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So you would stick with responsive design and work on making the site load as fast as possible and getting highest possible score on google page speed?

So if we looking at optimisation then Google Pagespeed is the only point we should worry about?

You don't think there is any SEO benefit from having a w3c valid mobile site?

So mobile sites are all the rave, but how many are doing it correctly and with all the different options which is correct or the best?

For example I have a guy telling me that the mobile site must validate here http://validator.w3.org/mobile/ or here http://ready.mobi/launch.jsp?locale=en_EN

However I have run many so called mobile sites like nike (m.nike.com) and those built by dudamobiles and all dramatically fail the above tests!

Responsive is another key element of web design and the guys at twitter came up with bootstrap, so I ran these sites through the above validators and all have failed.

I take this site as an example from ilovebootstrap.com, please note this is not my site but was top of thelist on here.

Mobi Ready

2 / 5 - result poor mobile experience

Results from google pagespeed

Mobile 62 / 100

Desktop 83 / 100

So while it looks good on mobile devices it does not score well

If you look at the google site: http://www.howtogomo.com/en-gb/d/why-get-mo/

The case studies listed all fail the validation tests, so my question is is it worth getting our mobile sites validated and will this affect rankings?

I am struggling to grasp the new logic behind google, my understanding was that they wanted to return more related searches so that the search matched the results giving people exactly what they are looking for from trusted suppliers.

However I work in the vacation rental niche and I have found that the individual long tail searches have started to become less valuable as they are no longer giving the exact property.  Here is a screenshot of the top 10 results for the key phrase "10 bedroom villas in quinta do lago"

Position 1 & 2 are good results and would be expected however the next 7 positions are completely not related to the search, yes it is quinta do lago. But I am looking specifically for a 10 bedroom villa, none of these pages offer 10 bedroom villas.  I actually found my listing outside the top 20 and mine is a 10 bedroom villa in quinta do lago.

Does anyone have anything that can enlighten me on this?

Thanks

Andy

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Hi Billy

Thanks for your prompt reply, could you give me some insight into what you believe is over optimized on the page, there are a number of pages which seem to be being penalized including the homepage.

It is a new site so don't expect high rankings but in the top 50 i would at least thought have grasped by now!

Have not recieved any kind of message from Google and webmaster tools shows only expected errors ( few 404's etc).

Thanks

Hiya,

Looking for some advice, i have a page which the on page optimization tool shows as an A grade and Google has indexed it. I have checked vie site: however is not being found in search results even for an exact match on the page title which is very specific.

I believe the page may be being penlized for over optimisation? any advice would be great!

URL is www.tots-away.com/child-friendly-holidays-spain/

Thanks for all the feedback I think you are right, I think the best strategy is to write on sites which fit your requirements.  You are focusing on people rather than links then, this should increase click through and potentially improve your rankings.

Thanks for all the feedback I think you are right, I think the best strategy is to write on sites which fit your requirements.  You are focusing on people rather than links then, this should increase click through and potentially improve your rankings.

I have always used article submission sites such as ezine, article snatch etc...  I have always seen the big ones as a good way of getting relevant content out into the internet network with the bonus of building quality links back.

However I have now been reading a lot of conflicting information, since the latest update from Google that even an article being republished multiple times around the net will wipe out the positive impact of the article and bring no SEO benefit.

I wanted to get feedback from the SEOmoz community to see if you now feel this is a pointless exercise and we should now be even more careful as to where our content is published.

I didn't actually do the 301 re-directs which is why I am worried, this was done by the other company, is there a way of checking?

I just run the domain through site explorer and got the message:

Oh Hey! It looks like that URL redirects to www.choice-cottages.co.uk. Would you like to see data for <a class="clickable redirects">that URL instead</a>?

So I am guessing I am ok, but 4 weeks seems like a long time.

Thanks

ok I may of missed a trick here, I have re-submitted both sites to webmaster tools.  I had assumed that re-submitting the old site Google would see the re-direct and remove the old site.  After your post done a quick bit or research and see that I should notify google of the change.  I have clicked on change of address and I get.

Change of Address

There is no change of address pending for your site.It doesn't give me the option to notify them, any suggestions?Many thanksAndy

I have taken over the following domain www.choice-cottages.co.uk, part of the contract was to re-direct the old site www.choicecottages.info to the new site.  Unfortunately I am only a middle man in the arrangement as the website is hosted with another company.  The switch was done well over 4 weeks ago,  the re-direct itself is working fine.

However if you google choice cottages you will see the first listing is www.choicecottages.info, then I have my new site below for a few listings.

Google is definitely updating something as before the old domain had lots of site links but this has reduced to a few.

Does anyone know anything on this, as in the past it only takes a couple of days to update.

Many thanks

Andy

Hi Greg,

Thanks for the update, can you point me in the right direction for creating the javascript drop down menu.

Thanks

Andy

Hi

Can anyone answer this question confidently, I know Google is moving away from lots of links within the footer.  However we specialise in websites for the travel industry and having a link to all the areas at the footer can be quite handy.  Our websites complete this automatically.

Here is an example where due to design of the site the links don't quite fit well, so we need to change anyway.  But before completing the work I wondered if there was a better way to do this.

http://www.dreamvillasitaly.com/

Many thanks

Andy

No nothing had changed on the homepage, the only thing we are trying to do is link build to internal pages so directories / social bookmarks would go to the specific page and not just the homepage.

However looking through the old stats before we worked on the site, he regularly had keywords going from page 1 to page 10, then a month or so later he would regain positions.

On the old site he relied on a search results page to generate different keyword positions, so they were not fixed pages.  I wonder if this had an impact?

Good news, the rankings have re-appeared.  Google decided to remove the homepage listing from its index hence the drop.  However the homepage has now returned and listings have gone from outside 100 to positions between 8 - 20!

Thanks John & Doug, really appreciate your feedback the site has had a complete overhaul and I think I underestimated the jump from .co.uk.  The site never had many inbound links except from one website so I didn't think I would lose rankings.

I know the new pages are good as they are ranked well, so I will just boost the link building.  But when clients are upset you want to make sure you have covered all bases and you haven't missed something obvious.

Cheers!

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently Content-Length: 160 Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 Location: http://www.TangoHolidaySolutions.com/ Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5 X-Powered-By: ASP.NET Date: Mon, 09 Jan 2012 19:46:04 GMT

looks like that is the right response.

I believe I have, as webmaster shows all the inbound links to the .com and not the .co.uk.  the domain is www.tangoholidaysolutions.com.  If you or John notice something stupid please don't be afraid to say!

I haven't even given you the domain name?  But if I do want to check the OSE index how would I do this to ensure the 301 re-direct is working for google.

I know it works for the human as if you type in the old domain i.e. co.uk it goes to the .com.

Thanks

Andy

Hi All,

I need some advice on this one, one of our websites is performing very badly and I am lost to know why.

We migrated from an old website www.myclient.co.uk and re-directed to www.myclient.com.

The issue we had was that the old site relied on search results i.e. www.myclient.co.uk/search+villas+in+marbella

However most ranked url's were not as tidy as the example above and had lots of characters.  Because of this and the fact that all incoming links were to the homepage we do not carry out any 301 re-directs.

In some keywords we have increased our rankings but for others we have dropped dramatically.

keyword 1

4th Jan position 22

9th Jan position 90

keyword 2

4th jan position 34

9th jan position 89

keyword 3

4th jan position 12

9th jan position 16 (a smaller drop than the others)

We do have some top 10s for this domain so I don't think we have been penalised for anything but I am shocked to see such drops in rankings.

I have setup the website so that each page targets different keywords and I have checked and they get A grades within SEOmoz.

Any advice would be really appreciated, as the client is not too happy at the moment.

Many thanks

Andy

Can anyone please recommend the best keyword research tools available, we specialise in the travel industry and struggle to find new keywords as the more niche ones always show no traffic searches in the google keyword tool so it is really difficult to make a judgement.  We know from google analytics that some niche keywords really are useless and while they are no. 1 they generate no traffic.

I hope you can help

Thanks!

Andy

Yes I can see the text version shows, everything.  Is the graphical displaying only showing the header and footer as the way the page is coded for example the code is called as followed:

Main (body)

Header

Footer

Where as conventional techniques would be header, main, footer.

Hi Can you please advise if the following website is corrupted in the eyes of Google, it has been written in umbraco and I have taken over it from another developer and I am confused to why it is behaving the way it is.

cache:www.tangoholidaysolutions.com

When I run this all I see is the header, the start of the main content and then the footer.  If I view text view all the content is visible.

The 2nd issue I have with this site is as follows:

Main Page: http://www.tangoholidaysolutions.com/holiday-lettings-spain/

This page is made up of widgets i.e. locations, featured villas, content

However the widgets are their own webpages in their own right

http://www.tangoholidaysolutions.com/holiday-lettings-spain/location-picker/

My concern is that this part pages will affect the performance of the seo on the site.

In an ideal world I would have the CMS setup so these widgets are not classed as pages, but I am working on this.

Thanks

Andy

ah great, it was the run weekly report bit I was missing.  I will start updating my campaigns.

Thanks

I have setup a campaign and have a number of pages which are ranked as F, but that is because they are comparing against the homepage and not the internal page I have setup.  Is it possible to update the page which the campaign monitor is checking against. Or is it driven by the highest ranking page for that keyword.

Thanks

Andy

We have clients that advertise identical properties on a complex, we train them to create unique titles for each apartment and to tweak the description so that it reads differently.  The content is based on the unique title which will be a searchable phrase. i.e. 2 bedroom apartment in portugal.  Next property will be apartment in portugal with two bedrooms.

As this are exact searches by creating 20 properties all with different search terms we maximise the exposure for the website, as it is very easy to get the no.1 spot on such an exact search.

I manage websites specialising in holiday rentals, so the search pages are very powerful however I only use these for customer experience. For my seo I create pages based on the areas, types of properties, specific searches i.e. villas in florida etc..

I think when building websites you must always have two outlooks; users & seo

ok thanks it does make sense which is why I resisted the urge, in terms of information facebook pages it is fine to link to other facebook pages or should you only link to websites?

Should you post on competitor's facebook page, I had an opportunity to recommend a client site for their services.  The facebook page was a holiday company, they only offered hotels & apartments, the post asked do they do villas and they responded with "no" and wished them luck.

Should I have posted a link to our clients website or facebook page?

Thanks so really with blogging and social media the client really needs to understand the importance of sharing information and  that we are not directly trying to create business.

Hi Ryan,

Thanks for taking the time to respond, as I say the whole blog arena is a bit alien to me.  I am trying to schedule my day better so that I can spend time dedicated to blogging.  I am wondering if client cross referencing is wise when blogging. For example linking client blogs to each other, linking my own blog to the clients blog etc...

Thanks

Andy

I have  a new client in the holiday industry and want to setup a wordpress blog, we will be writing the first few blogs and linking back to the relevant site page. But I am wondering how I should promote the blog so that the links are more powerful back to his own site.

Blogging is not my forte and doesn't come naturally so I really need some good advice to how I can start offering this service to my clients.

Thanks

Thanks this is a good site, which I have used before. My problem is I am in the UK and compete doesn't cover us brits!

Thanks bandicoot, unfortunately it is the latter.  I have a potential client who is getting much more traffic than any of our clients, however I think the traffic is not quality traffic not sure if you have heard of sitesell.com?

Hey guys,

I am new to SEOMoz and have setup my first campaign, so far very impressed with what is possible.

However I am trying to find out how much traffic a website is getting, as I know that people can be high up on certain keywords but are not actually generating any traffic from them.

Can anyone help?

Also I have a potential client who is ranking really high on alexa because of its american traffic, yet when I asked them they get very few bookings from americans.  How can I view the UK ranking of the site?

Thanks

Andy