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Is there a way to consolidate link prospects in Moz or should we look for an external tool e.g. Raven Tools, Buzz Stream etc.? Thanks.

Thanks for your responses - unfortunately because the article is on a national newspaper site, we have no control over redirecting it or removing it. So I'm really after other ways of stopping it rank so highly. Thanks!

We secured an article on national newspaper site for a client which now ranks number one for its own branded search term. Since we secured the article (over two years ago) the client has changed the direction of its business so the article is now no longer relevant and is actually causing a lot of trouble for the client. When people search for their business the article is telling readers one thing when their business actually does something else. How can we stop this article ranking so highly?

I've noticed a massive increase in the number of external followed links to my root domain (from 271 to 9961) - has anyone else experienced this?

My website, www.toplinecomms.com has a reasonably good blog that gets quite good interaction and sharing. I introduced the blog at the start of 2013 because the general sentiment from all the SEO books and articles I had read was that a good blog could be invaluable to a search marketing campaign.

The posts on the blog are keyword optimised and they get great shares and social engagement.

However, I have noticed that the blog is stealing my services' pages' thunder! There are some keywords that I am keen for our services pages to rank for, but the blog is beating them to it!

So my question is: How should I be using my blog to get my services pages to rank higher?

I run a blog: www.b2bsocialmediaguide.com. It's been going for 2.5 years and some of the old content is, frankly, dated! What do you recommend I do about it?

1. Update old articles with new, more relevant content and change the date?

2. Write new articles with the relevant content and forward the URLs from old articles to the new ones?

3. Do nothing.

4. Just add links to new content from old posts?

I don't want to lose link juice!

Total!

PriceSEO, it is odd. However, my ranking changes also vary over time - rather a lot actually! Some weeks they barely change, other weeks they fall, and others they climb!

Hi Janc

It's a really frustrating process, but totally worth doing: go through every keyword in your spreadsheet, line by line, and ask yourself: "will people use this keyword if they are looking to buy document storage?" if the answer is yes, mark the keyword '1' in a new column.

Then, sort your list by the new column, so that all the keywords with '1' next to them are together- my bet is your keyword list will now be at a more manageable level (probably close to 100).

Then, Google every single one of your keywords to check if the search results are similar companies to yours. For example, if you google "drawers" and the results are all to do with women's underwear, you can cross this off your list as you will struggle to compete for rankings with those results. Or if you google "office document storage solutions" and three competitors are all ranked on Page 1, you know that this is probably a worthwhile keyword to target.

By this stage, your list will be much shorter and  much more targeted. Then, look at competition and local monthly searches - based on these, choose your top 30-40 keywords to focus on. Optimise for those high value keywords first - it's a big job. Then move on to the next tranche.

I hope this helps - I am learning all about managing capacity in SEO.

Kind regards

Heather

Thanks - I actually needed to change my canonical tags - all working now.

Thanks Sara!

It's so frustrating. The following week we climbed rankings but then last week we dropped again. I think it's also to do with the fact that I am trying to rank for too many keywords at the moment. Grrr!

Thanks everyone for your comments - I will report back in a couple of months!

Thanks Chris - I think you're right. I was spreading myself too thin before!

Thanks Philipp - makes perfect sense and was the direction I was leaning anyway!

Hi there

I'm looking for advice from the community on how many keywords to target. What are the pros and cons of:

• focussing on the 40 keywords that we rank for already, with specific attention paid to those where we are on pages 2-5.

• Spread our link building / onsite optimisation work a little further - and continue to target all 280 keywords on our list as and when they are appropriate to target.

I'd love to hear what strategies people recommend.

Thanks

Not a great idea as it will harm the user experience - do you know anyone who would be interested in 35 pages for the same keyword?

I have to disagree with Glenn on the update frequency. I update at least one page a day on my website. When I went on holiday for a few weeks, my colleagues took over all search marketing activity, except page updates. In the two weeks I was away, we slid down the search marketing rankings. In every other instance we have climbed the search marketing rankings.

Nofollow links have no value as far as Google is concerned, so focus on followed links. That said, I get a lot of traffic from Nofollow links on popular web pages - so if the site only offers nofollow links, but is authoritative, it's good for your site, if not your SRO strategy.

Re outbound links, make sure they open in a new window so they don't take visitors off your website. I include outbound links where they add value to the post.

I hope this helps!

I think you should structure your URL from the point of view of the reader rather than Google - that way you future proof yourself against any Google updates.

It could well be that one of the pages on which the duplicate content exists has a NoIndex tag - have you checked that? That way it wouldn't be picked up by search engines.

Or, is one of the pages simply low down the webpage food chain and not being picked up at all?

Go into your Google Webmaster Tools account to see what Google says.

In the last week, my website's rankings dropped for a number of keywords. This is the first time I have seen a net drop (and it's significant) in my SEOMoz rankings report (been climbing consistently since January), and I haven't changed my strategy at all.

Can anyone shed some light on this? I noticed that my two major competitors have both lost domain rank as well.

Wow, a really tough problem.

I would definitely go for the image, and then customise the copy around the image so you can still rank for those pages. If you go for noindex tags, you lose all optimisation opportunites.

Or, could you host the product description on a single domain and then link to that from all your relevant pages?

Sorry Chandubaba, I have to agree with Adam here.

1. What about adding content to your own website?

2. You haven't mentioned anything here about the value of your articles and links. I can submit 30 articles to low quality article submission sites and get nothing. But then I can spend a few hours developing a really valuable piece of content and pitching it to a quality blog and get an excellent, sustainable link.

Your strategy is too simplistic. I use this rule of thumb: the easier the strategy, the less SEO value it will deliver.

Hi LoudNoise.

1. was there any site downtime during the migration?

2. Have you compared traffic sources before and after the migration to isolate the source of the problem?

H

If you analyse all the blogs on competitor websites, establish their strong points and their weak points and then develop your own blog that provides the best content in the industry, you will gain natural links and you will have a chance of competing. Obviously this would only work if your onsite optimisation had been completed.

Hi Christopher. Public relations works really well for quality link building:

I recently wrote a blog post on how to use PR to build elite links here: http://toplinecomms.com/blog/2013/02/pr-agency-trade-secrets-to-help-seos-build-elite-links

I hope this helps

Heather

Melanie, yesterday I watched a video by Matt Cutts explaining that the disavow tool is your best bet when it comes to combating negative SEO. It's frustrating though because it takes a bit of time to come into effect.

Good luck.

Heather

Hi Webdeal. http://addurl.nu/ has an up to date list of quality website directories. I hope this helps!

Hi Robert. Welcome to the wonderful world of SEO!

You should use the location based keywords that mention your town, because these include the general keywords anyway. So "neck pain Bloomington" covers both scenarios.

Hi, might seem like a silly question, but have you manually updated your page titles? I had this issue, for a section on my website - case studies. The designer had set the site so that case studies all had the same page title - automatically generated as 'case study'. Got him to update the HTML code and then added each case study title automatically. It worked.

Has anyone had this problem - no data in the links section of GWT? I haven't set a preferred domain, so I don't understand what's up.

Beytznet - I've had exactly the same problem, except ALL my links are gone - It's so frustrating!

Hi there. My understanding has always been that page authority and domain authority are indicators of how well optimised your site is. They are metrics rather than targets and will increase naturally as you continue to build links and create engaging content.

Hi there. Good for you for getting your SEO campaign off the ground!

You need to be careful when choosing an SEO consultant. There are so many out there claiming to be specialists in this area, who simply don't know what they're doing, and I have fallen victim to this myself in the past!

For me, the best metric is to ask them to show you the analytics for a site they have worked on (ideally one similar to yours). If the key metrics have increased, then you're probably on to something. Then ask them how much time they spent on optimising the site (if it took them 100 hours a month, they are probably going to be too expensive). You'll then be able to make an informed choice.