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Hi, I've been rooting around my GWT account and noticed two what may be dodgy links, they look like a blog network - no contact details on the site and basically just blog posts about various subjects that all contain keyword rich links. The two that are pointing at me are two seperate articles on two sites that both contain around 3 keyword links to our website. I have no idea why these are linking to me as I have not requested them, so not too sure if someone has done this on purpose on what! Looked on the sites in question and there is no way of contacting the person responsible for the sites. Not had any warnings yet (touch wood) in GWT, how you you go about trying to get shut of links when there is no contact info on the sites? Bit wary of using the Disavow thing in Google as some people say go for it while others say avoid? Any hints/tips would be welcomed as this has got me a bit worried! Cheers Ted

Hi, Just cleaning up some 404 errors in my site in GWT and noticed a couple of external links pointing at me that are wrong. Basically they are from a couple of DIY forum sites (I've not put these links in place myself they are 100% natural) and it appears that the owners of the forums amend the links (inserting characters into link) so they are not quite right. How would I go about redirecting the following - www.example.co.uk/blueberry_pie.htm Whatever I try doesn't work and I always end up with a 404! Cheers
J

Converted site  to wordpress and having a bit of trouble with re-directs not redirecting. Could somebody tell me whether redirects go before the `# BEGIN WordPress` or after the # END wordpress or immediately after this bit - <code># BEGIN WordPress <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On RewriteBase /</ifmodule></code> section of the code within my htacess file? Just wondered if this is the cause of my problems! Cheers Ted

Moving our static website to wordpress, pages currently end in the .htm extension and for reasons of me having to do all the moving myself and wanting to preserve link equity is there any way I can run the pages with a .htm extension in Wordpress? Tried using a plug-in by Daddy Design but it seems a bit hit and miss at times. I basically need to keep the url's the same as I will not be able to get the vast majority of my links altered to the new pages, plus I am doing this by myself!

Looking at using Schema microdata on our new website, we currently rank quite decently in Google UK. If I was to add schema mark up for our business address could this effect us in Google UK  rankings wise i.e. our rankings for national search (for want of a better word!) suffer but our local rankings increase?

As I understand it on a page where you are going for the keywords 'Metal gates', you have an image titled 'Metal gates' (Lets say MG for Metal gates to save on my typing!) with the alt tag being 'MG' Now as I also understand it, if an image is also used as a link the Alt tag is also the anchor text? So, I have a page on Metal gates using the above methods, from this page I have image links to a metal driveway gates page (as well as text links), would I be best using an image titled 'Metal driveway gates' with the alt text as ' Metal driveway gates' to link to my metal driveway gates page (if you follow me)? Also on the image question, what if you have say six images (that are all links) on the metal gates page, how would you title the images and alt tags? Variations on Metal gates? Or using the keyword on the page that the link points to? (I'm not looking to keyword stuff but want to get it  right! ) Also is it important to have your on page keywords in bold still? i ask because I've bolded text on my pages but not the main keywords - I've bolded text that I want people to see, but do not want to take away any power from my keywords if you follow me?

Hi recently changed my site so it is based on Wordpress, got my preferred domain set in Google webmaster as www.domian.co.uk but since moving to wordpress my domain is now having a slash put on the end of it like www.domain.co.uk/ Most of the links going to my homepage do not have the slash on the end so am I right in thinking I should get rid of the slash from my site so I have one consistent url? If so any ideas how to banish the slash? Cannot seem to do it through the Wordpress general settings (despite preferred domain being set as www.domain.co.uk !) Thanks T

Redesigning website in Wordpress and going to use the following lightbox plug-in http://www.pedrolamas.pt/projectos/jquery-lightbox/ Naming the original images that appear on screen as say 'sweets.jpg'
and the bigger version of the images as 'sweets-large.jpg' Alt text wise I would give both versions of the images slightly different descriptions. Do you think there would be any duplicate content issues with this? Anything I should do differently? I'm very wary of doing anything that Google is likely to think is naughty, so want to stay on their good side! Cheers
T

Using a lightbox type thing for our new website (you click on an image and then get a bigger version of image). Is there any best practices SEO wise for this and any no no's I should be aware of? It's all hard coded so not going the normal way via wordpress of using thumbnails then the larger original image as you click on the thumbnail, using two separate images- this sound to you guys?

Adding breadcrumbs to create a hierarchy on what is otherwise a flat site. Got the following pages which are, our main pages that rank - Metal gates Metal driveway gates Metal garden gates Metal side access gates The Metal gates pages link off to the other pages mentioned but also contain a lot of other info The driveway gates, garden gates and side access gate page all contain our range of gates, the three pages mentioned then have links off to their individual gates contained within each section Breadcrumb wise, should I aim for Home - Metal gates - Driveway gates - individual driveway gate
Home - Metal gates - Side access gates- individual side access gate
Home - Metal gates - Garden gates- individual garden gate Is that the best way to go or if I want the driveway gate page (etc) to continueto rank should I go like this Home - Metal driveway gates Home - Metal side access gates etc

Redoing my site at the moment and placing a few call's to action around it. The calls to action are pretty basic, along the lines of 'click here to get a quote', when you click you get taken to an anchor towards the bottom of the same page that takes you to a contact form. I've based the Calls to action on just a brightly coloured gif image that has text written on to it (not in code but added via photoshop)? This the right way to go, or should I be putting the text actually on my page and using a background coloured element to do it? The same image is used across several pages (got a couple of these images which I use across the site) and thinking it's easier to do it this way rather than code? Adding alt text to images 'Click here to get quote on X' (X being product) and also using img title tag for when mouse i hovering over - Click here to get a quote! Don't want to get hit by any dupe content issue for using the same image on multiple pages etc (I could always no index the folder where the call to action images are stored if this helps?) This sound ok to you pros?

Really stupid question (I think) but does Left or right hand navigation help or hinder SEO and/or user experience? Re-doing our site at the moment and I quite like right hand navigation as it seems to highlight our content better but not sure if it would hinder anything SEO wise - site is based on a responsive theme and side navigation is only called after content anyway so don't think it would make a difference SEO wise Noticing more and more sites moving towards right hand nav and I quite like it, would also differentiate us in our niche as everyone else uses left hand nav As I say probably a stupid question but thought I would ask! 🙂

I have a super static site - whats the best way to hardcode (manually if possible) the breadcrumbs i.e. the correct mark up etc? Not got a super large site (about 60 pages) and find people land on deep pages and seem to bounce outta there, working on things to turn this around etc but would like to add breadcrumbs as I think some people would probably go up a level in our site to find what they are looking for.

Just pondering what is current best practice for Title tags of pages buried deep within my website? Say I have a page about 'Cheese's of the world' and from that page there is a page about 'Cheshire Cheese' how would you suggest to structure title tags Would for example this be ok - Cheshire Cheese | Cheese's of the World | Brand name Or is this better - Cheshire Cheese | Brand name Just wondering as I'm redesigning my site currently and looking at everything! Ted PS - I like cheese 🙂

I've recently been converting our old website to a wordpress based website and been working on the new version of the site on a subdomain. Now at the stage when I am getting ready to let the site go live and just wondering exactly how to do this so I have minimal downtime? Looking in the wordpress control panel there is the setting to enter the address of the site if you want it to be different from the directory it has been installed within - is this a good idea (i.e. is it stable if I do this? good for seo, bad for seo or makes no difference?)? or should I manually install everything in the root myself (if I do this is there a way to direct people to the temp version of the site on the subdomain? Any tips, do and don't s would be appreciated as I want to do this right!

Not sure where to start with this so please bare with me. I do the SEO for our company website (we're a small family business), I'm not an SEO'er by profession (I'm a carpenter/joiner) but been doing our site for ten or so years. About 12 months ago sort of let go of work & web things a bit due to very sudden family bereavement which kind of hit me hard. So when I did get back into doing bits on our site I probably then concentrated a little bit too much on content building rather than going after links etc. As a result we've dropped in the SERPS a bit, but having said that still just about clinging within the top ten for our terms. Since I've started again we've had Panda/Penguin and I'm a little unsure how to go about getting links in, most of my competitors are using things like blog commenting (just random blogs that are do follow) , recip linking (any sites as long as they give a link!) etc basically things that long term will hold no value long term (or possibly none even to begin with). All this brand stuff leaves me at a loss, we're a small family business as our the majority of our competitors so not 100% sure that the branding stuff I'm reading about is relevant? As I say I've got some pretty decent content, some of which I am trying to push with mixed results – we're not in a very sexy niche so not much chance of it picking up links naturally! Another thing I am noticing is in my niche I don't think any SEO companies are involved with my competitors, most of our competitors are ranking their home pages for every single related search term, whilst I've have always tried to create a page for each search term and I have these pages ranking. For example my main search term, lets say 'wooden doors' I rank an internal page for this term whilst everyone else seems to rank homepages. I'm finding it hard to get new links into this page, so one idea I do have is elsewhere on my site I have a guide to fitting the doors (with videos, pictures and text) so what I'm thinking is place this guide on my 'wooden doors' page making it a bit more linkable (it's fairly new and not yet gained any links, so no loss to move it) and would also mean a variation of anchor text. A good idea do you think? Some of my other content has been linked to by colleges in the UK, unfortunately all the links are behind moodle log-ins (give me a decent link you leeches! Lol) ! I am thinking of getting in touch with other colleges to see if the content would be useful, but actually getting hold of the person responsible for the subject is proving difficult! I've also done a bit of guest blogging, however I'm torn between writing decent stuff for our blog or giving it away (I wouldn't like to give something away thats poor, ok or doesn’t make sense) to other blogs. Sorry for the ramble (if you've made it this far then thanks for reading!)! Would appreciate all advice. Ultimately would love to get an SEO'er involved but looking around the good un's are out of our price range so I may seek some training as it may prove more beneficial.