Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I agree with Robert. The first thing I noticed was the backlink profile. With only 1 linking root domain to the desired page, this is probably from internal links within your own site, so inbound links from other sites may be 0.

I'd look at building links to that specific page with relevant anchor text relating to 'corporate events' where possible.

Hope that helps

Hi Dean

Could you not just use your FTP client (like Filezilla or Dreamweaver) to pull the entire site content down, save it locally, ready to upload later? Or do you not have FTP details of the sites you're taking over?

Sorry if I've miss understood the question

Heather

Google offer some advice on sitelinks here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=47334

It all works on the algorithms and depends on the search term being used.

Hope that helps

I would ask to see work they've done for other clients, then take a look at their clients' backlink profile in Open Site Explorer. This should give you an idea about their link building tactics if you think that will be a concern.

Content creation would be a good area for them to start as you could sign off any content before it goes live or gets distributed. You'd then get a feel for their professionalism and knowledge.

Hope that helps and good luck!

Heather

Could you tell us what CMS you're using and perhaps your site URL so we can take a look at the code.

The ALT attribute has to be added into the HTML and cannot to added to an image before upload, but there should be an option in your CMS to add this. If there isn't, you need a new CMS!

If you're worried about changing the format of your URLs when moving to the Wordpress platform, just make sure you have the appropriate 301 redirects in place to the new URLs. This should help pass the link juice from your old site.

As Robert says, if Godaddy are just hosting the site, they won't get any link juice.

Hi SaraSEO

Have you looked at http://www.linkstant.com/?

Although I've not used it myself, it was recommended at SearchLove Conf last year and can apparently alert you to new links via email/SMS immediately.

Hope it's useful.

Welcome to the world of SEO!

I deal with this kind of thing on a daily basis. It's frustrating to say the least.

I think the most important thing for you to do, is stay white hat and don't be tempted to play them at their own game.

Go for quality every time. It may take longer, but that usually means you'll maintain your positions longer than the the sites using the short-term SPAM tactics.

Good Luck!

I would agree that it's vital for the anchor text pointing at a particular page to be highly relevant to the landing page content. So it makes sense for the H1 tag of the landing page to be the same or similar to the anchor text pointing at it.

I would just show caution if your tactic is to build hundreds of links with exactly the same exact-match anchor text as this would look unnatural to Google and could be risky.

Hi there

I don't think it's necessary to repeat 'football boots' as it could look a bit spammy, so I'd go with option 1, but then expand a little, taking it up to 60 characters or so.

For example: add in your location if you have a bricks and mortar shop and want to target local searches, or perhaps think seasonal and add 'Christmas deals', 'back to school', etc.

Hope that helps

Heather

I'm in the UK and see the site at position 11 on Google.co.uk with this page <cite>www.dataclinic.co.uk/hard-disk-raid-recovery.htm</cite>

Results change all the time, have you tried different machines, logging in and out of Google, disabling Web History etc?

Hi Ryan

Thanks for your response. I can assure you that pursuing black hat methods was never the intention. I don't think anyone on SEOmoz would want that label. But I can see why you'd see it that why.

It was decided that both websites should offer the same products, focussing on their 2 key products but then saying "we also provide such and such through our sister brand". We are happy to have the association and for Google to know the 2 sites are related.

The reason I asked the original question was due to the advice of an SEO company we used to use who said that we needed to move one of the sites to a different server if we wanted them to rank for their own keywords. I guess they weren't telling us the whole story?

From what you say, a new content strategy is probably the answer.

Hi Marcus

We have 4 products. 2 come under the main brand, but the other 2 come under a separate brand that is more appropriate for the market they are targeting.

Each site focuses mainly on their 2 primary products, but also has a section for the secondary products, introducing the other brand and sending them to the other website.

Due to the industry we're in, content is pretty controlled, so creating completely different content for each site isn't straightforward.

All I need to know is if we need to be on separate servers. My priority is to get the sites moved asap and not rebuild and rewrite content at this stage.

Thanks

Heather

Hi all

We're looking at moving our 2 websites onto a cloud hosting package. The content on our sites is very similar (but not duplicated) so at the moment they are on separate servers.

If we move to the cloud, is it enough for them to have different IP addresses on the same cloud system, or should we host in separate clouds?

Thanks in advance

Heather

Hi Bob

I'd say you should utilize the space in the top right of your header, then repeat with a separate section and smaller logos in the footer.

I agree with John suggestion of adding them at the end of every post too as this is when people are in a position to 'like' or 'share' your content.

Good luck!

If the same principle of passing page authority through external links applies to internal links, then I guess it makes sense to take this into consideration, but I would make it a secondary consideration.

I agree with cees, you need to think about the user experience here.

Would the link provide a benefit to the reader? i.e. does it link to a page with more information about the topic being described in the article?

If so, and it's genuinely helpful, then do it, but if you're linking for the sake of linking, I'd think twice as the site could come across as a bit spammy.

There are no duplicate content penalties, as such. Google will crawl both articles and decide which it thinks is the original, and index that one, but not always both.

If you're publishing the articles to your site and Ezinearticles at the same time, there is a danger that Google will find the one on Ezinearticles first and not rank your page, believing yours is not the original.

I would recommend writing unique articles for your own site if you can, that way, there's no issue of duplicate content. I know that's probably not the answer you want to hear, but these shortcuts and time-saving plug-ins may seem like a good idea, not they're not the best way to go about creating great content for SEO.

Thanks for the quick response Ryan!

We don't use SSL on these sites, and our emails go via an external software provider, so looks like we can do without a static IP to begin with.

We're looking at moving our websites to the cloud. Most services seem to default to providing a dynamic IP address, with static IP addresses being offered as paid extras.

Is there an SEO disadvantage to having a dynamic IP address?

Hi Vinod

I have the same issue with Wordpress sites. The category and archive links mean each page has too many links according to my pro reports.

I would say that if these links are internal and they are genuinely useful from the user's perspective (make the site easier to navigate and find what they're looking for), you shouldn't need to worry too much. However, if you think you can do without some of them, see if you can remove some of the widgets that generate these links.

(disclaimer: I'm not familiar with the Blogger platform, so can't advise on the technical side of removing these links)

Thank you for your response, Megan - I can confirm that I'm now seeing UK results for Google UK in my reports. So that's great!

Thanks

Heather

Hi Peter

It would be helpful to know how you are redirecting these pages (301 etc) and for what reason?

Also whether any of your pages are blocked in your robots.txt file - perhaps to prevent duplicate content?

Hi John

I'm not sure - we only target the UK so have never monitored other countries.

We rank in the top 5 consistently for our keywords on www.google.co.uk

However, the ranking report (set to Google UK) shows that we don't appear in the top 50.

When looking in more detail at the keyword in question, it shows the top ranking sites to be all US sites with .com domains that don't rank at all on google.co.uk.

Can anyone shed some light on this or tell me if there is any way of getting accurate ranking reports via SEOmoz tools for UK sites, so I don't have to do it manually?

Thanks in advance

Hi there

We had a similar issue and just added:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

into a robots.txt file on the subdomain itself. This worked OK for us.

Hi Atul

As far as I'm aware, Google will allow you to submit a site to Google News, but not individual press releases.

You can find out about the criteria for submitting your site here

Hope that helps

Heather

Hi Dheeraj

My first recommendation would be to download the SEOmoz toolbar. This will tell you the number of links to the page and the number of root domains. It'll also give you the Page Authority and Domain Authority. You might also want to run Open Site Explorer to see who's linking to them (making sure there's no 'bad neighborhoods').

See here for information on the toolbar: http://www.seomoz.org/seo-toolbar

Also - a general look over the site should tell you whether they're sites are good quality or just contain 'thin' content for SEO.

Building up the keyword domain looks like the way to go as Google seems to favour these.

There's a good answer about a similar situation here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-to-use-good-keyword-url-to-help-main-site

Thanks Yumi, I'll take a look at the CSV files so see if I notice any patterns.

linking root domains have only dropped slightly (around 15%), but I'll take a look into which root domains are now missing from the reports

Just checked our links for a couple of our sites and noticed that the number of inbound links has dropped from around 55,000 to 13,000 on one and from 6000 to 700 on the other.

GWMT still showing the previous amounts.

Anyone else experienced this over the last few days?

My understanding is that by using the script given in the post that John mentions above, the comments are crawlable as it removes them from the iframe and places them on the page as html - so Googlebot sees what the user sees.

Unless I miss understood the post?

Hi Martin

The parameters in the URL are a big giveaway that this is an affiliate/paid link, so it's not a good idea to rely on these solely for your link building campaigns. There are ways round this by using cookies to store the affiliate details and keeping your URL clean, but your current system may not allow this.

As Ryan says, never have all your link building eggs in one basket. It's much better to diversify. This will look more natural to the search engines and hopefully mean any changes in Google's algorithm, should affect you too badly.

I would be interested to see whether anyone has done any experiments or had any experience of this effecting search engine positions.

I would say that as long as the H1 appears near the top of the page before any

oretc, so that the markup is correctly formatted as the W3C guidelines state, then it shouldn't really matter. But I could be wrong.

There's quite a bit of difference in terns of how they appear on the user's wall. See article http://daggle.com/facebook-button-facebook-share-keeping-1792

And there's a clear distinction between the buttons. I appreciate the article is old, but the latest ranking factors from SEOmoz show that shares have a higher correlation to search engine rankings than likes. Why would the two be separate, if they mean the same thing?

Hi everyone,

I'm reading everywhere about the Facebook 'Share' being more powerful than the Facebook 'Like'.

Just yesterday, there's a post on the SEOmoz blog about Facebook Shares http://www.seomoz.org/blog/plus-one-adoption-rates-and-social-sharing-statistics

But I thought the Share button was replaced by the Like button? http://mashable.com/2011/02/27/facebook-like-button-takes-over-share-button-functionality/

All references to the Share button now point you to Facebook's Like button developer page.

So if we want more SEO value, where can we get the Share button from? Or do we have to make do with the Like button from now on?

As the header and footer make up part of the page, then yes these links would be included.

However, if you're saying no more than 100 external/outbound links are recommended and there are no external links in your header and footer, just internal links, then they wouldn't be included.

I've used All-in-One SEO and Platinum SEO - they both do more or less the same thing and are simple to set up.

As far as I'm aware, both experiments work in a similar way, but the multivariate tests have more than one alternative. So instead of just having your original form plus a new trial version (A/B), you would have several trial versions running at the same time.

It's up to you to change the elements on the page and save as a new version to trial, I don't think Google can do that.

Good luck!

Perhaps you could try Google's Website Optimiser. That way you could have two versions (or more) of your form, with and without required fields, then set the conversion page as your 'thankyou' page. Google will then display each version of your page an equal number of times and record the conversions.

You'll be able to report on which version of your page is the most successful at getting people to fill in and submit the form.

Hope that helps.

As far as I'm aware, Google will use your 'bounce back' rate (where by users return to the search results page straight away) as a search metric as this could indicate whether the site is relevant for that specific search query. This was mentioned in the 2011 SEO Ranking Factors Report.

Hope that helps

Google may be taking the description from your DMOZ listing (if you have one). If this is the case, it's an easy fix - just add the following to your

Completely agreed with Todd.

If the PR7 site is just a page full of outbound links, you'll won't get all the PR7 link juice, so you'd be better looking for a site with relevant editorial content where the link appears natural, regardless of the PR.

As PR is almost always out of date, you never know if Google has already dropped it. Google has stopped even reporting on PR in Google Webmaster Tools as it doesn't wnat people to focus on this metric.

Just an update on this, The experiement has run its course and the meta refresh didn't seem to give Google any issues with tracking conversions on either version of our land page, so I would say it has been a success.

Thanks for your replies. I've set the experiment going with the meta refresh and Google was able to validate the script on each page. I'll let you know if it works reporting wise.

We'd like to track conversions using Google's Website Optimiser, but the conversion page is hosted on a different sub domain so Google won't allow us to use this as the conversion page.

The plan was then to add a blank page on the original domain that contains Google tracking code and a meta refresh to the page on the sub domain. We would then block this page in the robots file so Google doesn't try to index the page with the meta refresh.

Does anyone see any harm that may come of this? Or any other way around the issue?

Thanks in advance