Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I have two questions/queries:

Hi, I am drawing your attention to Moz's Domain basics here: http://moz.com/learn/seo/domain It reads: "Since search engines keep different metrics for domains than they do subdomains, it is recommended that webmasters place link-worthy content like blogs in subfolders rather than subdomains. (i.e. www.example.com/blog/ rather than blog.example.com) The notable exceptions to this are language-specific websites. (i.e., en.example.com for the English version of the website)." I am wondering if this is still Moz's current recommendation on the subfolders vs subdomains debate, given that the above (sort of) implies that SE's may not combine ranking factors to the domain as a whole if subdomains are used - which (sort of) contradicts Matt Cutts last video on the matter ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MswMYk05tk ) which implies that this is not the case and there is so little difference that their recommendation is to use whatever is easiest. It would also seem to me that if you were looking through the eyes of Google, it would be silly to treat them differently if there were no difference at all other than subdomain vs subfolder as one of the main reasons a user would use a sud-domain is a technical on for which it would not make sense for Google to treat differently in terms of its algorithm. I notice that in terms of Moz, while most of the site uses subfolders, you do have http://devblog.moz.com/ - and I was wondering if this is due to a technical reason or conscious decision, as it would seem to me that the content within this section is indeed linkworthy (as it has external links pointing to it from external sources), therefore it would seem to not be following the initial advice that is posted in Moz's basics on domains. Therefore I am assuming it is due to a technical reason - or that Moz's adive is out of date with current Moz thinking, and is indeed in line with Matt C in that it doesn't matter. Cheers

I am sure everyone is aware at Moz, that although the Moz link metrics ( primarily I am talking about DA & PA) are good, there is a lot of room for improvement, and that there are a lot of areas where the metric values given to some types of site are well out of whack with what their "real" values should be. Some examples
www.somuch.com  (Link Directory) - DA 72
www.articlesbase.com (Article Directory) - DA 89
www.ezinearticles.com (Article Directory) - DA 91 I'm sure everyone would agree that links from these domains are not as powerful (if of any value at all), as their DA would suggest, and therefore by definition of how moz metrics work, the sites these have links from such sites are also inflated - thus they throw the whole link graph out of whack. I have 2 suggestions which could be used to singularly or in conjunction (and obviously with other factors that Moz use to calculate DA and PA) which could help move these values to what they should more realistically be. 1/. Incorporate rank values.
This is effectively using rank values to reverse engine what google (or other engines) as a "value" on a website. This could be achieved (if moz were not to build the data gathering system itself), by intergrating with a company that already provides this data - eg searchmetrics, semrush etc. As an example you would take a domian and pull in some rank values eg http://www.semrush.com/info/somuch.com?db=us  - where you could use traffic, traffic price, traffic history as a metric as part of the overall Moz scoring alogrithm. As you can see from my example according to SEMRush the amount of traffic and traffic price is extreamly low for what you would expect of a website that has a DA of 72.  Likewise you will find this for the other two sites and similarly to pretty much any other site you will test. This is essentially because your tapping into Googles own ranking factors, and thereby more inline with what real values (according to Google) are with respect to the quality of a website. Therefore if you were to incorporate these values, I believe you could improve the Moz metrics. 2/. Social Sharing Value
Another strong indicator of quality the amount of social sharing of a document or website as a whole, and again you will find as with my examples, that pages on these sites have low social metrics in comparison to what you would normally associate with sites of these DA values. Obviously to do this you would need to pull social metrics of all the pages in your link DB. Or if this we to tech intense to achieve, again work with a partner such as searchmetrics, which provide "Total Social Interations" on a domain level basis. Divide this value by the number of Moz crawled pages and you would have a crude value of the overall average social scorability of a webpage on a given site. Obviously both the above, do have their flaws if you looked at them in complete isolation, however in combination they could provide a robust metric to use in any alogrithm, and in combination with current moz values used in the alogrithm I believe you could make big strides into improving overall Moz metrics.

This is really a suggestion (and debate to see if people agree with me), with regard to including "citation links" within Moz tools, by default, as just another type of link NOTE: when I am talking about "citation links" I am talking about a link that is not wrapped in a link tag and is therefore non clickable, eg moz.com Obviously Moz have released the mentions tool, which is great, and also FWE which is also great. However, it would seem to me that they are missing a trick in that "citation links" don't feature in the main link index at all. We know that Google as a minimum uses them as an indicator to crawl a page  ( http://ignitevisibility.com/google-confirms-url-citations-can-help-pages-get-indexed/ ), and also that they don't pass page rank  - HOWEVER, you would assume that google does use then as part of their alogrithm in some manner as they do nofollow links. It would seem to me that a "Citation Link" could (possibly) be deemed more important than a no follow link in Googles alogrithm, as a "no follow" link is a clear indication by the site owner that they don't fully trust the link, but a citation link would neither indicate trust or non trust. So - my request is to get "citation links" into the main link index (and the Just Discovered index for that matter). Would others agree??

I have a multi-part question with regard to the moz link index and some presentation suggestions. Firstly I would be interested to know how the link index treats site-wide links with regard to metrics such as DA, and PA. We all know that it is highly likely that SE's are unlikely to pass full link value across from sitewide links, and therefore it would make sense for Moz values to account for this as well - if they do not already. One annoying thing that also relates to sitewides is that they tend to clutter the much of the information presentation in a few of the tools (you can't see wood for trees as it were). This is most prominent in the "Just Discovered" page - if you have a sitewides on a large site, you can often find that this screen is just totally filled with these links as they are found. It would be very useful to be able to filter these out, as they are of little interest - currently I can't see a way of filtering them out. A further value where they create to much noise is the 'Total Links' value. Where sitewides are included in this value, the value actually becomes pretty meaningless as you can find that the majority of that value is sitewides. It would therefore be useful if there was another value for 'Total Links - Excluding Sitewides' where maybe value of 1 was just added to the count for a site wide

Hi, I was wondering if the 'Just Discovered' links get added to the main link crawl index? It would seem to make sense for them to do so, as this would enable the enable the link index to be more up to date than it would otherwise be. Observing the link index it would seem that at the moment it does not do this and they are totally separate indexes (based on personal observation). Thanks

Hi, I was wondering if anyone had a solution to linking without loosing link equity? From what I have read using 'no follow' on both internal and external links DOES NOT pass any equity across the link to the link target, but also, the latest thought goes that it DOES loose link equity (as if it were a FOLLOW' link). So is there a method of retaining link equity using another method? Thanks

Hi, I was wondering if other people had noticed the (very sudden) closing down of the ranking tools for both Raven and Ahrefs - both of which were major parts of their software. Given the sudden and synced timing my guess is that Google is throwing its weight around and banking on the doors of companies offering ranking software with the threat of a fat lawsuite! What is everyone else using for their rank checking ? Will this impact SEOMOZ ranking results ?

Hi, I've read a bit up on making AJAX called content indexable and there seems to be  a number of options available, and the recommended methods seems to chaneg with time. My situation is this: On a product pages I have a list of reviews - of which I show the latest 10 reviews. The rest of the reviews are in a paginated format where if the user clicks a "next" button, the next set loads in the same page via AJAX. No ideally I would like all this content indexable as we have hundreds of reviews per product - but at the moment on the latest 10 reviews are indexed. So what is the best / simplest way of getting google to index all these reviews and associate them with this product page? Many thanks

Hi I was wondering if there was any consensus over whether links in script tags pass any value - such as the link code below? Thanks

Hi, I was wondering if anyone can help. I need to have a simple check where I have 2 domains, and I can check of there are any links from domain A to domain B. Does anyone what would be the best query for this and if you would use google, bing, yahoo or other SE. Many thanks

Hi, We have a small group of co-workers, and we are constantly firing round emails of great articles we have found, new websites to read etc etc. Emails are just very cumbersome and get lost, so I am wondering if people can suggest any tools which would be good for creating a "work board" where we can quickly mark and comment on articles/websites each of us finds and it gets posted across other peoples boards. It needs to be fast, user friendly, allow grouping by topics, visually appealing (and ideally allow you to mark of when you have read something). Anyone have an suggestions as to a tool that would be similar to this? Thanks

I know this must be driving a lot of other people mad as I see loads of people who now have 2 registered accounts at google plus due to their seemingly terrible ability to merge or connect accounts. We have a work email address set up through google, then I have a personal Gmail address. In Google Plus now I have 2 profiles - even though I have not signed up to google plus with my work email, I cannot add this email to my Google + account set up on personal email as it just tells me to log into that account taking me to a page to set up a profile for that account. Has anyone managed to solve this problem - it is happening to everyone in the company, driving us all nuts and our IT guys have no idea how to solve it. Were trying to use G+ for the purposes of SEO & Marketing, but if they make it this cumbersome for people to use, then they are going to die a quick death - after a few weeks of use and noticing the huge number of dead accounts, only live accounts being SEO/Internet Marketing related, and huge number of duplicate accounts, I think their user figures are hugely suspect! Rant over - anyone know how to merge accounts?

Hi, I have noticed when using OSE and enter a domain you very often see a higher Page Authority than Domain Authority. If someone could explain why this would happen then I would be very grateful - its my current understanding that page authority would ALWAYS be LESS THAN Domain Authority but that is not always the case (I have seen cases where PA is more than 10 higher then DA) Here's an example where PA > DA http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links.html?site=www.primelocation.com Thanks

Hi, We are building an app that requires some audience profiling of websites as part of its architecture. Alexa provides some of this info, along with visitors by country which is useful, however I am quite skeptical of the information it provides as it is well known it can be way off (particularly on smaller sites), so are there any other API's that provide better data along the same lines as Alexa? NOTE - The app will profiling websites without having their authorized logins etc, so it needs to be an API that doesn't require authorisation from the website to get the data . Many Thanks

Hi, I would be very grateful if you could answer a short question I have related to a project I am working on - I am trying to build up a bit of market research as to where the market lies with regard to the market rate for blog posting. The answers are pretty subjective as there are other factors in involved but for the purposes of this question, it would be helpful to have simple answers that assume: ASSUMPTIONS:
a/. The blogs/websites are of AVERAGE quality for the domain authority given, and are genuine niche website (with their own full domains) and not sites which are haunted by spammers (ie NOT anyone can post anything sites such as article directories and Squidoo like sites etc, )
b/. The articles are of AVERAGE quality you would associate with a domain of that authority IE the articles would be better as you go up the DA scale as you would expect. Each article contains a couple of links to your target website. **QUESTION:** In $ how much would you pay for an article both **written AND posted** on a website with the following domain authorities? 1/ DA 20 2/. DA 30 4/. DA 40 5/. DA 50 6/. DA 60 7/. DA 70 8/. DA 80 9/. DA 90+  I'll start off with my answers as follows: 1/ DA 20 - $15
2/. DA 30 - $30
4/. DA 40 - $50
5/. DA 50 - $80
6/. DA 60 - $120
7/. DA 70 - $200
8/. DA 80 - $350
9/. DA 90+  - $600 What would you pay?

I've been doing a bit of competitor analysis for a client using OSE. There are a group of about 4 websites (our clients website included) that all dominate the sector with none of the 4 clearly out in front (call this GROUP A). Then there are another group of about 5 websites, which come lower in the SE's consistently than the top 4 (Call this GROUP B) **I've been doing some analysis in OSE: ** ALL GROUP B Websites outrank all of GROUP A websites in the OSE Metrics (Including Trust Rank). I did some analysis on the backlinks in Group A VS Group B Group A - Generally a mixture of ok links from blog posts, sponsorship, and ok directories. Group B - As A, but with fewer numbers of links from quality blogs PLUS A high level of spammy links ( .edu and .gov spam filled pages), very low quality, almost non legible blog posts on MFA sites (think Digital Point sellers). From the above it is clear that the OSE metrics are out of whack with the real SE results. Clearly OSE has a few problems with working out what are spammy links and what are decent. Obviously google also has issues with working this out, so I am not surprised that OSE also does - but that doesn't solve the issue. This is a general discussion - so I would just throw in a few thoughts on how OSE may possibly try are overcome some of these issues : 1/. % Trust Links vs Non trust Links:
Add in a metric to Trust Rank where the number of links close to trusted sites are also compared to the number of links not close to trusted sites. If you see a very high ratio of links from sites that are not close to trusted sites, it is a strong indicator of spammy links. 2/. Use seed "Non Trusted" sites to create a negative Trust Rank
Use something like a reverse of the "trusted sites" theory, but taking a load of very clearly spammy / link manipulative sites and work out in terms of links connections how far the site is away from these sites. Thoughts???

Hi, I'm looking into building a tool which would incorporate SEOMOZ ranking metrics and I have a few questions with regard to the ranking data which will help me develop it correctly. I have done a few searches, for the information but haven't found an answer to these questions on seomoz - if they exist somewhere then I would be grateful if you could point me in the right direction. 1/. When looking at the values of metrics such as MozRank and DA, is there any information on how this values are distributed amongst the ranked website - EG The mean / median values of DA and MozRank etc of all websites monitored is X & Y . If there were any distribution graphs for these values then even better. 2/. Along the lines of the above - are there any online resources showing similar information for google PR? 3/. What is the calcuation used in the scale of MozRank and DA  - ie We have a scale of 1-10 for these values - be we also know the scale in not linear but logrithmic - ie Double the Links of a DA 5 website and you would not end up with a DA 10 website - so what is the calculation which defines the scale. A WBF about google PR by Rand indicated that a value of between 8-9 is used in Google PR - but what about the values used for DA and MozRank etc? Many thanks for your help

Hi, We are working as a middle man between our client (website A) and another website (website B) where, website B is going to host a section around websites A products etc. The deal is that Website A (our client) will pay Website B based on the number of unique visitors they send them. As the middle man we are in charge of monitoring the number of Unique visitors sent though and are going to do this by monitoring Website A's analytics account and checking the number of Unique visitors sent. The deal is worth quite a lot of money, and as the middle man we are responsible for making sure that no funny business goes on (IE false visitors etc). So to make sure we have things covered - What I would like to know is 1/. Is it actually possible to fool analytics into reporting falsely high unique visitors from Webpage A to Site B (And if so how could they do it). 2/. What could we do to spot any potential abuse (IE is there an easy way to spot that these are spoofed visitors). Many thanks in advance

Hi, We have a bit of a problem where on a website we are managing, there are thousands of "Dynamically" re-sized images. These are stressing out the server as on any page there could be upto 100 dynamically re-sized images. Google alone is indexing 50,000 pages a day, so multiply that by the number of images and it is a huge drag on the server. I was wondering if it maybe an idea to blog Robots (in robots.txt) from indexing all the images in the image file, to reduce the server load until we have a proper fix in place. We don't get any real value from having our website images in "Google Images" so I am wondering if this could be a safe way of reducing server load? Are there any other potential SEO issues this could cause?? Thanks

Hi, I was wondering if anyone could recommend a high quality blog directory submission service ? I know that the best method is to do this yourself - but the time required to do so is enourmous, so although I may manually submit to a few of the very best directories myself, I'm looking for a good quality manual service to do the rest. I'm willing to pay a decent amount to a quality submission service as I want it done as near as possible to doing it myself. Thanks for your thoughts.

Hi, I would like to know if anyone has an easy way off allowing me to browse a SE and get results based on as if I was browsing from a different location. EG I am based in the UK and therefore google customises my result as such. However I am working for a client targetting the US, so I need to get SE results as if I was browsing from there. Thanks

Hi there, There are a couple of us in the office that are involved in link building - and sometimes it's difficult to keep track of where everybody is trying to build links. Does anybody know if there is a tool available where users can input both website addresses to check whether you already have a link from the desired website? Thanks in advance for your help.

I've been doing a bit of stats research prompted by read the recent ranking blog http://www.seomoz.org/blog/gettings-rankings-into-ga-using-custom-variables There are a few things that have come up in my research that I'd like to clear up. The below analysis has been done on my "conversions". 1/. What does "/aclk" mean in the Referrer URL? I have noticed a strong correlation between this and "gclid" in the landing page variable. Does it mean "ad click" ?? Although they seem to "closely" correlate they don't exactly, so when I have /aclk in the referrer Url MOSTLY I have gclid in the landing page URL. BUT not always, and the same applies vice versa. It's pretty vital that I know what is the best way to monitor adwords PPC, so what is the best variable to go on? - Currently I am using "gclid", but I have about 25% extra referral URL's with /aclk in that dont have "gclid" in - so am I underestimating my number of PPC conversions? 2/. The use of the variable "cd" is great, but it is not always present. I have noticed that 99% of my google "Referrer URL's" either start with:
/aclk   - No cd value
/search - No cd value
/url - Always contains the cd variable. What do I make of this?? Thanks for the help in advance!

I'm interested in gathering some further data for my site. What I would like to do is as well as collecting the search Keyword for users coming to my site, I would also like to gather the search engine position for that keyword LIVE - IE what is the current position of that keyword in the SE at the time the user put in their search. This data will be really useful when digging down on my analysis. Does anyone have any simple ideas of how you would go about implimenting this? Many thanks

Hi, I was wondering what people would recommend for website monitoring (IE is my website working as it should!). I need something that will:
1/. Allow multiple page monitoring not just homepage
2/. Do header status checking
3/. Do page content checking (ie if the page changes massively, or include the word "error") then we have an issue!
4/. Multiple alert possibilities. We currently use www.websitepulse.com and it is a good service that does all the above, however it just seems so overly complex that its hard to understand what is going on, and its complex functionality and features are really a negative in our case. Thanks

If I have a bunch of non important pages on my website which are of little use in the SE's index - IE contact us pages, pages which are near duplicate and conflict with KW's targetting other pages etc, what is the best way of retaining the link juice that would normally be passed to these pages? Most recent discussion I have read has said that with nofollow you effectively just loose link juice, as opposed to conserving it, so that doesn't seem a great option. If I do "noindex" on these pages, would that conserve the link juice in the site, or again would it be just lost? It seems quite a tricky situation as many pages are legitimate for customer usability, but are not worth having in the SE's index and you better off consolidating link juice - so it seems you are getting penilised for making something "for users". Thanks

Hi, I was wondering on your thoughts, or if any tests had been done on the best format of "near" perfect keyword domain matches. Suppose I am not really interested in branding, and I am principally after the bonus given to exact keyword matching, but all the exact match high level extensions have gone - whats the next best solution? Suppose I am after the term "car hire", and on my website I want to target many different location keywords such as - "Car Hire London" My main extensions are gone, but I have the options to go for:: Additional Word at the FRONT:
Number - eg 4:
4carhire.co.uk  -> gives me -> 4carhire.co.uk/london/
Geo association - eg uk:
ukcarhire.co.uk  -> gives me -> ukcarhire.co.uk/london/
Info term - eg compare:
comparecarhire.co.uk -> gives me -> comparecarhire.co.uk/london/ Additional Word at the END: Number - eg 4:
carhire4.co.uk  -> gives me -> carhire4.co.uk/london/
Geo association - eg uk:
carhireuk.co.uk  -> gives me -> carhireuk.co.uk/london/
Info term - eg compare:
carhirecompare.co.uk -> gives me -> carhirecompare.co.uk/london/ Which of the domains would be best to benifit when a term like "Car Hire London" is typed in ?? If you were to choose a domain which would you go for and why?

I've observed some strange findings on a website I am diagnosing and it has led me to a possible theory that seems to fly in the face of a lot of thinking: My theory is:
When google see's several duplicate content pages on a website, and decides to just show one version of the page, it at the same time agrigates the link juice pointing to all the duplicate pages, and ranks the 1 duplicate content page it decides to show as if all the link juice pointing to the duplicate versions were pointing to the 1 version. EG
Link X -> Duplicate Page A
Link Y -> Duplicate Page B Google decides Duplicate Page A is the one that is most important and applies the following formula to decide its rank. Link X + Link Y (Minus some dampening factor) -> Page A I came up with the idea after I seem to have reverse engineered this - IE the website I was trying to sort out for a client had this duplicate content, issue, so we decided to put unique content on Page A and Page B (not just one page like this but many). Bizarrely after about a week, all the Page A's dropped in rankings - indicating a possibility that the old link consolidation, may have been re-correctly associated with the two pages, so now Page A would only be getting Link Value X. Has anyone got any test/analysis to support or refute this??

I've got a conundrum I would appreciate your thoughts on. I have a main container page listing a group of products, linking out to individual product pages. The problem I have is the all the product pages target exactly the same keywords as the main product page listing all the products. Initially all my product pages were ranking much higher then the container page, as there was little individual text on the container page, and it was being hit with a duplicate content penality I believe. To get round this, on the container page, I have incorporated a chunk of text from each product listed on the page. However, that now means "most" of the content on an individual product page is also now on the container page - therefore I am worried that i will get a duplicate content penality on the product pages, as the same content (or most of it) is on the container page. Effectively I want to consolidate the link juice of the product pages back to the container page, but i am not sure how best to do this. Would it be wise to rel=canonical all the product pages back to the container page? Rel=nofollow all the links to the product pages? - or possibly some other method? Thanks

On our website we do a lot of dynamic resizing of images by using a script which automatically re-sizes an image dependant on paramaters in the URL like: www.mysite.com/images/1234.jpg?width=100&height=200&cut=false In webmaster tools I have noticed there are a lot of 400 errors on these image Also when I click the URL's listed as causing the errors the URL's are URL Encoded and go to pages like this (this give a bad request): www.mysite.com/images/1234.jpg?%3Fwidth%3D100%26height%3D200%26cut%3Dfalse What are your thoughts on what I should do to stop this? I notice in my webmaster tools "URL Parameters" there are parameters for:
height
width
cut which must be from the Image URLs. These are currently set to "Let Google Decide", but should I change them manually to "Doesn't effect page content"? Thanks in advance

Hi, I've got an issue where our web developers have made a mistake on our website by messing up some URL's . Because our site works dynamically IE the URL's generated on a page are relevant to the current URL it ment the problem URL linked out to more problem URL's - effectively replicating an entire website directory under problem URL's - this has caused tens of thousands of URL's in SE's indexes which shouldn't be there. So say for example the problem URL's are like www.mysite.com/incorrect-directory/folder1/page1/ It seems I can correct this by doing the following: 1/. Use Robots.txt  to disallow access to /incorrect-directory/* 2/. 301 the urls like this:
www.mysite.com/incorrect-directory/folder1/page1/
301 to:
www.mysite.com/correct-directory/folder1/page1/ 3/. 301 URL's to the root correct directory like this:
www.mysite.com/incorrect-directory/folder1/page1/
www.mysite.com/incorrect-directory/folder1/page2/
www.mysite.com/incorrect-directory/folder2/ 301 to:
www.mysite.com/correct-directory/ Which method do you think is the best solution? - I doubt there is any link juice benifit from 301'ing URL's as there shouldn't be any external links pointing to the wrong URL's.

I currently use SEOMOZ Campaigns and Advanced Web Ranking for monitoring our KW rankings and those of competition. AWR is a brilliant tool with so many different reports, methods of viewing etc. SEOMOZ campaigns are good but don't come close to the monitoring power of AWR (EG I monitor over 50 competitors on over 1000 KW's on a Daily basis with AWR and recieve a variety of set emailed reports on the data). However, one thing that SEOMOZ campaigns have that is useful is the traffic data - but this is still a bit basic and I think could be improved. The problem with AWR is that it doesn't integrate with your Analytics / Adwords / Google WM Tools - so it is only showing you half the picture. Knowing how your site ranks for each keyword is helpful, but it would be nice to understand the value of each keyword.  For example, being able to see your rank position and how much traffic that keyword has sent you over time would be helpful. It would also be nice to see the number of searches that are performed for that keyword each month .  For example, lets say I saw that I was ranking at number 11 for “hover mower” and getting 500 hits per month.  Two months from now, if I was ranking at position 7, it would be nice to be able to immediately see how that changed the amount of traffic I was receiving for the term.  Is a position of 11 (first item on page two) better than position 10 (last item on page one)? If you can link it to your analytics, you could then link it to your goals, and goal values to get a complete picture of where your keywords rank the value of the rank, and the improvment on that value when rank changes. If browsed around for such software but can't find anything like this - does anyone know of any software that can do this - or something close to this? Many thanks

Hi, I've had a few issues that have been caused by our developers on our website. Basically we have a pretty complex method of automatically generating URL's and web pages on our website, and they have stuffed up the URL's at some point and managed to get 10's of thousands of duff URL's and pages indexed by the search engines. I've now got to get these pages out of the SE's indexes as painlessly as possible as I think they are causing a Panda penalty. All these URL's have an addition directory level in them called "home" which should not be there, so I have: www.mysite.com/home/page123 instead of the correct URL www.mysite.com/page123 All these are totally duff URL's with no links going to them, so I'm gaining nothing by 301 redirects, so I was wondering if there was a more painless less risky way of getting them all out the indexes (IE after the stuff up by our developers in the first place I'm wary of letting them loose on 301 redirects incase they cause another issue!) Thanks

This is just a general discussion on your thoughts on this - maybe some tests have been done, but I haven't found any. Suppose I have document X If I put document X on high authority website A - It comes in SE position 1 for Keyword Z If I put document X on low authority website B - It comes in SE position 10 for Keyword Z What happens (if anything) if I put document X on website A and include a canonical tag to point to document X on website B. What SE position would document Z on website B now come for Keyword Z ??

Hi, I've got a number of staff in the office that I am trying to get to learn SEO. I want to be able to test them on their ability and have already set them the SEOMOZ test: http://www.seomoz.org/seo-expert-quiz . Does anyone know of any other decent online SEO tests I can set them - I haven't really got the time to develop a test myself, so I am looking for some pre-build online testing. Thanks

I've seen Rands video on subdomains and best pratices at
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-the-microsite-mistake
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites I have a question/theory though and it is related to an issue I am having. We have built our website, and now we are looking at adding 3rd party forums and blogs etc (all part of one CMS). The problem is these need to to be on a seperate subdomain to work correctly (I won't go into the specific IT details but this is what I have been advised by my IT guru's). So I can have something like:
http://cms.mysite.com/forum/ Obviously after reading Rands post and other stuff this is far from ideal. However I have another Idea - run the CMS from root and the main website from the www. subdomain. EG
www.mysite.com
mysite.com/blog Now my theory is that because so many website (possibly the majority - especially smaller sites) don't use 301 redirects between root and www. that search engines may make an exception in this case and treat them both as the same domain, so it could possibly be a way of getting round the issue. This is just a theory of mine, based solely on my thoughts that there are so many websites out there that don't 301 root to www. or vice versa, that possibly it would be in the SE's self interest to make an exception and count these as one domain, not 2. What are your thoughts on this and has there been any tests done to see if this is the case or not? Thanks

Suppose I have a adwords campaign, with an adgroup targetting the broad match term "cell phones". Is it possible to get metrics on the exact keywords users have used to create ad impressions, clicks or conversions for that campaign? Many thanks

Here's a technical question. Suppose I have a page relevant to the term "Mobile Phones". I have a piece of text, on that page talking about "mobile phones", and within that text is the term  "cell phones". Now if I link the text "cell phones", to the page it is already placed on (ie the parent page) - will the page gain more relevancy for the term "cell phones"?? Thanks

Like me you may not have heard of the new EU law on cookies - but apparently it is illegal to use cookies on EU websites!! - Apparently came into effect on the 26th of May. Having read a bit about it, it would be comical if it were not actually true. Check out these refs - its staggering:
Video: http://blog.silktide.com/2011/05/the-stupid-eu-cookie-law-in-2-5-minutes/
ICO making a farce of its own law: http://www.ico.gov.uk/news/current_topics/website_changes_pecr.aspx
More Info: http://blog.silktide.com/2011/05/can-we-use-analytics-with-the-new-uk-cookie-law/ I'm so glad the consideral tax my cookie reliant business pays is being put to good use by a bunch of ignorant bureaucratic dicks............

For any website it obviously useful to know about as much of your user behaviour as possible - and part of that involves past user behaviour. This is generally done by cookies and would involve things like: Last Visit Date Number of Site Visits Number of pages viewed etc etc I'm trying to build up a list for my developers so they are trackign the information that, although may not be explicetly useful now, but may be useful for future functionality. So does anyone have a list of the key things you should always track?

My site works a bit like a directory, so say I have a page called "Ice Cream Vendors" - on that page I would talk a bit about Ice Cream Vendors, then I will have a list of Ice Cream Vendor Locations. My list of locations can be quite big depending on the product and the amount of locations they occur in - when you click a location, it goes to a page showing all "ICeCream Vendors" in that location. So Currently I will have a table on the page a bit like this: ICE CREAM VENDOR LOCATIONS
New York
Miami
Las Vegas This is all perfectly nice, simple and usable - BUT it is not producing perfect keyword links - for perfect keyword links the list should be like this: ICE CREAM VENDOR LOCATIONS
New York Ice Cream Vendors
Miami Ice Cream Vendors
Las Vegas Ice Cream Vendors Now I have my perfect anchor links - BUT it looks rediculous and is NOT user friendly. So What do I do?
1/. Build it for users and not have perfect anchor links, and loose in SEO?
2/.  Build a perfect SEO links and make it less usable and looking spammy? OR 3/. Deliver the search engine the perfect SEO links, and the user the userfriendly version? In this I mean I could do the following:
SE's (and screen readers I think would see):
ICE CREAM VENDOR LOCATIONS
New York Ice Cream Vendors
Miami Ice Cream Vendors
Las Vegas Ice Cream Vendors Users would See
ICE CREAM VENDOR LOCATIONS
New York
Miami
Las Vegas Now in my view I am doing nothing wrong - I am mearly giving the user the most userfriendly version and I am giving the SE more information on the link, that the user doesn't need. So - In my view I am doing something that is honest  - but what are your thoughts?? Has anyone tried to do this? Thanks

Hi, I've been monitoring my referral URL's coming in and today noticed they had changed. Previously when I clicked one it would be the google search result page - however now they all seem to be like this: http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=7&sqi=2&ved=0CHEQFjAG&url=http://www.mysite.com&rct=j&q=my%20keyword&ei=Bvc3TrbgB5G0hAfvqoSvAg&usg=AFQjCNFONDCPJDl3d2PYceYvale_cL7s4Q All these URL's immediately redirect to my website pages. Do you know what they are - they seem to be tracking URL's of some sort I am thinking?? Are they trying to analyse my site with respect to certain keywords?? Thanks

This is just a general theoretical discussion to provoke some thought. Suppose I have a 2 synonym keywords - which mean identical things. EG - "Golf Holiday" "Golf Break" - probably you can think of better ones, but you get the idea. On the following assumptions: Google knows these synonyms have identical meaning. Google want to provide the searcher with the "best possible result set". By definition there can only be 1 "best possible results set" If the above is true, then Google should produce identical result sets for either of these terms - **So why don't they?  **

I've been using googles keyword tools to get keyword search data, but I'm pretty sceptical of some of the results it throws out on number of searches. On a number of keywords - particularly when you get to longtail, I've seen results which cannot possibly be right. So - I am trying to find out a way of getting REAL data I can trust. Here are my thoughts on a possible method of getting this key data:
1/. Firstly I am taking on the assumption that the adwords campaign monitoring statistics are more reliable and accurate than the keyword research tools - correct me if I am wrong! 2/. Then take a load of keywords you wish to monitor and create didfferent ads for them based of EXACT match. 3/. Make sure non of your adverts conflict with each other, so you may have to turn off any other campaigns you have running. 4/. Put you bids and available spend as high as possible, so that ideally you will your ads will always be shown for every search match, and ideally always come in No1 spot on the ads. IE your aim is to create a neutral environment where your ads are shown for every search match and appear in the exact same position for each search match. Run the campaign for a period of time long enough to be confident that you have enough search data. From this you should have the vital data on keyword searches done on your exact match keywords. 5/. Repeat the test, but this time use phrase matches and again make sure there are no conflicts. 6/. Repeat again with broad match - this would require very careful implimentation not to have any conflicts and you would likely need to make heavy use of the "Not Include" keywords. What are your thoughts on the above process? - Any flaws, or other better solutions? Obviously one key thing with doing this is you need to have to be prepared to have a decent budget to get this data - but it won't be wasted as you will also be getting the adwords traffic. Thanks

Hi, I'm building an affiliate system for our website, and I obviously want to gain as much SEO benifit from it as possible. So I am wondering what the optimal solution is with regard to how an affilaite URL is tagged. After looking into it a bit more - I have come up with the following. 1/. Use an affilaite URL idendifier with a #
EG like www.mysite.com#123 2/. 301 redirect the affilaite URL to the "real URL"
EG www.mysite.com#123      301 ->  www.mysite.com What do you think of this? Thanks

This is just a general discussion on your thoughts on the value of obtaining keyword Twitter & Facebook accounts ( especially if you have a brand name not connected to your primary keywords) For Example: What do you think the value/benifits are of obtaining accounts such as:
http://twitter.com/#!/keyword
http://facebook.com/keyword Thanks

Hi, I'm building our own affilaite system. I want to make sure I get as much SEO benifit from affiliate links as possible so I am in search of the perfect solution. My thoughts after doing a bit of research are to do the following - using the # as my identifier: 1/. Use an ID like www.mysite.com/#A123 2/. Redirect via 301 these urls to www.mysite.com Any thoughts on this, or other things I should be thinking of with regard so building an affilaite system that has strong SEO benifits? Thanks

Hi, I am wondering on you through relevant to SEO in the following situation. I have a "travel" website and obvisouls as part of that I have a whole list of desitinations. So I have a drop down in my page navigation, which lists all my desitinations. At the moment I see have 2 main options to display the lists as follows: 1/. Perfect Anchors, but not good for usability - IE repeating the word "holiday in a list of 100 destinations, looks spammy for one, and when the headline says "Holiday Destinations", then from a use perspective its pretty pointless and takes away from navigation rather than improves it".
New York Holidays
Las Vegas Holidays 2/. Non Perfect Anchors - But better for usability
New York
Las Vegas So I am thinking - would the use of the title attribute provide a perfect solution?? Or am I wasting my time with this and it is just pointless considering it as an option. EG - what I had in mind was:
3/. Ideal Solution for both SEO and usability??
New York
Las Vegas Thanks for you help in advance.

Hi, I'm looking at my links containers and trying to optimise them. I would be greatful if anyone can give me some feedback on my plan for perfect optimaisation. My links are constructed as follows: I have a two states:
1/. A Non Hover state which contains an Image and Text
2/. A Hover state which contains a bit more text - I do this as containing full text on the non hover state would not be good for users and would look ugly as well. Here's an example block of the HTML - as you can see from the URL, its quite a deep page level. From the URL and Alt / Titles the Page I am Linking to is about: "The Royal Hotel Accommodation New York Holidays". I Just a bit confused on how I should apply ALT and Title (Titles in particular) attributes given the nested DiV's etc - I can apply these to parent level, or apply all levels, or apply them to a mix. Also is there any obvious thinks you can think of I am missing that may help onsite SEO? Thanks in Advance CURRENT UNOPTIMISED CODE:
                   The Royal Hotel
           
           
               
                    New York Holidays Accommodation
                    The Royal Hotel
                     MY OPTIMISED CODE (Adding Title and Alt attributes):
                   The Royal Hotel
           
           
               
                    New York Holidays Accommodation
                    The Royal Hotel