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I recently started a discussion on Google+ and thought I would get some feedback from the SEO community.

https://plus.google.com/106060287111641282262/posts/Hpak5R6uY47

This article suggests that Google Search Plus Your World does not improve search quality for users. When a search is performed, I can imagine that results would be skewed to Google+ content and +1s from people in your circles. Doesn't this mean that if you only follow not-so-influential people who share and +1 not so quality stuff that your new "world" results are just going to be low quality? Doesn't this mean that SEO and traditional linking methods are dying? This would mean that the bigger chains will have more advantage just like what happened after Panda. How does the small business compete with this?

Any insight would be of super appreciation.

Site age could also have a lot to do with it...also, is your anchor text the exact keyword you are trying to rank for?

I am assuming you are trying to rank against the first results www.cplc.ca

If you look at the links in open site explorer, you can see that this website has targeted exact match anchor text from pretty high domain authority domains (in the 50s and 60s). You can see all externals links pointing to that domain here:

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?page=1&site=www.cplc.ca&sort=page_authority&filter=&source=external&target=subdomain&group=0

Your backlink profile isn't as diverse and targeted as theirs. Try looking at their links and try to get the same ones pointing to your targeted page, which looks like your home page.

Hope this helps!

try using "redirect 301 old.html new.html" that is the traditional way using a 301 with an .htaccess file.

Double check your file names wherever you are setting up the redirect. The first URL in your original post 301s to this URL:

http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/index.htmlmelia-caribe-tropical-announces-fall-promotion.html

See how there is more after the first .html? Looks like you might have just accidentally misspelled your end locations

These are redirecting, but they are redirecting to a page that is not there. So the result of your 301 ends up as a 404.

Are you using your .htaccess file to perform 301s? If otherwise, let us know so that we can further address the problem. If you can, copy your .htaccess file contents here.

Thanks for your response. A few weeks ago we actually posted the pictures right on the page. This page is indexed / followed- everything. Google hasn't penalized the site or anything like that. If anything, it is helping his visitors by showing his work. So I guess until Google can "see" the image, keeping them on the page will be the best option. Thanks!

Maybe what you should do is add the rel="canonical" attribute on your page/thread to the corresponding Yahoo answers page. This will certainly tell Google who the "original owner" is. If you want to block from search engines also, keep the noindex and also block Googlebot in robots.txt for that sub directory.

I actually have used BuildMyRank. The good thing about it is that it's affordable, the bad thing is that the links are usually very low quality. Some of the links do have pass a high PR, but the quality of the content isn't very good. My advice is if you are going to use BMR, write your own content and have them distribute it. Otherwise, having them write the content for you will give you poor quality articles!

It looks like what you are missing is links from other sites. Anyone can launch a website and make it relevant for any keyword or keyphrase they want. But even the "perfectly" optimized page won't rank in Google without any links pointing to it. Links give your site authority. According to OSE, your site has one external link. If you're new to SEO and link building, some easy ways to get some links right off the bat is to check out the SEOmoz Link Directory. Submit your site to the most relevant directories in the most relevant category. Don't submit your site to every directory here, it's not meant for that. Plus. you'll go broke.

Also, check out the link building category on the SEOmoz blog. There are a ton of articles from the staff, associates, and members of the community who post literally hundreds of creative ways to get others to link to your site. It's good you have a blog, use that as a link building tool by creating good keyword rich content that your users and prospects will find useful. Add some social sharing features to help get the word out there.

I wish there was a magic button for link building, but there isn't. It is what separates the wheat from the chaff in the SEO world. But at least you are in the right place! Good luck!

Agreed. You will get some good link juice to the home page. Place highly optimized anchor text on the home page to the URL you want and that will help you out the most in building authority to that page.

I don't think it would be a good idea to claim all of these profiles. Google will most likely just suspend your account. Claim only the best one with the most/best reviews on it. On all of the other duplicate profiles use the "report a problem" link and choose the "place has another listing" option. In the comments, give Google the direct URL to the claimed profile.

I am unsure how they will handle reviews for this, but at the very least you'll have a starting point with the best profile these previous "SEOs" did.

My first thought is no. But I am definitely looking for some loopholes. If there is any way to make this work, please share your thoughts.

I have a client with page 1 rankings for several keywords. He wants to make some updates to his website.

He is offering a new service and wants to show before and after photos of the procedure. He is an OB/GYN, so the before/after pictures are very explicit and have full nudity.

How will this affect his rankings? Is there something that I can do to tell Google and other SE's that these photos are medical and not pornographic? Should I host them on another domain? Just looking for thoughts and insight. Thank you in advance!

Have you purchased or obtained any spammy links to your content?

Have you checked Google webmaster tools for any malware warnings?

Did the traffic just stop completely? Make sure that you didn't remove your analytics code from your header. This will make it obviously look like you have 0 traffic when you actually might be. Sometimes technical changes (especially with a CMS) can cause some parts of the site to stop working together.

What did you do recently that might be of question to Google?

I have a client with a well aged, high DA site. They rank well for their wedding photography business in several cities.

They are launching a new service which is related to photography (photobooths and flipbooks) which they built and developed content on a new domain. The existing domain has 0 links with a DA of 1. The site is brand new..

Is there any drawback to moving the existing content on the new domain to a sub directory of the high authority domain? EX: http://domain.com/newcompany

The look, feel, and design of the new site / service is much different than the high DA site.

My thoughts are that this will give them an automatic step up, especially since they will be marketing this in several major cities.

Also, since the design will be different, if it is good to move to the subdir, should we put the new company name in the subdir folder or something keyword friendly like domain.com/photobooth as opposed to domain.com/newcompanyname.

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

I'm going to head this route....thanks a lot for your help!

Hey Mozzers-

I know the basic process for handling duplicate listings, but I just want to make sure and ask because this one is a little sensitive.

I have a client with a claimed and verified listings page, which is here:

http://maps.google.com/maps/place?q=chambers+and+associates&hl=en&cid=9065936543314453461

There is also another listing (which I have not claimed yet) here:

http://maps.google.com/maps/place?q=dr.+george+chambers&hl=en&cid=14758636806656154330

The first listing has 0 reviews, where the 2nd unverified listing has 12 fantastic 5 star reviews. We can all agree that if I can get these two listings to merge, his general listing will perform much better than it already is (the first listing has about 200 actions per months).

So, what is the best way to merge these two without losing any reviews and without suspending my places account? Thanks in advance!

Ian

Depends on what framework or CMS you are using. Do you have any more info? Check your htaccess file for any malicious code.

Google webmaster tools will allow you export all of the backlinks to your site, within any page. Also, in open site explorer, by default it shows links just to one URL. Make sure you select the dropdown "All pages on root domain" and it will show you all links to all of your pages.

EGOL-

Thank you for your awesome input. Didn't realize I was sitting on that...you are awesome!

Thank you both! I will definitely use to connections that they have already to get those sites and associates to point a link to the site. They also do the clinic work on campus so I'm sure the university will provide a link with the right leverage. Would love a .edu for this one. Thanks guys!

I have a prospective client looking to do SEO- they are a charity and have a fixed one time budget. (The budget is surprisingly high) They are looking to have their site ranked for "charities in (our city)" and "dental charities" and any keyword variations. Adwords shows significant search volume and ranking difficulty is moderate per SEOmoz keyword difficulty tool. On page will be fairly simple and well handled, but am looking more towards the authority and link building.

I am going to tackle 3 top quality directories, Yahoo, BOTW, and Business.com (as well as DMOZ but i've never had luck). But was wondering if there were any other nationally recognized sources that mozzers know about that would be a good place to start to get some links to the site. The organization is a clinic that provides free dental work to veterans.

I have never handled SEO for a charity before, and my first instinct is that getting a link to the site will be much easier to get than if I ask them to give money to the foundation, so they would be glad to do it. Any other guidance would be appreciated. And I can give more details if necessary.

Any other tips and insight would be appreciated.

Thank you!

Ian

What about off site elements? Any directory submissions that were of low quality? Or did you lose a link that you might have had before?

I like that.

Now is there anything negative about uploading the same video to both services?

I am just wondering if there are any SEO considerations when uploading a video to either YouTube or Vimeo? Should i choose one over the other or is it okay to upload to both? Haven't stepped into the video part of SEO waters before

Im assuming your client has online competition? Show them their online competitors and what keywords they are ranking and optimizing for. Your client will love it if you outrank their competition! You also now know that you aren't going to be wasting your time and have an end goal.

I've never been able to find one...they must not have one? The only way I've ever found cached pages on Bing is to click the arrow next the listing on the SERP, then arrow down to cached page.

If you look at the source in chrome, the isn't matching color of the <title>. I think you are having a validation issue. I think its up top in the HTML section:</p> <p><span>xmlns:og</span>='<span>http://opengraphprotocol.org/schema/</span>'</p> <p>Make sure that you are using quotation marks instead of the apostrophe. So it is ="content" instead of ='content'. </p></title>

Make sure that your site is being crawled correctly. Also, how long has it been since you did the site consolidation? If it is very recently then I would guess that your final site will get its ranking back soon, you've done all of the necessary steps.

Have you considered getting links from those directories for your client? Do that and get some additional links that are better that your competition doesn't have and I would imagine that you would outrank them over time.

I agree with this. The closer the IP addresses between sites that link to each other the more likely they are that the two sites have a relationship. Not that this is bad, it's just that links that you get from your relationships are usually easier to get than those that are freely and naturally given, so they discount them.

I wish I could help you with that one, I'm not too proficient in PHP. Maybe someone else with more development experience can answer?

I would imagine that the use of canonicalization or a 301 redirect would be the way to go. Can you set it up so that it tracks the referral ID, logs it, then 301s to your main index?

Look at other ebay/amazon stores that link to their own website. Check out the source code and see if there is a rel="nofollow" attribute appended to the a tag of the link. If it's not there, you are in good shape search engine wise.

User wise, you are definitely in good shape. Link to your company website so that you can show your potential customers that you are the best choice, especially compared to your competition. Offer them reasons why they should go with you and use testimonials to back it up. I don't think there is a downside to this

Just to open a discussion, I would imagine that Google will not put a lot of weight into the domain name listed on the places page. They are already looking into exact match domain names and their ranking ahead of others, so I would assume that the same would be places. I know for sure that distance from centroid, number and quality of reviews, and categories of the listing have the most weight in ranking in places or maps. Sorry i don't have a straight answer but thought I would give a point of view? Hope it helped

To clarify- if you have two pages, one optimized for furnace filters and the other optimized for furnace filter, i would imagine you would have a lot of the same content on those pages, not to mention that you would also probably be wasting your time since Google will treat those two keywords the same since they are variants.

To answer your other question: You should probably optimize for those filter sizes also. Thats a great idea for long tail keywords.

Also, when determines whether or not you should optimize for the singular or plural version of the word, optimize it on that page based on what product you are selling. For example, if you are selling a budle of 3 filters, focus on the plural version of the pages, that way users searching for multiple filter packs won't come across a page with just 1 filter. Does that make sense?

I think Google will count both filter and filters as the same search terms as they are just variations of each other. But just to be safe you might consider furnace filter because it has the most volume. Use variations of filter both singular and plural on the visible page. Google does not hold a lot of weight in the variations of these words and will display results accordingly based on relevancy and authority. Focus on getting text links with both variations of the word, you can't go wrong with that. I don't think you will need to choose two separate optimized pages since they are so closely related. I could image there would be a lot of duplicate content issues with that?

Since it is the same content then I guess it wouldn't hurt you to no follow and no index at all. And even if you didn't I'm sure it wouldn't matter since Google knows you are just testing using their scripts.

Check out this thread on Google: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/websiteoptimizer/thread?tid=2462d6ad54512b96&hl=en

It basically says that if you are using GWO for testing purposes, SEO will not be affected. Google can see that you are using their site optimizer and won't discount any of your rankings or penalize your site for duplicate content.

If you are just switching hosts and keep your site and permalink structure the same, you need not worry about backlinks. For some reason if they do change, you should 301 redirect all old articles to their new versions. If you are switching domain names then you definitely need to make sure that you do the 301 redirects as well. I just want to make sure that you have the terms correct?

If you have links incoming to your home page with "job scheduling" in the anchor text, Google will see that page as more authoritative and relevant than a page on your site without any links to it. If you can build links with "job scheduling" in the anchor text to the optimized page not ranking, you'll have a better shot at it ranking ahead of your home page in the future.

You should probably make sure that the canonical URLs box is checked in that particular plugin. The reason why you are getting those duplicate content errors is because Google is seeing those tag pages as different URLs with the same content which will possibly penalize you.

This will help with most of the issues. Also, you can edit your tag and category archive pages to display links to the different articles without displaying a lot of the content. Although there might be user consideration for this.

Also, maybe try SEO Ultimate, a plugin which has additional options for you regarding your author, date, category, and tags archive pages.

Have you created and submitted to Google an XML sitemap including the TOC and all other pages?

I have had good experience with the yahoo directory and it's link quality. Same goes for business.com and Best of the Web. The submission requirements fall right along the lines of the google webmaster agreement and google's guidlines for what qualifies as a good site. If included your site will be seen as more authoritative. Make sure that the site meets the requirements of the Yahoo directory because they will not refund your $299 review fee if you do not get in.

Yes- I did not mention this in my other response. Adam is correct also, it could be that Google has an outdated index.

Sometimes Google will display the title and meta element of a DMOZ listing. If you are listed in the DMOZ open directory project, simply put the following to your head section and it will default back to what you actually have on the page.

Sometimes, Google will also change the Title and description elements in the SERPs for user experience. It's difficult to see how or why, but it does happen. Does this help?

Hey-

I have not used this site before but heard good things about it. It's affordable, but the directories are not super high quality. PR 4 or so. I think they have different tiers for better directories. This isn't auto submission, it's simply a service that submits manually for you. Also, they vary the anchor text I think up to 10 times I think?

http://www.submit2please.com/directory-submission.html

For awesome directories - I always submit my client's site to Best of The Web, Business.com, and the Yahoo Directory. They have similar guidelines to Google so they are very well trusted.

Hope this helps!