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What is the best way to internally link via images? I have a website about shoes with all different brands. Let's say I'm trying to rank for "ABC sandals", and on the ABC page I have a "related brands" section with 4 logos of related sandal brands, linking to their respective page. Currently the alt text of the logos is "XYZ Logo" with the link title text "XYZ." Would it be beneficial to have change either the image alt text, or the link title text, or both to "XYZ sandals"?

We recently (2 months ago) launched RSS feeds for the category pages on our site. Last week we started seeing error pages in Webmaster Tools' Crawl Errors report pop up for feeds of old pages that have been deleted from the site, deleted from the sitemap, and not in Google's index since long before we launched the RSS feeds. Example: www.mysite.com/super-old-page/feed/ I checked and both the URL for the feed and the URL for the actual page are returning 404 statuses. www.mysite.com/super-old-page/ is also showing up in our Crawl Errors. Its been deleted for months but Webmaster Tools is very slow to remove the page from their Crawl Error report. Where is Google finding these feeds that never existed?

I'm referring to the sitelinks that appear in the SERPs when searching for my brand name. 6 subpages come up- some found in my main navigation, some not. 3 of the 6 sitelinks have been demoted in Webmaster Tools under "Site Configuration > Sitelinks." I realize that they say in their instructions: "Google doesn't guarantee that demoted URLs will never appear as a sitelink, but we do consider a demotion a strong hint that we'll try to honor when generating sitelinks." I am just surprised they would ignore 3 of the demotions and for so long. The pages that are demoted do not have very many internal links pointing to them (unlike other pages of my site that are targeted specifically). Also, the site has tens of thousands of pages to choose from. Why are they ignoring my request? What else can I do to fix this?

Say I'm on Nike and I +1 a soccer shoe page...does the Nike root page rank higher/for more terms for my google+ followers or would just the soccer shoe page?

I have noticed for some pages of the site I am working on that I see the video that is posted on that page ranking a lot higher than the page itself or the page does not rank at all, just the video. I'm curious to know if these two can technically be competing for rankings and if Google sees that the page does not need to rank because it chooses to put the related video into the SERPs. Also, has anyone seen any differences in the way videos rank based on where it's hosted (youtube, wistia, etc)? I would think this is common sense not to but still unsure, is it bad practice to keep videos hosted on multiple sites (currently I am adding videos on a new host, but have not deleted the old ones on Youtube yet)?

We are working on a site with a page that has been ranking on page one of serps for quiet some time. It all the sudden completely lost its ranking for a single term (no major changes to on page made), but still ranks on the 3rd page for a few similar terms. Those terms used to rank a bit higher. Is it possible that some old spammier link building techiniques could have caught up with this site? The page itself is still indexed, has a few terms it is ranking for - but just completely gone from index for primary term.

Rand Fishkin touched on the tiny links that can appear for your search result - not the 6 pack of links that show the structure of your site, but the 2-4 links that show up on one line below your meta description. Any idea how to earn or influence these? He mentioned them in the "New Opportunities in Google's Search Results" webinar from May 2011 on Slide 19 if that helps. An example would be if you search "seo guide" in Google search, the SEOmoz link has those mini links below the meta description. Are they random or can they be influenced?

We switched over from our standard XML sitemap to a sitemap index. Our old sitemap was called sitemap.xml and the new one is sitemapindex.xml. In Webmaster Tools it still shows the old sitemap.xml as valid. Also when you land on our sitemap.xml it will display the sitemap index, when really the index lives on sitemapindex.xml. The reason you can see the sitemap on both URLs is because this is set from the sitemap plugin. So the question is, should we change the plugin setting to let the old sitemap.xml 404, or should we allow the new sitemap index to be accessed on both URLs?

When we click on one of our keywords under the keywords section of Google Webmaster Tools it shows our top URLs for that keyword. The problem is that it is giving us some very strange URLs that we have searched high and low to try to find but we don't know where they came from. Here is a screenshot: http://bit.ly/pl6mB3 Do you know where this type of URL string could have originated and how to fix it?

We are working on an ecommerce site that sorts out the products by color and size but doesn't use the sortby= but uses sortby/. Can we tell Google to ignore the sortby/ parameter in Webmaster Tools even though it is not followed by an = sign? For example: www.mysite.com/shirts/tshirts/shopby/size-m www.mysite.com/shirts/tshirts/shopby/color-black Can we tell WMT to ignore the 'shopby/' parameter so that only the tshirts page will be indexed? Or does the shopby have to be set up as 'shopby=' ? Thanks!

Hello, For functionality purposes, I need to wrap separate blocks of content with a tag. The main question is whether Google will follow this URL, even though it is not a hyperlink on the page, just a URL used for functionality purposes. We will have 10-20 of these types of span tags with a different URL for each one, and we just want to be sure that Google will not be following these URLs that are not links. Thanks!

http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/08/new-snippets-for-list-pages.html I read this post and have been seeing a lot of results with this feature, but can't figure out exactly why some results get them and others dont. of the results I've seen, many have information in lists or tables (as the article suggests), but some simply have their information listed in separate divs. Does anyone have any further insight on this? The above article is the only one I can find on the subject.

I'm assuming this is a common problem in ecommerce sites. Lets say we have a "sleeping bags" which has all types of sleeping bags on it. Then build a brand page "The North Face" with a subpage for The North Face sleeping bags. Is it possible to target the sleeping bags page for "sleeping bags" while targeting the branded sleeping bag page for "The North Face sleeping bag"? how would you suggest doing this while avoiding keyword cannibalization?

My company is in the middle of a big contest that is generating thousands of backlinks pointing to the contest page on our domain. How do you suggest best using this authority we're building up with these backlinks to spread it to the pages we'd like to rank for, especially after the contest is over and we take down the page?

We are trying to convince a client to do a massive rewrite from all URL's looking like this: "www.company.com/category/categoryId=82374" to something like "www.company.com/womens/jackets/rain" How would you describe the importance and impact of doing URL rewrites to an ecommerce site?  What evidence/research can we share with them to convince them it is worth the time and effort to do?

I came across this article about telling google not to crawl a portion of a webpage, but I never hear anyone in the SEO community talk about them. http://perishablepress.com/press/2009/08/23/tell-google-to-not-index-certain-parts-of-your-page/ Does anyone use these and find them to be effective? If not, how do you suggest noindexing/canonicalizing a portion of a page to avoid duplicate content that shows up on multiple pages?

Hello, I was wondering if there is a good tool or method to pull the new Google Analytics Site Speed data into excel and use this document to track site speeds on a weekly basis for multiple clients? Any good articles or how-to's would be awesome!

We have a client in the mortgage industry that has recently been licensed in multiple states, but they only have one office (for which their Google places page is claimed).  We have seen much success for the region their office is located in, but we want to expand our presence both for general terms and different region specific terms.  How can we help them rank in the various states that they are newly associate with?

I have a site that is rolling out a new "Daily Deals" feature.  The feature is found on MyBrandName.com/daily-deals. Would it hurt or help to buy the domain main MyBrandNameDeals.com and redirect it to the initial URL above? I think branding the feature itself could help because it is separate from the rest of the site, but if people bookmark/link to the new domain (MyBrandNameDeals.com), I will lose some of the link juice in the redirect. Are there pros that would outweigh possibly loosing some link juice from the redirect?

I had several sites regarding a core subject. The main site was xyz.com and then I had multiple sites for the inner categories of xyz.com . I decided to consolidate everything to a single site and so did a change of address in webmaster tools and 301 redirected all niche sites to the appropriate page on the primary site of xyz.com. Shortly after we lost rankings for those niche pages. Any thoughts?