or even ranking for.

Have you considered something like job shadowing? Or going about it like a job seeker?

I'd also suggest attending meetups or conferences with other SEOs and making friends, and then from that budding friendship, develop the kind of relationship where you can bounce your ideas off others.

I personally don't believe that a mentor is someone you can buy.

Hi Mark,

You can control URL writing in the Settings > Permalinks part of WordPress. There you can set what directories (if any) you want to list in the URL.

As for meta descriptions, All-in-One SEO has a section to add a meta description. And as far as tags and categories go, you can set them in those sections on Wordpress.

Hope this helps!

Have you checked the sitemaps? Are they getting updated as she posts fresh content?

If the site's getting scraped a lot, does she employ canonical tags to claim her stuff?

So a basic LinkedIn account is free. A paid account can do things like promote job openings, filled out more in a company page profile, see certain contact info, and see who's visiting your personal profile. But most people are just happy with the basic.

Here are so reasons why people have LinkedIn / ways people use LinkedIn:

• You have a whole bunch of business contacts that want to connect on social media, but you want your Facebook only for family/friends.
• As a business owner, you want to advertise for jobs on another network.
• You're a B2B business.
• You want to be seen as an expert in your business field. LinkedIn has lots of groups and q&a which help build that type of reputation.
• Even if you're not B2B, you target people in a certain business field.
• You want to promote your company's growth business wise to a professional environment on a page.

Of course, there are many more reasons. Hope this helps!

The increased visits could be slowing down your site. Did the 30% increase happen at the same time as the errors started?

The increased visits could be slowing down your site. Did the 30% increase happen at the same time as the errors started?

I'd be extremely cautious when outsourcing this type of work. At lot of companies promise more than they deliver, and if they turn out to be spammy links, you might see a temporary boost, but then a few weeks/months down the road, you'll be back at square one.

I'd listen to your gut.

Have you gone in and changed the admin panel information about your site?

Do you know if they're also filtering out UPS addresses? My nonprofit has essentially a PO Box at a UPS store, but it has an actual address (looks like an apartment address).

This means that when the bot went to crawl your site, your site took too long and the bot gave up. Do you have site speed issues? Or is something passively blocking the bot?

I think it's always good to let Google know as they might remove it sooner. But there's no guarantee either way. Though if you can, you should 301 your content to a new/similar page rather than just let it 404.

I'd use OSE to look at the backlinks of your competitors / other sites in your field that are coming in with strong signals and reach out to those relevant sites to see if you can gain traction with them.

I'd also do some searches to see who out there is talking or asking questions about simliar things. You can identify influencers based on both traditional site strength and social klout.

You can also target home owners looking for this type of information directly. Either take out some keyword based ads. (You might consider Facebook ads for this given some fo the drilldown you can do, depending on your report.) Or you can search say Twitter for people curious about what info your report gives -- but don't know that you have that answer -- and contact them. Though be careful not to be spammy! Likewise, you can search in other forums or question sites for people asking questions that your report answers.

Hope this helps!