Welcome to the Q&A Forum

This is kind of a vague question as we really have no idea about further details of your site. It's not bad to have keyword anchor text for internal links, but that is a general statement. Other details to consider would be how many links you have on a page, what the anchor text is pointing to, what the content of the page is, etc.

If your links are pointing to the pages for your various offers, and those links state what the page is about, then you should be fine. The biggest question you should focus on is does your content serve the reader, or are you performing these tactics solely for ranking? Focus on providing value to your reader/customer, and you should be fine.

You should be completely fine. If for some reason there is a duplicate content issue, Google will just show whichever it thinks is the original video. Giving them different titles and descriptions should also help to differentiate them.

Since you are hoping to take advantage of search for your videos, it will be helpful to link from one of your videos to the other. I'd suggest putting a link on the Vimeo (on the Vimeo site) version pointing to the YouTube version, since that is the one you are hoping to rank.

So, my question here then revolves around relevancy to the user. If someone is searching for "fitness management software" and sees your site in the results but your page's title is "Client Management Software" and your competitor's title is "Fitness Management Software", which do you think they are more likely to click on? Furthermore, lets say they do click on your page, your reader will not be sold as well as they would if the landing page addressed their specific need. If they then decide to compare your solution to a more targeted solution, who do you think they will pick?

You could use your blog post as a means of explaining how your product solves their specific problems. Or, you could create a whole new page dedicated to fitness management software, which would have a much higher chance of ranking well in the search engines and would probably convert better than a generic page.

I'm pretty sure if you just chop off the last tag, , you are going to be perfectly fine.

There should be one canonical tag and it should point to the URL of the original document or the version that you want search engines to view as the main document.

I just did a search for both of your examples and it appears that the answer is, yes. You should be perfectly fine whichever way you go. However, if you know that your audience/customers/prospects use a specific way of writing the keyword over the other, then that will be the one you should go with.

The first example that comes to mind is Freecreditreport .com which actually is ranked #2 for the term 'free credit report'. I have never heard of search engines marking certain words as spammy. You should be perfectly okay.

Thomas made some great suggestions. I personally use, and love, Team Treehouse (http://teamtreehouse.com/).

Distilled U is also great, you can find a Moz perk for them here: http://moz.com/perks.

I would definitely just start with HTML. More than knowing how to write simple tags, you should understand the structure of a webpage. Then focus on how java and php actually work. You may not need to learn a whole lot of java or php to do a great job at SEO.

I agree with Mike. Stay away from automated tools if possible. One of the major social bookmarking sites is StumbleUpon, I believe you can also promote pages on their site as well. Just like every other social site, you will want to be somewhat active and contribute in order to get the best value.

I believe this is what is being referred to as negative SEO and what many fear will be the result of the latest updates. Do you know if these links are in articles that contain any of your content? Could these be scrapers?

Are you experiencing negative effects as a result of these links?

I can't say for sure as to whether it's safe to use or not. Are you asking if you can use it over and over again, or to have some sort of automated process for adding links to the tool? I'm fairly certain you can use it more than once. And, if you were planning on automating, how would you know which links are good and which are bad?

Here is some text directly from Google regarding the disavow tool:

"This is an advanced feature and should only be used with caution. If used incorrectly, this feature can potentially harm your site’s performance in Google’s search results. We recommend that you disavow backlinks only if you believe you have a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site, and if you are confident that the links are causing issues for you. In most cases, Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance, so most normal or typical sites will not need to use this tool."

So, if you are not experiencing negative effects, I would just keep an eye on it in case something happens. If you still want to use the tool, Google also recommends that you do your best to get the links removed from the sites. The author info might not be available, but you could possibly reach out to the site owner.

The confusion potentially comes from the citations associated on the various accounts. You didn't mention phone number, but I am assuming that is the same for both businesses as well.

Having two separate sites, since they are focused on different segments makes sense. However, every detail should be treated as these being separate businesses if they are going to be represented as such.

When you talk about their rankings, are you talking about website rankings or local places rankings?

What is the purpose of the wedding site? Is it a single landing page or a full-on information rich site with multiple pages?

Also, you say that they are sharing a blog, how is this set up?

It could possibly be that Google doesn't view many of your URLs as being unique. I notice that almost all of your URLs could be grouped into two sections. Each section of URLs being almost exactly identical since you have almost no unique content on any of your pages.

Also, and I may be wrong on this part, submitting a sitemap doesn't necessarily guarantee that all pages will be indexed.

I highly recommend Wordpress. You are going to get a lot of flexibility and support both with the CMS itself and all of the available plugins. Not to mention the availability of theme and plugin developers in the event you need something custom.

One thing you might look into for Wordpress is premium.wpmudev.org, I have been considering this for a long time but I thought of it when you mentioned mini forum, might be a good resource.

What exactly are you trying to do? Maintain high rankings for that page or somehow capture the high rankings for your new landing page?

If you change the contents of that page into a landing page, your rankings will fluctuate. If you don't redirect, you will lose all of the links pointing to the content you move.

Why don't you just gate your content for members only and point your paid media to a new URL with the landing page?

I'd be interested in hearing what you have found out so far in your research.

Amazon is famous for recommending products and their related products span pages. There is also the idea that you don't want to overwhelm your customer with too many options. I'd say the best way to know for your industry is to first research what your competitors are doing, and then build some tests around that to see what works for you.

I think you should design your site with the user in mind while making sure that the platform you use is SEO friendly.. The whole purpose of your site will be to attract, retain, and serve site visitors, prospects, clients, etc. Then focus on the SEO of your site which will include titles, headline tags, meta info, internal linking, etc.

You can get a good idea which keywords you should be targeting for your SEO and PPC by examining your competitors. Of course, over time you will identify which keywords are working for you and which ones have value.

I assume your site isn't built on Wordpress since you referred to it as an external blog. You want to focus promotion on your internal blog since this will boost the ranking of your site overall.

Three sites you could try are:trafficestimate .com

websitetrafficspy .com

statshow .com

(delete the space in the URL of course). These are of course are only estimates of traffic. You can see by looking at moz.com, for example, on each site that you have a range of ~23,000,000 to ~48,000,000 monthly visitors.

I don't think this will have any effect at all in terms of how the search engines view your site. However, something to consider is that if your visitors are turned off by it and your time on site is less or your pages have a high bounce rate, this may factor into your rankings.

I have heard that some splitting done in regards to white text on a black background revealed lower conversion rates and higher bounce rates.

Just something to consider.

Hi Megan,

As long as you have made all of the appropriate changes, you should be fine. The drop is probably due to the change, but you should see the rankings recover. I think you can expect some shuffling to occur when changes like these are made.

Hi Karl,

I second Dany's advice. Additionally, and while it doesn't give you the direct data you are asking for, you can use Google Analytics Flow Reports to get a better idea of what your readers are looking for. Since you had mentioned conversions, this type of data will give you insights beyond just click numbers, and help you optimize the most sought after content.

-Josh

Google will have to spider the site before any loss in rankings due to design, right? So, if there is a drop in rankings, it won't necessarily be recovered in a re-index.

But, so long as there are no errors and the site remains the same structurally and content wise, there shouldn't necessarily be any issue. Even if there are no errors with the new theme as far as SEO goes, if the new design affects the load speed, this could affect the ranking of your page.

Hi Erick,

I did a quick search and came across this article:

http://searchengineland.com/too-many-ads-above-the-fold-now-penalized-by-googles-page-layout-algo-108613

So, if you weren't previously penalized, then the new update may have caught you. If you consider that Google's mission is (other than world domination) to deliver quality content to it's users then this type of penalty makes sense.

I'd say it was a good idea to move some of your ads down, and maybe even remove a few of them all together if you have too many on the page.

I think there is still a ton of value. Even if the links aren't valuable, I'd still look into the value of your company being mentioned in a release and the traffic generated to your site.

If you focus on providing some value and an interesting story, you may be able to generate a good amount of traffic to your site. From here, you should have a method for capturing visitors and getting them to engage you, both on your blog and in social media.

However, if you are looking at it as purely a method of gaining links, it has lost the value that it once held.

Have you gone through your site to make sure that there are no longer any links to the old 404 pages? You probably don't need to worry about external links pointing in, since those pages are now redirecting, but I think it would be best practice to correct all of your internal links.

Hi Brad, I think you are right on with your instinct. You are, after all, a consumer as well.

While it may not in fact hurt your rankings online to use the same photo for all locations, I would suggest that the end-user would appreciate the opportunity to see location-specific images. That is what they are there for.

However, if you do have the 10 photos, you could offer these up to what I assume are either your partners, franchisors, or licensees as a benefit while making the suggestion that they also get their own images.

Chris,

I think all of the previous advice is great in regards to your bounce rate. David makes a good point regarding search engines measuring bounce in organic listings by a searcher returning to the search results, and not with analytics data.

I'd be interested in knowing what happened to your traffic when you still had the navigation on the page. Were the searching your site for more information on your company? Checking out your blog? Where were they going on your site?

Also, if you are experiencing a high bounce rate, this could be an indicator that your ad is not optimized. Which is essentially costing you money.

Maybe this is a little beyond my knowledge, but why would a PPC ad be designed to have a high bounce rate? How does that help get more leads? I get that it would probably be much higher than an organic result bounce rate. And, that it doesn't effect the SEO of the rest of the site.

My comment about optimization of the ad was in regards to the fact that if an ad has a high bounce rate, wouldn't that mean that it is potentially not converting well? So, the traffic arriving to the landing page is not seeing the offer as a fit for what they are searching for.

Dylan made a good suggestion. I'd just add to make sure that if you do noindex your tag and/or category pages, do a noindex/follow. This will ensure that the bots can find your content, but you aren't competing with your own content in the search engines.

I think if you are looking entirely just to rank you will have to look at the competition in the space. Be sure to consider quality of the content just as much, if not more, than the quantity of the content.

Additionally, you should be focusing on creating content that serves your target audience. Can you produce enough valuable content to serve the market as an authority? Or, will people find your site and go elsewhere to find what they are looking for?

You should also focus on creating your content for multiple readership paths, i.e. - headings, subheadings, images, and links. Not only does this provide value to your audience, but will help in your rankings as well, contributing again to the quality rather than the necessary quantity.