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Nothing bad and turns good when people scrape your content (it gets scraped with the canonical to your page) or you make a mistake with your information architecture (as things tend to point to the correct place)

Well, if the answers are wildly off they would be taken to account by the other posters or the SEOmoz staff, and you can always drill further down into the problem once you get a reply

The biggest challenge on this forum is that the questions are very generic, leading to very generic answers. Be as specific as possible and you will get great advice

BTW Looking at my personal site would give you no indication of what I do, as I work in an Agency and my time is spent on client sites. Some great SEOs have pretty mediocre personal websites

remove from sitemap, noindex asap. he has no longtail from those pages, its not going to suddenly appear out of nowhere

An alternate view:

Specific comments like fixing spelling mistakes, get better anchor text or redirects, is doing more damage than good here

It leads to false hope that this will help rank for the term "web design" and that Kieran will rank for this if he "just tries hard enough"

If you have been here 3 months and think that trying to rank for "web design" is a good business move, then yes, let the SEOmoz contract lapse if the money is an important factor. Read the blog, read everything on this site in the last year

The problems you face are not analytics or SEO or anything OSE measures - its understanding how the web works, understanding how customers are going to react when they see your website.

Seeing your website, Id say your best bet is personal recommendations. Knock the site into shape to convert people you send their personally, and don't waste time or energy on SEO

S

There is no ratio. Put the links that your users need to navigate your site

Have you checked against (not provided)? That may well have swallowed a large chunk of branded

BTW, the big (not provided) switch was early March for the UK and it makes a heck of an impact on reporting

Other things to check:

have you stopped any marketing activities in other channels that would have driven brand traffic?

Are your segments correct? Double check, maybe someone changed whats in them. How are you handling (not provided) with respect to assigning brand or non brand?

Very unlikely: tracking code misfiring on your homepage i.e. affects brand count but not longtail

Stephen

I would say 301. Although theoretically it may be technically correct to use a 302, if you want the value of the link juice and you are not sure when you may get back to this site (if ever) a 301 seems a better bet

S

I wouldn't bother with nofollow, I would put all 3 on the same page & consolidate that way. If you wanted, you could leave your navigation as is, by just using anchors to get to specific parts of the page

I don't like to noindex or block the legal pages, as they are a signal for trust

Go to open site explorer and put in the worlds top brands Nike, Amazon etc

That is how Google will expect a natural backlink profile to be

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links.html?page=1&site=www.nike.com&sort=page_authority&filter=&source=external&target=page&group=0

Stephen

1. Not really a need to change location. Google is aware that sites are often hosted outside of their country, there are a lot of other stronger signals that he can easily give

I assume he has a .co.uk or a .com?

1. Set his location in webmaster tools to be UK
2. Make sure he has a UK address on the site - footers or contact us page etc
3. Set the lang in the html to en-gb
4. Make sure there is UK related content on the page

2. If those links are not showing up, they are likely from very weak domains that wouldn't help him even if they did show up. Go and get decent quality links!

Internal, so all links values and volume (think linking domain diversity) are attributed directly to your domain authority. Make sure its on a subfolder and not subdomain, for the same reason\

S

Id have an "about the webmaster" page and explain the story as you have here. then do a short paragraph on your other projects

From my UK experience - I would take the time and get the right type of person and train them in the way you want. Its less trouble than getting the wrong person and having them screw it up or getting someone with the right skills but wrong attitude for your company

Paying well helps, having a great environment helps

Get out and give kick ass SEO presentations at conferences and let people know you are hiring - being known as an leader in an area can help attract ambitious people

Maybe ask your current staff? Good people tend to know other good people

Getting out and meeting people is the best way I know - network at SEO events and see who you gel with

Once you have someone great, make sure you keep them - set them decent long term challenges and maybe think about business related remuneration like shares etc

Reversing the problem, some alternate thoughts:

• slow down growth until you get the right people on board
• cutback on the trouble clients and keep the good ones
• only grow the stuff you can scale (linkbuilding over consultancy)
• bring new clients on board only at a higher rate

Let me know how it goes, Id love a solution to this problem!

Stephen

Normally you find out what your client needs to achieve and them work out what its going to cost to deliver that

Just saying "I build you X links", without taking into consideration any of the multitude of things you should, means you don't really deliver anything of value for your clients

I get the feeling that giving advice would only land some poor company with terrible SEO. Have a read through SEOmoz and then re-ask the question

haha, now you're talking! That brings back memories

I would start with a much stronger image above the fold - maybe move the movie section up and start with that - your best stuff is way down the page

The page feels a bit unstructured - maybe you need darker or lighter colour columns outside your content to add the structure

Ive recently done the same for the wedding, and used PRnewswire. They have number of packages from £300 up to £2000 for video hosting. They were pretty good at getting in touch, explaining what they offer and feeding back.

I used the online US distribution package to try get the most backlinks, however was disappointed with the results (I got large numbers of links but all spammy). I would do a UK release next time and see if thats better

Otherwise I have alist of free PR sites here http://seobestpractice.org/Linkbuilding ordered by Pagerank

Overall no PR distribution has done that well for me in actually moving keyword rankings, Id be interested to hear how you get on and who you choose

EDIT: If you do pay for PR, make sure they have submissions to Yahoo, Google news etc

How about trying crazyegg or clicktale?

Then you can see how people are interacting before they bounce. Getting an idea of how they browse; do they scroll and then bounce or just bounce straight away - may give you some clues

OK cupid

No one mentioned yoast's seo plugin yet? ive tried a few and its the best by miles http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/ you can also find it in the download section within wordpress

Its in constant devleopment and you can do stuff like access your .htaccess file from directly within the plugin.

If your going social, you need to have something interesting to say. Having an opinion helps drive that conversation. Its easier to have an opinion on the politics of education than it is to have one on a maths problem

Maths questions target students, and Im with EGOL that it will more likely be parents who follow you but only if you provide value. I would look at the higher level  stuff, having an opinion on how maths is taught, the politics of maths and teaching, running competitions for maths stuff for their kids

I have to ask why you arent doing the freerice.com thing with it? big extra love & links from the community - work out how many grains of rice there are in a packet and you realise how cheap that type of thing is to do

not provided isnt anything to do with Panda or Penguin. For pretty much every site its their #1 referring organic keyword - Google doe snot provide keyword info for users who are logged into their services anymore

Have you looked at your keywords? I would be surprised if (not provided) did not stand out massively

Hi Robert

For most agencies, linkbuilding is a lower level activity that I think can be scaled the most easily

• that everyone in the company can do it,
• new recruits can learn it easily
• new recruits can support established team members to deliver more
• you can outsource parts of it
• generally people who are cheaper to employ will be doing this

I see good consultancy as a higher level activity that is restricted by the available time of your most skillful employees

• not everyone  in the company can do it
• harder to learn in a short time
• hard for a new recruit to support someone effectively
• cant really outsource it
• generally your most expensive (experienced) employees will be doing this

S

Ofc, many experiments show that tabs are terrible for conversion. Only way you can know is to test

I suggest you have a look at eth templates on unbounce.com and have a look at 5secondtest as well.

Finish off with some google a/b and multivariate tests and you will never have to ask for opinions again; the numbers will tell you the facts

Consider whether you should be using social media at all.

It can be a massive distraction and waste of time that you can be spending on activities that you are good at and help your business more

If you are trying twitter, facebook and linkedin all at the same time, with no idea what you are doing, its no surprise it doesnt work - 3 painful learning curves all at once.

Pick 1, and be great at it, or spend your time doing something more useful

S

NEVER go on whats in the SERPs. Get recommendations - so MOz is a good place to start.

Why not look for the really technical SEO posts on moz and then approach those companies? I can recommend Distilled

You could look at the http://moz.com/community/users users board and pick someone from London that has a ton of points - this indicates they have been helpful to the SEO community over a number of years. I'm at 21 and I am based in London. Marcus Miller is at 12 and he is based in Birmingham

There is also a MOZ recommended list http://moz.com/community/recommended

Stephen

<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="noindex, nofollow, noarchive, 
noimageindex"> I would start here

Make this for the beauty industry http://www.cakewrecks.com/

I do a lot of advertising across Bing, Google, Facebook and others so have anice view across platforms

Bing has the same quality traffic as Google but at a lower volume. I tend to copy across the campaigns that have significant volume and they work well. I suggest you try it with a few of your best campaigns

A word of warning though, the interface is some way behind Google's and I find it quite frustrating. The Bing guys are quite helpful on Twitter though ~~@~~BingAds

Stephen

We have a couple of guys with MA in philosophy, seems a pretty good fit for SEO

We also get a lot of Business grads applying for jobs, and Ive yet to find anyone who was worthwhile. They seem to get taught such useless rubbish and come in without any idea of what a real marketing job is like

I personally have a MA Social  Media, which is utterly useless, and a BSC Biology which I find incredibly useful

I don't think education level is much of an indicator

S

no need for that ^^

I assume you no longer link to those 404 pages from your website? So on the next crawl SEOmoz wont pick up those 404s

You want to buy services from a company that is running Google adsense on its front page? Just another spam site

1st question yes its fine. preferably get that link in a piece of content that is contextually relevant if possible

2nd link exchange rarely provides decent value

3rd  more complex. publish your site only if your sure you can be seen as the originating place for that piece of content.

No idea what you mean by no follow

2 separate things. Don't mess with the sitemap.xml, its for spiders not people

1 part, should be that it grabs you visually straight away - like a glue value, keeps you glued to that page to actually engage with the content - that can be a good headline, or image or typography or any combo

• Actionable!

I've been using http://www.outreachr.com/bulk-domain-checker/  to pull data out of batches of urls for this. It goes and grabs link data from SEOmoz and then has a go at getting contact details including twitter etc

(Hope I don't kill his server while hes on holiday by posting this here)

looks good

make a /brisbane too and once it ranks, then turn the homepage into driving school Australia

S

Just delete them if you don't want them. Delete any links to them on your site and you should be fine.

If they have a lot of links pointing to them from other sites, you may want to think about 301 redirecting them to resolve to the homepage or anywhere else that makes sense. If its a small personal blog, I would not bother with this step and would just let the page 404 naturally

Other than have a great product? Decide what success looks like

You haven't given enough information really, but I start with Research, Information Architecture, Paper Dolls, UX, UI, goals and analytics.

Then SEO becomes easy

I am doing SEO for an alcohol client now. There will be no stupid age verification bollocks. make sure its actually a legal requirement in the country you are operating in!

but if you must:

http://groups.google.com/group/google_webmaster_help-tools/browse_thread/thread/3ce6c0b3cc72ede8

from that:

Hey all,

This topic comes up periodically for sites (alcohol, porn, etc.) that 
need to serve an age verification notice on every page. What we 
recommend in this case is to serve it via JavaScript. That way users 
can see the age verification any time they try to access your content, 
but search engines that don't run JavaScript won't see the warning and 
will instead be able to see your content.

this may also be useful http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/12/07/the-unusable-and-superficial-world-of-beer-and-alcohol-websites/

have a german language page on the .co.uk?

You could also use IP redirection

S

What happens when you shoot a propane tank (video)?

7 uses schools have found for empty propane tanks (gallery)

Forget Ask A Ninja - Ask a Propane Tank (video)

Lolcats vs Propane Tanks - there can be only 1 winner (gallery)

Microsoft designs a Propane Tank (gallery)

How far could you throw a Propane tank if you were bitten by a radioactive spider (quiz)

easy....

Its just spam. Waste of money

Something I read (from Dave Naylor i think) was to understand what your keyword/url structure is going to be. Then while you are building the site, you seed those urls with viral content to gather links.

When the time comes, you just swap the content of the page and your good to go, with links already secured

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/competitor-analysis-for-linkbuilding-a-guide-for-people-who-hate-linkbuilding My post on finding places to link based on your competitors backlinks (+learning the niche as you go). Asy ou go through, note the places that offer blogging or blogs

I have had a bit of success using <cite>myblogguest.com/</cite> You do have to wade through some crap from article churners but there are a few nuggets in there. I am going to try the paid subscription for a few months and see how it does

http://www.seomoz.org/labs/link-finder/index.php stick your details in here and see what you get out

http://www.seomoz.org/link-finder/ stick in wedding dresses and get the contact details of those blogs and organise some cross promotion

Otherwise contact, contacts, contacts. Ask these guys if you can guest post <cite>www.secretsalons.com</cite>and get them to guest post back - they use their twitter etc to promote you

"online wedding retailer and we add new, unique, high quality content to our blogs on a daily basis" <-- Son, I am skeptic

If you are writiing content and then looking for places to seed it, then I think you're doing it the wrong way round. If your daily output isn't getting traction, do fewer posts but make them better

http://www.confetti.co.uk/ <-- this is you I guess? id stick those fb/tw buttons right at the top with a CTA & make the phone number much bigger

S

I would try both and see what happens

The problem with rel canonical though, is that your not using it as intended and could get caught out or have the link devalued

I dont see any problem with a plain text link. personally i would KISS and use the text link

As to whether its worth it, it depends how good the linkbait is and how many links/power it gathers. The only way you can know is to try and then see the effect on your rankings.

You could certainly get more value than one link out of it though; link out to other articles that link back to your ecom site.

When you have this type of  powerful 3rd party site, you can then start swapping links from your site in return for links from theirs to your ecommerce site

If you are already penalised, I wouldn't touch paid links of any kind, especially directory ones

Could be easy or near to impossible

• How good is your product?
• What is you products USP?
• Is it viral?
• Does it naturally acquire backlinks and social shares as part of its operation?
• Are you going to be able to create amazing stories and content from it to promote it?
• How much creative freedom do you have to promote?
• Are people going to hit your website and go "OMG this is amazing"?

When I see these types of questions, I think the the answer is normally to go back to the product level and engineer a product that wins for you