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In my opinion, something like a comic strip where I am going into it knowing I will be investing significant time or resources to it, I would publish it on my own website and use social media to push it out to the people who have already shown interest in my stuff. You are far more likely to gain a positive response from these people, who might in turn share and publish it on their own.
Out of curiosity, what is the subject matter of the strip?
Also, love the creativity!
Chances are the client didn't have the foresight to match URL's, which means the sitemap contains many invalid URL's. I do not know what exact effect this will have, but it can't be good.
You can submit a removal request directly to Google. Keep in mind the have a set of guidelines for this.
Edit: Mike is quicker on the draw as usual 
You can get up to 400 rankings a day immediately using Rank Tracker.
There could be many, many reasons for this other than back links. Could you provide your URL so we can take a look?
Without seeing the site it is pretty tough to correctly answer this question.
What is telling you there are only 2 out of 5000+ pages being indexed? Webmaster tools?
It is hard for me to tell, as your template may vary. That does appear to be the correct spot, try it out and see what happens.
Make sure you are backing up for wordpress database and install before you go changing this stuff.
"First off, does the age of your site matter? Now, this is purely from an SEO perspective, in terms of if I have exactly the same effects going on, the same number of links pointing from the same places pointing to the same pages with exactly the same content. But one of those sites was produced in 2008, and one was made in 2000. Is that going to substantively change rankings? The answer is almost certainly not. Almost certainly not."
I would not even worry about it.
In wordpress editor, edit archives.php, find the following code block and change as needed:
<code># term->Title(); ?></code>
You're right, there is no API to access trends data which is a damn shame.
I did find this: A python script which returns google suggest data along with the number of times it was searched. (Does not provide a time period though).
If this doesn't work, could you use the AdWords Traffic Estimator API to get the data you're looking for?
That's how it appears on your website. SEOmoz just pulls the title from the pages <title>tag. The title is not pulled from the URL.</p> <p>Here is the page source copied and pasted:</p> <blockquote style="background-color: #f7f7f7; padding-top: 5px; margin-left: 0px; padding-left: 2px; padding-bottom: 5px; white-space: nowrap; overflow-y: auto; font-family: monospace; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;"> <p><title>CodeBaby Virtual Assistant Optimizes Web Self-Service Experience — CodeBaby</title>
Click on "Export to csv" in the top right hand corner of your crawl report.
When the file downloads, there is a field called "referrer" which will tell you the exact page the broken link was found on.
Could you give an example of a URL that goes to a 404.
Edit: NM I see above.
It refers to the number of followed links on the page pointing to other pages on your site or other sites.
Source: Using MozBar to compare numbers.
OSE runs off it's own link index and pulls data from google and bing. You have no guarantee of finding all inbound links to you with any tool of this nature.
You could use google analytics and look at referring sources over the past year and where they went. You would pretty much just have to sift through the list of pages painstakingly to make sure you have 301's for them. This is the only way I can think of to be sure you catch everything.
Sit down in a room with a pencil and piece of paper for an hour and write out ideas. Here are a few of mine:
These are ideas I thought of in about 60 seconds having no experience or knowledge of the vacation niche
Good luck!
I would go for option B without a doubt.
It used to be a popular tactic to register a bunch of domains and then build thin content to try to rank for a keyword, these days it isn't worth the time and effort. Better to focus on building up your main domain.
Not sure if I understand the question, are you talking about purchasing domain names and then building them up with content? If so, there could be. Generally speaking it's better to focus your efforts on one domain, but there are exceptions.
If you are talking about just registering domain names and then forwarding to your existing website, there is no benefit or very, very, very little benefit. Probably none.
Googlebot can crawl javascript (which is how Locu displays text) but it's not a guarantee. If it's an option I would stick with HTML. There was a great case study done on YOUmoz awhile back on this : Can Google Really Access Content in JavaScript? Really?
webranger, I can help but would need to see the site and run the grader for myself to see the result. Feel free to PM me a summary of the sites.
You can use ApacheLogViewer(freeware) to view your web-server logs and filter where UserAgent="Googlebot". This will give you the raw statistics including time of day when Google crawled your site.
jamesscaggs has got it covered but I wanted to post this:
This will work, no issues. (Source)
Ask yourself if you really think that multiple city pages are different enough in nature and content to bother. Are you legitimately offering those services in those cities or are you just being greedy with traffic?
If you really think it makes sense, I would start by building out the top 5-10 term+city variations and spending a LOT of time on each one making it truly different from the others. Claim and optimize your Google maps listing in each city, build up content relevant to that city alone, build links from local sources like Yelp or other websites that will portray a strong local connection.
I do not recommend building out 300+ term+city pages. Start with 5 and see if it really makes sense.
Two articles I recommend you read in full :
I think it all depends on your needs and capacity. If you're asking the question "Are SEO and SEM different enough to merit two different positions?", then the answer is a resounding "Yes". Unfortunately this isn't possible for a lot of businesses so they have to look for someone a little more well rounded. If you can afford it and you have a decent sized business/funding, then yes, you should hire them as separate people.
In our case we are able to have both and so we do. Both of them are knowledgeable in both areas but each prefers his own job respectively. It's nice to have two people to bounce ideas and responsibilities off each other, if they are the right people they will work well together and do much more for your business than one alone.
Hi Gareth,
using on_sent_ok should not be padding the numbers. Do you have it implemented as seen here :
on_sent_okSometimes you might think of running custom codes after the form has been submitted. For example, you may wish to run Google Analytics’s tracking code for tracking their visitor’s usage of the contact form and counting it as conversions.
The new JavaScript action hook would be useful in such a case. If you have a JavaScript code you wish to run after form submission is completed successfully, simply insert the code into the Additional Settings section (which is new in this version and is placed at the bottom of the admin panel) with preceding on_sent_ok keyword, like this:
Note that you need to quote the codes properly; and the code must be in one line.
To show you a more practical example, if you want to insert Google Analytics’s tracking function, enter it like this:
on_sent_ok: "pageTracker._trackPageview('/funnel_G1/step1.html');"
I'm curious, why are your image links rel=nofollowed, but the text links are not? I'm not saying this has anything to do with your issue, just curious.
It's not a good idea to manipulate your link profile with links that are all on the same server. While this might give you some benefit in the short term, Google understands quite a lot about linking and will most likely catch on. If you have taken the time and investment to build 40 quality websites, why risk getting them banned or devalued?
Google would be stupid to allow this kind of linking. Google is not stupid. I would recommend linking your sites together only where strictly relevant, or else use rel=nofollow. I think that's about as clear an answer as it is possible to give.
Have you tried using In-Page Analytics? It puts little bubbles next to each link on the page to show what percentage and number of users clicked on that specific link. I haven't played with it much but I think you should be able to sort the click data in an export of some kind.
Alan, I think I misspoke. I meant to say that a categorically structured set of your products would be better to index than a paginated version. For example :
http://www.sunglasses.com/mens/black/productx
as opposed to http://www.sunglasses.com/products?page=233
Is it still considered wise to index both paginated results along with categorized results in this case?
Hi there,
SEOmoz created a special area just for this kind of question - SEOmoz Marketplace. Good Luck!
Greg - I believe all of that has been made pretty much obsolete by Multi-Channel Funnels in Analytics.
Sorry to hear you invested so much time, but happy that there is an easier solution available to you
10 maps is a lot of data going on... have you considered just doing static images of each neighborhood and making it link to the Google map?
"I've read that you lose all your valuable links doing this because they are domain specific and the 301 doesn't forward your links."
Where did you read this? It's entirely incorrect. A 301 redirect will credit 90-99% of your link juice as well as all users and bots. The best approach here is to setup your .com.au domain branded and setup the way you want, then 301 all your old pages to the most relevant ones on the new domain. You will maintain the vast majority of your link juice this way and get to use the brand/domain you want.
More information on 301 redirects
Good luck!
Quilbur - Notices on your site aren't necessarily there to concern you, just for you to make sure you are aware of them. I spot checked your site and it appears you are using the rel=canonical tag correctly. You have 12 total pages, all of them have a correct rel=canonical tag. Nothing to worry about.
I did PM you a couple of other suggestions for things you should tweak however.
Good luck!
First you need to setup your site in a campaign. You can do that by clickjing the grey "Start a new campaign" button. Once that is done and SEOmoz has time to crawl/run your reports, you can see external backlinks by clicking on your campaign, then clicking on the "Link Analysis" tab, then if you scroll down you will see a preview of all "Followed Backlinks". There is a brief list there and you can export a full list by clicking "Export to CSV"
If you are wanting to run a simple backlink report you can just use Open Site Explorer : www.opensiteexplorer.org
No. You should not split it into another domain (or subdomain). Having a slightly more specific domain name is not going to win you 15 more SERP positions. What does concern me is that you are not in the top 10 results for your brand name. Can you PM me your URL? I've never had a problem ranking a site in 30 days or less as #1 for it's brand name so something sounds off here.
If you did decide to do this anyway, a 301 would be the correct way to forward most of your link juice to the new subdomain. There is a very small amount lost (something like 1-9%) so if it is feasible for you to change your inbound links, you should.
More pages doesn't always mean better SERP position. There is no black and white answer on this. Here is a helpful excerpt from a recent blog by Dr. Pete :
A common example is when you take a page of content and spin it off across 100s of cities or topics, changing up the header and a few strategic keywords. In the old days, the worst that could happen is that these pages would be ignored. Post-Panda, you risk much more severe consequences, especially if those pages make up a large percentage of your overall content.
Another common scenario is deep product pages that only vary by a small piece of information, such as the color of the product or the size. Take a T-shirt site, for example – any given style could come in dozens of combinations of gender, color, and size. These pages are completely legitimate, from a user perspective, but once they multiple into the 1000s, they may look like low-value content to Google.
Unfortunately, this is a case where you might have to bite the bullet and block these pages (such as with META NOINDEX). For the second scenario, I think that can be a decent bet. You might be better off focusing your ranking power on one product page for the T-shirt instead of every single variation. In the geo-keyword example, it’s a bit tougher, since you built those pages specifically to rank. If you’re facing large-scale filtering or devaluation, though, blocking those pages is better than the alternative. You may want to focus on just the most valuable pages and prune those near duplicates down to a few dozen instead of a few thousand. Alternatively, you’ve got to find a way to add content value, beyond just a few swapped-out keywords.
In your case, if you are able to truly make pages that are unique, valuable, and genuinely helpful to users, you definitely stand to benefit your overall traffic. However, If I were in your position I would focus on making more like 50-100 pages with better, higher quality content, rather than 1000's of pages with just a little content.
Option 2 would be the best possible solution, with a 301 redirect. You maintain MOST of your linkjuice this way and users get an easy redirect, no extra clicking required.
Take it at face value. It's a group of mixed professionals/amateurs giving their 2 cents on topics. Nothing said here should be blindly followed and anyone worth their salt will provide a source for what they are saying.
[Citation Needed]
I can't imagine this being the case. It would create an unfair playing field since not everyone uses google analytics. Google already has plenty of metrics available for ranking and this doesn't seem like a logical one to use. If google ranked a site higher it would get more clicks and therefore rank higher?
I do think that Google uses the metrics already available to it such as the Organic CTR and Bounce Rate - most industry experts believe they are very influential metrics. You can see the data here.
Generally speaking index pages have a lot more trust and link-juice than sub-pages. That's why part of link building is making sure you have some quality links pointing to 2nd and 3rd tier pages as well as the home page.
For example, if your home page is about "Basket Weaving" and your sub-pages are about "Underwater Basket Weaving" - you would need to make sure the "Underwater" page has a bunch of relevant links, otherwise your "Basket Weaving" page is going to trump it.
Can you PM me your specific URL and the keyword examples? I can give you a more specific answer then.
Juliantile,
The on-page optimization reports are graded based off the index page because that is the highest ranking page in the SERPs for that term. The only way to do this automatically is to get your specific pages to rank higher than the index does for those terms.
From the SEOmoz help files :
The On-page summary automatically generates reports for any of your campaign keywords that rank in the top 50 of your primary search engine. The URL that it grades is the same URL that appears in the search results.
For instance, if you have 75 keywords ranking in the Top 50, you should have 75 On-Page Reports. This generation happens automatically within 24 hours of when your rankings are updated.
If you want to grade your specific landing pages, the only way to do that is with the custom report tool as you are doing now. Hope this helped!
Elias,
You should be able to accomplish this by just typing the sub-domain in the "filter" box on the GA "Traffic Sources" tab.
I just tried this and it works with "answers.yahoo.com" as opposed to "yahoo.com"
I apologize if I am missing something, please let me know.
From the Linkscape FAQ :
The internet is really big and grows really fast! Crawling all of the internet’s webpages takes a lot of time and money. Our goal is to update our index every month. As time goes on we are confident that this time will decrease.
PageRank only updates two or three times a year and the last one was around January. If you are getting traffic and your site: query looks good, I wouldn't give it a moments thought.
Hi Gary,
Reading these two resources should give you a good idea of where to start :
Good Luck!
Hello Teemu,
My guess is that Google sees the "lotto" query as a "QDF" query. It means that Google associates this keyword with search results that would change from day to day or week to week. Since lotteries change frequently this seems pretty accurate to me. It's also why you would see a date next to your meta description when it is ranking high. Google is saying "Here is some recent content from X date, i'll show this at the top of the SERPS since it's current"
I recommend watching the Whiteboard Friday on QDF, this will give you an idea of why Google is behaving this way and how you can take advantage of it to try and maintain the top positions as often as possible.
Good luck!