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I want to link to an event on a separate ticket website from at least 20 major pages.

• Is it OK to post a description & title & links on those 20 pages that are the same? (duplicate - but account for less than 5% of total on-page content)
• Do you Link as Do-Follow or No-Follow? ... and why?
• Or should I just use their ticket widget and plug that registration form into those 20 pages. (There still is a link - do-Follow, but everything stays on the website)

I have been getting a lot of confusing answers as to whether have external links as follow or nofollow. If you know of any RECENT resources about the topic based on evidence rather than opinions that would help a lot.

Is URL length really that important?

I have many articles that would lose meaning if the URL was shortened and for most, they would have to be under the root domain instead of under the category in order to fit.

Has anyone tested if they were negatively impacted by URL's that are too long?

I'm still testing my release I sent out in November. Some observations:

• Stable traffic of 10-15 visitors each day directly from the PR site where the release was done
• Incoming do-follow links from HIGHLY reputable newspapers (syndicated though, not reporters)
• Ranking increased for the two keywords included in the release

I did not see any negative effect ... yet.

If I do, I'll let you know.

Anyone else has done a test like that recently? Please share

Ask and you shall receive! Thank You

So what's the recommendation?

1. <a class="zippy zippy-collapse" style="font-size: 12px;">microdata</a>
2. <a class="zippy zippy-collapse" style="font-size: 12px;">or microformats</a>

<a class="zippy zippy-collapse"></a>

It's a bit tough to find info about getting started with Rich Snippets and how to start associating that information with the website.

I'd appreciate some links to guides on how to get started, followed by how to get good at it.

Thank You All in advance

That's a good one! One of my clients did that too on a regular basis. After we found the tag they got over 500 new pages ranking very high, and of course we were credited with the improvement, so that was a nice thank you check

I'll bet you won't do that again

I'll bet you won't do that again

So I got a whole lot of help these past two weeks and my rankings have been skyrocketing. Then I decided to start working on the on-page SEO in the lowest category of meaning, specifically on long-tail URLs. So I shortened a few of my best keyword pages so they can be fully indexed...

Let's just say that I neglected to remember I had built over 2 years some 30+ PR4-6 links to these pages. Rankings for these keywords dropped from 1-2 US listings to non-existent.

Lesson Learned. But I'm still smirking

What was your big lesson/mistake in the past week?

The video is a year old... Call me "skeptical" that it's still valid. But definitely a good watch. Thanks!

Do you have some proof/case studies for this comment?

"In addition, there is no point in including "stop words" (prepositions, conjunctions like to, and, for etc) in your URLs. They provide no additional clues to the user or search engine what the URL is about, and just make it unnecessarily longer."

I've heard a lot of conflicting views on this.

Some SEO gurus consult to use _ (underscore) whenever you need to use words like "for" "and" "to" when defining keywords in URL structure.

Others say to use - (hyphen) in everything

Others say not to use the connecting words (to, for, and) at all

What would you recommend?

Great list. Thank You!

Would you also put location into alt-tag? Like "dog pound los angeles"

What about putting a web page with a URL "dog-pound-los-angeles-ca"

or the extreme "dog-pound-LA-zipcode-address"

Has anyone done that and gotten back SERP improvement for local?

Local SEO

Adwords are easy.

What are the best ways to geo-target for a specific city?

(Please share your top 5 ways to do so)

Should you set a preferred domain?

www.domain.com

or

domain.com

Does this influence your SEO strategy?

What's the best practice to link to sub-categories without cannibalizing SEO?

Main page title = Dog

Sub page title = dog collar

Sub sub page = spiked dog collar

I used SEOMoz program and it showed the link from the main page to the sub page as cannibalized and also as duplicate title Same thing for the sub-sub page. How to avoid it?

Please provide examples

Questions:

1. Would you use: dog_collar or dog-collar for the sub-page?
2. How would you link to the sub page from the main page?
3. How to title the sub pages to avoid duplicate titles?
4. How would you link to the website from other websites? What kind of tags would you want used in the links?

What are the best and simplest programs to minimize HTTP Requests?

• for JS
• Images
• CSS

My site is built on a Bitrix CMS

Do you have some reference?

Here's what I found out last night which is contradictory to what you said:

added 11/30: I was reviewing competitors' link backs I found they did a lot of press releases and gained a high-level link back from each one. These were the best/highest-authority links they had. The syndicated releases were not even listed anywhere. And then I reviewed their SERPs... and guess what, their ranks increased with each one. (So I don't think "duplication" is an issue. If anything only the syndicated copies were penalized, but not the original one)

That's a great point about anchor text. Would you recommend linking to a different/new landing page?

Until the public gets educated on the "Alternatives" we're stuck. Sorry

How is this related to the question?

David, that's exactly what I was looking for! THANKS!

If you had a website "Food for Dogs" and:

1. Food for German shepherds was improving in search traffic & conversions
2. Snack Food for German shepherds had no change and never resulted in conversions but resulted in many leads for #1
3. Food for Poodles was unchanged but improving conversions
4. Here's the kicker... Food Container for Dogs was super high traffic but with no conversions or any activity to other categories

Would you redirect "food container for dogs" to a different site and delete that tab from the original site completely? It's still related but does not offer any $ value or leads to any of the other categories. Just note that we have a different interest in this category that will support the other categories at one time, but not any time soon. We also have a major group on LinkedIN that's grown to thousands of members for the "food container for dogs" category. On top of it all, the "food container for dogs" has been increasing in rank on Google for several keyphrases to positions 2-5 (nationally)

Other important question:

1. Would keeping "food container for dogs" influence the ranking of the other keywords? (by dilution of the site's PR or any other reason?)

What's better for SEO and why? (any references would be greatly appreciated)

For the purpose of a URL of a page is it better to use:

1. Hyphens
2. Underscores

Would hyphens or underscores be better for Google Adwords?

Was it a .edu site?

LOL, and how many words (on average) do You tell your story EGOL?

I disagree with that.

Great marketers can tell a story in a natural language in 800 words, but others can do it in 30 with a smart punch line and an image and perhaps an embedded video.

For example, in my niche, there are super-high-ranked sites with just a title on a wordpress page, a short video and 20 words of content just in the caption (It happens to be a competitor so I'm trying to figure out what the "better" approach would be considering we have everything else at tip top shape)

We recently spent analyzing some of the best SEO software companies on the U.S. market fishing for the best practices in SEO and I saw one thing in common :

• They all had website titles in all the page title tags separated by " | "

Is that the best practice for SEO or is it just for Branding?

Interestingly enough, the website titles were completely unrelated to the pages' content or keywords. (Here's my personal opinion on what it looked like: "riding on a bicycle" | Ferrari )

But when I looked up the keywords ... ranked #1 or #2 spots, in some serious competition. (So in the example above, "bicycle" would be in the top spot)

Aside from well optimized meta tags, alt tags, captions I could use some help figuring out:

1. What's the recommended number of words (original of course) on page?
2. What should be the keyword % ?

We've recently engaged an SEO company to provide an audit, and hired another for comparison and guess what ... 2 different viewpoints. I consider this to be the worst $3 grand we've ever spent!

I look forward to your opinions

20% is repeat traffic. 80% is new. In past 2 weeks impressions increased around 30-35% and the only thing I can attribute the change to is the interactive stuff.

I have what you may call a niche market. All the competitors out there are focusing on selling products, we're offering a service on top of education. In many cases we're sharing the stuff the product companies would never want clients to know.

But it doesn't hurt to be prepared once other competitors arise, and I'm sure they're coming.

It would be good to find out about the correlation of Time on Page vs. Rankings from others that have tested this.

I'll be sure to post an update in a couple of weeks.

David, like I said though... we did get an additional 100+ link backs from high PR sites (6+7) that were in the PRweb network where the release was distributed to.

Yes, we did get interest from reporters and got interviewed but I was asking about those 100+ links from the PRweb network.

I was curious about how much page load times affect rankings. Here's what I did:

• I put together a lot of interactive media on specific landing pages
• Time-on-Page from organic visitors went from 50 seconds to average of 34 minutes
• Bounce Rate decreased by 20%
• Page Load time increased from 1 second to 6 seconds and at peak times to 8 seconds (on 56KB test)
• In the meantime the page was re-indexed and re-cached

My question is three-fold:

• Would the time on page give higher rankings for keyword
• Would decreased bounce rate enhance rankings?
• Would the page load time decrease rankings?

Did anyone do a similar test? What were the results?

5 Steps:

1. Take screenshots of ALL webpages
2. Get a report on exactly how many pages were scraped and have evidence (usually Googling the site titles is very effective)
3. Take screenshots of the meta data: Right click, click on view source, and take screenshots
4. Once all is recorded send the website owner a Cease and Desist letter informing them to take everything offline and manually take off the pages from search indexes
5. If they don't comply at that point any IP lawyer will help if you have all the documentation. Some will take the work pro-Bono because there's huge money to be won, especially if you did all the work for them already.

Do NOT issue Cease and Desist letters without the screenshots. Usually what these guys will do is to change the appearance and add content to the meta tags and at  that point they will claim it was not plagiarized while still hurting you. It will not stand up in court.

However, if you documented the scraping the only option the website owner will have is to take the plagiarized content offline completely. Any edits they do at that point is considered a scraping/plagiarism because you documented the offense.

We've been able to prosecute 13 companies already. One company we publicly called out on Twitter during a popular chat leading to the company's downfall in 4 weeks.

FIGHT FOR YOUR CONTENT!

I'm having a bit of a conundrum with Press Releases:

I recently sent a press release on PRWeb (which I personally think is just "average" compared to others as it focuses mainly on the CBS network and is not focused at all unless you pay for an expensive release) and got over 100 incoming links from high PR news sites (according to Webmaster Tools) but these links had PRWeb in subtitle, so for all I know these were syndicated releases and not "Pick up By" as PRWeb reports.

• Will this affect Page Rank value or rankings for any keywords?
• Are these links treated only as temporary links or permanent back links? (I know sometimes they appear in Google News or Yahoo News, but disappear the next day)

Was it valuable to the company?

Our business is in health sector exclusively on East Coast U.S. and the release was seen all over the world and not one of the links coming back was from a health-related section. They were high rank online sites, but is there value in such links?

added 11/30: I was reviewing competitors' link backs I found they did a lot of press releases and gained a high-level link back from each one. These were the best/highest-authority links they had. The syndicated releases were not even listed anywhere. And then I reviewed their SERPs... and guess what, their ranks increased with each one. (So I don't think "duplication" is an issue. If anything only the syndicated copies were penalized, but not the original one)