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Posts made by irvingw
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RE: Duplicate Content Help
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RE: How useful/ damaging is it to have links repeated on every page ?
It's still viable.
In regard to your points
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If you were to include a large footer on tons of pages with little content that would not be good, but a small footer repeated on pages with a lot of content is fine. Also, supposedly Google looks at common code globally on pages and strips it away from the equation (boilerplate) They still follow the links and pass PR but just don't take the external template stuff into major consideration. So your main content section is mostly what is being graded to determine rankings.
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Well Google likes anchor text within content, so if it fits what you are doing, then within content is better, but a list will not hurt. If you have MANY items it gets very sloppy looking, so in that case I would suggest using jquery like this site does, this way you can get all of the links on the page in a SEO friendly way, ensuring they will all get spidered and pass PR without making a bad visual/user experience with tons of links on the bottom of the page.You can see when you click on a section in the footer it then expands to show the links for that section, very elegant.
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RE: Need a referee on article links
Yes backlinks still matter.
Well it sounds like they are simply doing a different strategy than you expected. If you feel that the links they are getting are good clean quality links than I would opt to have them pointing to your main site (internal pages not the homepage, never link build to the homepage intentionally) - but if the links seem kind of dodgy then linking to a independent blog makes more sense because it provides a level of insulation against getting a penalty in Google. This is assuming that the blog is privately registered or under a different name, and on a different server as well.
I would make sure that the blog is optimized to drive traffic to your main site. Compare the total traffic numbers to the blog with your main site referring domain numbers.
Also, If they are linking to the blog and the blog is linking to you exclusively, you'll get some PR juice from the blog so all is not lost.
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RE: How useful/ damaging is it to have links repeated on every page ?
That is called a robots nav, and it is a good SEO strategy for passing PR to MAIN pages you are targeting while not being something that draws attention to the user to click on. Strictly made to pass PR.
Look how this site is doing it in their footer. There are 6 links in that footer all perfectly targeted with anchor text, pointing to perfectly targeted pages (URL, title tag, H1, Etc)
http://www.onlinemedicaltourism.com/
Serving information to the medical tourism community, OnlineMedicalTourism.com helps you find information and services regarding medical travel, including overseas facilities that address your specific needs. We do not rate or recommend medical tourism facilities or medical travel services for quality of care, but rather act as an information clearing house so that medical tourists can locate the services they require. We recommend that you read more about medical tourism costs and the risks of medical tourism. The information on this site is posted by the facilities and medical tourism providers - OnlineMedicalTourism.com is not responsible for inaccuracies they create.
That being said, I would only do this on main targeted pages and not include dozens of links. Since this is a global footer you don't want it to be too long. It needs to be only a small percentage of the content on the page so that it does not appear to be duplicate content on all of the pages.
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RE: Long Tail Keyword Research
Use the Google Adwords Keyword tool, it's free and good.
All keywords should have some long tail, some just have more than others, also alternative keywords, not necessarily longer tails are good targets, also because of LSI (latent semantic indexing) you wand synonyms and alternate keywords on your site.
<cite>https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal</cite>
interior design
about interior design
what is interior design
interior by design
house designs
home designs
interior designers
room design
interior decorating
etc
all of these are 1,200,000 to 3,000,000 monthly searches, good volume, medium competition.
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RE: Title tag best practices when domain and brand are the same
Hey guys,
My suggestion was based on an assumption that this is a title tag for a home page.
Dog Supplies | Food, Bed, Toys and Treats for Dogs | Buy Online
Main keyword for this page is "dog supplies" however the homepage also mentions what type of supplies are sold on the site so it makes sense to include them in the title tag instead of leaving it out because those are your secondary keywords. Then, as you stated the category pages should target the type of supply in this case dog food:
<title>Dog Food | Biscuits, Bones, Treats and MORE for Dogs</title>
Listed above is the secondary keyword, and tertiary keywords. Also the plural because "food for dogs" is different than "dog food"
Again simply putting <title>Dog Food | Dogs.com</title> i think is selling yourself a little short, because the title tag is extremely important to SEO as long as you have room after putting the main keyword first you should utilize that space for SEO (better chance to rank for "dog biscuits" "dog bones" and "dog treats" due to better optimization, and also for better CTR. A person looking for dog food may be like "oh this place seems to sell more than just basic dog food, or oh cool i need biscuits too i can get them all here"
That's a whole other topic though, writing and experimenting with different messaging in title tags to increase CTR through persuasive copy to make yourself stand out among the competition.
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RE: Title tag same text as H1?
it's certainly acceptable for them to be the same. That said, the Title tag is used as your search display in the SERPS and "los angeles blue widgets" may not attract click throughs and that will impact your ratings. Here is a great article that just came out on title tags - http://www.verticalmeasures.com/content/the-best-headline-writing-title-optimization-tips-of-all-time/
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RE: Do you ever forget the SEO basics?
how are you going to noindex a cgi-bin, or scripts, or pdfs you don't want indexed or image folders with the noindex meta though
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RE: Reconsideration Request
Actually, while it is true that you have to choose your main TLD in Googles drop down to request reconsideration, you can absolutely discuss how you cleaned up your URL structure and provide deep link examples in the text box. In fact, it is this kind of detailed information about what exactly you fixed on your site that will get you successfully reconsidered in Google.
They don't want generic "i fixed my site please reconsider me" emails. Specific examples of the steps you took to improve upon your site and bring you back into compliance are excellent information to provide to them in helping them make a decision.
a) be detailed but not overly wordy
b) be polite and articulate
c) be humble and show appreciation for them taking their time to look over your site
d) provide specific details of what you fixed
e) repeat in two weeks or so if your site did not recover, make sure each follow up request has some new information as to what you fixed since last time
Also, remember you don't need to fix everything wrong on your site before filing for reconsideration, the main thing is showing progress, fix some stuff and explain what you fixed, then fix some more stuff and file again listing additional progress you made. It could take a few requests before you finally get sucessfully reincluded.
Good luck.
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RE: Title tag best practices when domain and brand are the same
I disagree. 4 instances of DOG in the title tag and 4 instances of DOG in the meta description is way too spammy.
I would have two instances in the title tag and two in the meta tag at most.
Dog Supplies | Food, Bed, Toys and Treats for Dogs | Buy Online
Featuring a large selection of dog supplies, we carry every major brand of food, bed, toys and treats for dogs of all sizes and breeds.
don't forget using the plural
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RE: How can i get the Authors photo to show in the Google search result?
Thanks to everyone for responding. I don't see anything amiss with my code, so it sounds like I just need to be patient.
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How can i get the Authors photo to show in the Google search result?
I added the rel="author" tags to the blog posts last week and updated the authors page with a link to the Google+ account, but I have yet to see the authors photo surface in the Google Results.
Example URL: http://spotlight.vitals.com/2011/10/dr-richelle-cooper-testifies-against-dr-conrad-murray-in-trial/
Can anyone identify what else needs to be done?
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RE: The URL Inside
Gianluca is absolutely correct. Example one (main site) is much better. Subdomains were used by spammers many years ago and are no longer a good strategy.
For every subdomain you make for each product you're basically creating a separate site too which needs to be put into GWMT seperately, so that gets a little crazy. It's just not a good strategy, even when someone wants to create a blog only for their site I tell them to put it under the main domain for PR and Google webmster compliance reasons, and you're talking about creating dozens of subdomains. There is only downside to doing it that way.
Good luck
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RE: Over Optimisation Penalty
Without looking at the actual site it's hard to make a determination, but simply matching up H1 tags, breadcrumbs, title tags etc is not enough to trigger a penalty, so don't un-optimize your site or you'll have an unoptimized and penalized site. Try to look at places where you have over done it, like too many instances in the content and tone it down a bit.
That is assuming this is why you got a penalty though, there are so many different factors that could trigger a penalty, how are you coming to the conclusion that it is over optimization?
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RE: Multiple Domain names pointing at one website
Google's take is you're not supposed to do it.Also,
a) make sure the domains are private registration so no one knows who owns the sites
b) put about 2000 words per page on the site, you can get away with a two page site just make sure both pages have tons of unique content
c) link to your site from the web and let Google find the site on it's own, don't submit it to Google's ADD URL tool - some claim that doing so tells Google that this is a new site, if Google finds it on it's own it doesn't make that determination (again can't be proven 100%)
d) this strategy only sometimes works for some reason, don't count on them all ranking.
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RE: Recommendations for International Hosting Companies?
Are you doing this for SEO reasons? If so I would just host in the US. Hosting location for rankings in that region is not much of a factor anymore due to the fact that companies in 3rd world countries were hosting in 1st world countries because of the need for reliability and it wouldn't be fair to rank them lower based on that decision.
Also, you can geo-target specific folders in GWMT so there is also less of a reason to get a country specific TLD.
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RE: Will Google penalize for redirects related to a company merger?
You can redirect them all with no issues if the companies websites are compliant. That is they are not penalized domains, and also not overly interlinked to each other.Too many websites for one company is against Googles rules, you're only supposed to have one horse in the race.
My suggestion would be to look at each site one at a time and vet it for compliance, once you have determined that it's a healthy site with no bad link building done on it, it would be safe to 301 redirect it to your new site.
This is just being super cautious though, because theoretically you have no control over who 301's a site to your domain. If Google penalized a site based on that then competition would take penalized spam domains and 301 them to the competitions sites in an effort to get them penalized. That being said, I wouldn't want any penalized sites to be 301ing to my site just to be on the safe side.
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RE: Sounds too good to be true?
Run don't walk from that offer. They're going to spam on your behalf and probably get you penalized. Also, they could be talking sitewide numbers. One link in a blogroll on a blog with 50,000 pages is technically 50,000 links but Google discounts sitewide links.
If curious ask them to build 10 links for you on a trial and see what they come back with.
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RE: Nofollow advertisers with high value sites
Hey Robert, I respectfully disagree with this theory:
"The reasoning (this is my opinion) is that they do not want the advertiser to grow and leave them so they try to prevent any juice from going to them. To, in essence, endeavor to keep them captive. "
Giving an advertiser a dofollow link is like gold, so not only will you get more advertisers, but if they do see better rankings as a result they would be less hesitant to leave because losing their links on your site could cause a drop in rankings so just the opposite is actually true regarding keeping them captive.
Also, image links do not pass PR which a lot of people don't know and also there is not anchor text so SEO benefit is minimal. If someone wants to advertise on your site and says they want their image link dofollowed I see no problem, that is of course assuming it's a clean site (which should go without saying because you only want to associate yourself with clean sites anyway)
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RE: How to detect which is a bad link ?
This is a great tool, it will show you not only the sites they are linking to, but the sites that the sites they are linking to are linking to, if that makes sense.lol
This has false negatives, like "sussex" gets flagged for "sex" so you need to read between the lines, but it's extremely valuable to tell at a glance if the site you are interested in getting a link from is linking to bad places such as adult, meds or casino sites.
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RE: What is the best way to make sure competitors or others aren't buying links on my sites behalf to penalize us?
Also take a look at incoming links in Google Webmaster Tools, you can export that as well. usually when someone tries to attack your site they use adult links, so these are pretty easy to identify due to the site names.
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RE: Multiple links to dead pages
correct, you 301 redirect the dead 404 pages to the most relevant related page, if there is no similar type page then redirect it to the home page. You can do that in your .htaccess file. You must explicitly code 301 in your redirect or it is 302 by default and 302 redirects won't pass link juice like 301's will.
Here's how to do it:
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RE: Problem with https
Can you clarify? Where are you trying to compare sites?
Usually https is only used for login pages and secure sections of a website. If you see a site that is all indexed in https that is usually an indication that something is wrong with the coding on the site. Google is crawling a https page and then following a http link and not changing back to http so some or all of the pages get indexed as https. It's a technical issue and usually not intended. This is why you don't see an option for https.
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RE: Is a slash just as good as buying a country specific domain? .com/de vs .de
It doesn't matter, because in Google Webmaster Tools you can geo-target directories for specific countries, so there is no need for different TLD's for different regions. It seems to work well.
Also, Google is smart enough to know that if a section is in German it should be shown in Google.de, if a section is in French it will be shown in Google.fr - it is the English sections that you definitely need to point Google in the right directions with.
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RE: Help with website
WAY too many instances of "nail files" on that home page. Twice, the the title tag, twice in the meta description, way too many instances in the copy. I would remove at LEAST half of those instances so Google doesn't think you're keyword stuffing.
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RE: Image Size for SEO
Load time is absolutely a consideration in rankings, go into you google webmaster tools account and you can see your site performance and how your load time compares to other sites on the web. Images are just one aspect of why your page load times could be considered slow but it is a factor. Get the yslow extension for firefox and that will give you some suggestions about what other changes you can make on the site to reduce load times.
I would play around with optimizing your images in photoshop and see what percentage decrease you can get away with without noticing a difference. If all of your images are roughly the same quality you can do a batch in photoshop, which is basically making an action first, for example saying shrink all images by 15% and then batch all of the images in the image folder and photoshop will shrink them all in one shot.
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RE: Does daily changing of price information in a title tag damage SEO?
I wouldn't do that because Google is not going to update your title tag every day like clockwork so if you're thinking the title tag will line up with the pricing on the page that won't happen - the daily price on your page will be one thing and the title tag will be a price from a few days ago. It could be construed as misleading because the user will see one price in the title tag, click on it and see a different price on the page.
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RE: Is my sitemap going to help me attract more visitors?
Just to add a bit, if your pages are being frequently updated you can add a published date and frequency of updates in the XML You can also prioritize the pages (like giving your category pages a higher priority). However, only use these optional parameters in the XML if they will be used correctly and this will definitely help the bots in crawling your site. If your pages hardly ever get updated, then it makes little sense to let Google know in the sitemap that your pages never change.
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RE: Images on page appear as 404s to Googlebot
Shalom - Your blocking the images folder in your robots.txt file.
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RE: Images on page appear as 404s to Googlebot
Please point us to the site and the exact example of some of the images in question.
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RE: Confused about robots.txt
I would also recommend to go to the site configuration - crawler access page in Google Webmaster and test many of your sites URL's to ensure that robots can access them. Test every unique URL format on your site like the search results page, product pages, category pages, etc... I always use this tool whenever I make any change in the robots.txt
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RE: Can anyone tell me where my site can be improved
I would advise you to remove all no follow tags unless the links are for paid for.
Some ideas on links to remove: In the drop down for designer radiators - product manufacturer does not need to expand into many more links - cascading drop downs are generally frowned on anyways. The links in the footer are duplicate to the header - consider condensing the footer links.
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RE: Can anyone tell me where my site can be improved
I see your site as number two in the Google rankings for designer radiators, so not sure why you're seeing it in number 21. Try logging in as a different user.
Some suggestions: Get rid of all your nofollow tags on all the links - page sculpting does not work in that fashion anymore. Also, you maybe overlinking on the home page, thereby greatly reducing the page juice of the home page - the nofollow tags do not stop your page juice from being diluted.
Only Desiger Radiators should be in the H1 tag. I would not put the following in a H1 tag.
<h1>Welcome to the Radiator Gallery...h1>
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RE: Link Attack
Apparently my company doesn't have websense blocking objectionable content
Nothing stated by this person here is true:
"First Google knows that you have no control over who links to your site and will not penalize a site for links from a spammy site. Looking at the pages that you listed those sites appear to have been hacked, there are 100's of hidden links on those pages. It is a little interesting that the hackers who hit those sites choose to include a link to your site along with the 100s of other sites. "
a) you absolutely can be penalized by the actions of others, it's just difficult and takes time and money and determination.
b) that's a PHP forum, it hasn't been hacked, the mod is just allowing anything and everything to be posted on there. Spammers sell link dumps to people who use throw away sites to spam for themselves, all of those peoples sites listed there paid a link builder to dump as many adult links as they can. It's incredibly cheap, you can get something like 4000 links for $20. It's totally automated using software. This throws you in the pool with many shady sites, I bet if I check those sites i'll see at least half of them are penalized.
see i just posted below all those links, it's just a crappy forum
Well Google makes it hard to contact them, don't use the paid link form. Contact them via reconsideration request in webmaster tools. Although it isn't a reconsideration request you're still talking to the people who have the power to forgive and manually reinclude sites who have been penalized.
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RE: Do you ever forget the SEO basics?
Thanks - I am not that bad - I only blocked out one page. I'll just wait until Google comes around.
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RE: Link Attack
If your forum wasn't so well established, I would say change the URL of the forum homepage and you'll instantly 404 all of those crappy links and your problem would be solved with one quick change.
Since that is not an option, the best thing you can do is to notify Google that you are being attacked by someone attempting to get you penalized. Email them once every couple of weeks with updated information, for instance if you see your incoming links number going up dramatically from the last time you emailed them point that out.
Basically, if you send Google enough messages they may listen and flip some switch or raise some incoming link spam threshold on your site (no one knows exactly what they do, but they can manually adjust things)
I think because of the nature of your site, it is not hard to convince Google that there are people out to sabotage you since you are exposing already shady people.
Be proactive, and make Google aware that this is not you doing this before they penalize your site. Good luck.
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RE: Warnings on Pages excluded from Search Engines
Try this to block pages with parameters
Disallow: /emailproduct.aspx?*
You can also add a robots nofollow, noindex on the EMailproduct.aspx page if you are trying to block it
You can do parameter handling in Google Webmaster Tools > site configutation > URL Parameters as well to tell Google how to deal with the parameters.
Also, you should always do 301 directs, not 302. Good luck.
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RE: Should I link to this site or is it too spammy?
they're linking to casino sites so I would not link to them or even want a link from them.
http://www.myteetimesonline.com/make-your-bets.php
Also, reciprocal links are dead, one way links pointing to your site is what you want.
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RE: Numerous (20K+) inbound links from ONE site in short time period
Tons of sitewide links all at once can hurt a site that has very few incoming links, they get discounted anyway so the best thing to do is to get a homepage link only since the homepage is usually the highest PR page on a site, and well crawled by Google. Also, being linked to from a penalized or bad neighborhood can hurt you so you should vet your incoming links and remove any offending ones.
Too many links at once I do not believe is a factor, because Google is not going to penalized a site just because it goes viral, it is more about the TYPES of links and diversification of those links that can trigger a penalty.
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Do you ever forget the SEO basics?
We all get a little sloppy at times. Just yesterday , someone pointed out that I accidentally blocked the robots from one of our primary pages, because it was being included in a wildcard match on one of the disallow commands in robots.txt.
Sometimes the mistakes are very basic. The one below is just too funny. I thought I would share the love. Search Google for "MD care"
MD Care Inc. - Welcome<a id="LXPLSS_979677678U1"></a>
<cite>www.mdcarehealthplan.com/</cite>
This is an SEO description that will be seen by the search engines and used in the search results.
The meta keywords tag is even funnier:
<meta name="keywords" content="spam,the,keywords,here,like,this,and this,good" />
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RE: Keyword cooccurence
Latent Semantic Indexing
http://www.seobook.com/archives/000657.shtml
I think they definitely do that for spamming reasons, otherwise you could make a million pages with latin text and only put your keyword repeated in the content and get it ranked.
A real article speaking about a topic would generally have similar related words also included in the article.
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RE: Advice on SEO for videos on a streaming server
Well it looks like you are hosting them yourself so that's good, have you created and submitted a video sitemap XML to Google yet?
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RE: Sitemap - % of URL's in Google Index?
If all the pages in your sitemap are worthy of the Google index, then you should expect around a 100% indexation rate. On the flip side, if you reference low quality pages in your sitemap file, you will not got them indexed and may even be hurting the trust of your sitemap file. As a point in case, Bing just recently announced that if they see an error rate greater than 1% in the sitemap, then they will just ignore your sitemap file.
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RE: Do Google Analytics filters affect link building?
They should realize their own filters but I take no chances. Allow me to suggest to specifically tell Google to ignore these parameters in the URL parameter tab in Webmaster Tools.
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RE: Can I get harmed by an inlink?
Scan the URL with this link vetting tool
http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/text-link-tool.htm
if it's got tons of bad associations (people they are linking to and people who are linking to them are linking with)I would suggest getting your link removed.
Use this tool before reaching out to a site you want to get linked on too, this way you know what you're dealing with
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RE: Can changing our links page make our rankings drop through the floor?
I would personally remove the page(s), but you could also do the following if you are afraid of losing links from partners linking to your site when they see their links are no longer there.
a) nofollow or javascript all of the links
b) noindex, nofollow, noarchive the links page(s)
c) block the links section in robots.txt
at a quick glance or to a non SEO person it would appear that nothing has changed, in reality you neutered all of the links - you should definitely do something to protect your site.
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RE: Does a page's url have any weight in Google rankings?
both are important for SEO - the filename in the URL should match up with your title tag. all filenames should be unique. for example
www.coolsite.com/kids-toys/blue-schwinn-bike
not
www.coolsite.com/kids-toys/blue-schwinn-bike/index.php
this latter example would cause you to wind up with Google seeing every page with the same filename index.php