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Oh, good question! I've noticed more and more people being (professional) transparent about their desire for links and giving more specific - polite - suggestions for where to link or what content may be good for it.

You mention your reports - when you send them out, do you include ways to link? Are there embedded links? If so, do they work consistently (random question, I know - I've run into issues where the hyperlink doesn't work so it's wasted). 
What about adding a section, like: For additional information and resources, please share these links: widgets: URL; exec info: URL, etc.

I think a big part of it is approach. (I'm sure you know better than to point out that a site is linking to a competitor and complain to the site/author about that.) A follow-up message, like: great post, glad to see the report is of value, here's some additional resources that could be valuable to your audience (link, link) if you'd be interested in updating your post.

I've noticed more people approaching me with specifics like that, and they do better than those who are just trolling (literally will email me just asking for any links from my site to their content). Not that I think you'd troll - like I said, it's about approach.

'No follow' isn't the same as a 'no index' code. No follow just tells the search engine it "should not influence the link target's ranking in the search engine's index."  'No index' is where you tell the crawler to not index the pages, then you can remove that if you at some future point want them indexed.

So, in theory, what you did wouldn't  have anything to do with how many pages are indexed on your site anyway.

Mike, it's a tough situation. It's so important that you are informed about your site and holding an agency (or any partner) accountable is critical. It's tougher once the relationship is over and it is a big deal if you find out you got hosed. It's unfortunate that this wasn't caught earlier.

At the very least, they should be able to give you some sort of overview. I spent most of my career on the agency side and you paid for their services and asking for information on your account isn't out of line, IMHO.

If you can get the data, great, however you know enough to not let it stop you. I mean, if you can hold them accountable, OK, but that won't change your predicament, right?

It sounds like there's plenty of black hat stuff you need to clean up and are smart enough to know to make it a priority before it really hits your site negatively.

And you know for next time -if there is a next time - who not to go to or what to make sure no outside partner does

Good luck!

A few things could be at play: they have their on page content optimized properly (keywords are in the page title and used OK in the proper technical sections on the page). The domain is older than the other sites ranking after it (2007 vs 2009, etc.). And, the keywords aren't highly competitive.

All this means is that you just have to do a bit more than them to possibly surpass. Ex: they only have 2 links - get 10+ for you. Add solid content, update it often enough, etc. and you should be able to surpass. Again, it's not that their site is great - there's just a few things in their favor for right now.

Ah, the fun of semantics! It's amazing what a difference it can make, though, when trying to convey messages to a non-SEO or Web group.

I traditionally use "on site" and "on page" SEO for the "internal" items you have. That's partly driven by the fact we have some people working on  internal search on our site so people get confused with those projects if I use the term "internal."

I do use the term "external" or "site SEO" for the projects you list as "external." I try to differentiate what' specific to a page and what's specific to the overall site to help people understand there's different layers. And to help educate that because you optimize one page doesn't mean you've done SEO

I also like to educate on "technical" SEO so my team understands it's not just about keywords, but site performance and other things that can mean developer and IT resources. I learned fast that there was a perception that if you just put the keywords in the right place, revenue would come.

As for more social related information, I use buckets for social sharing but also make sure I hammer home the need for "in bound" marketing. There's a difference between those as you need the content to drive in bound but you use social to help give it visibility. And I think it's a more comprehensive element of marketing.

I would argue though that visibility isn't segregated by how you mentioned in. The technical build as well as the keywords selected can both play into visibility. You may not have any 500/404 problems, but if you picked keywords only a small audience cares about, you also limit your visibility.

For me, part of my terminology is dictated by our own internal jargon and how to map back to it so more people "get" it...while I talk about complicated things out of their wheelhouse that can end up confusing them anyway!

I've had mine take several days and Moz has told me that's not unexpected (even if it hasn't happened to you before).

If it goes longer than let's say today, contact their help desk. It's possible something got stuck (it's happened to me) and they have a great help team who will get you taken care of. They are very responsible and approachable.

Personally, I don't go by score. I go by content and what's best for the user and what's most "matched" or "alike" so it reads naturally. My intention isn't to sound smug, but when writing content, I can tell when it's stilted and the same word is used over and over (both my reading and doing a count of it) vs using variations of it. Also, there's tools that I use to at least get an indication if Google might think something's up (i.e., not diverse enough).

Also, my site isn't about one topic - we have a few core things, but we sell more than 30,000 SKUs so it's easier to be more diverse, even if there are similar variations (arc flash labels, cable labels, etc.) which makes it easier.

I track my site/words in a spreadsheet so I can make sure we're not optimizing the pages for the same words and competing against ourselves.

As for backlinks, that can get a bit trickier because I have less control on how people select to link to our site. For that, I monitor and when I feel it's needed, make suggestions and/or collaborate with other sites. (Keep in mind I have 50,000+ pages.)

Exciting opportunity - good for you! I, personally, do an audit. I don't usually spend hours and hours on it,  but I look at both content and technical to get an idea of what I'd be getting myself into. It's also a chance to bring up things that the client may not even realize.

So, then you look smart. Better, though, you showed you pay attention to them and their needs. Don't overlook the power of asking questions: What might their content be missing you'd suggest? What changes might you make on what they have now? Why did they layout their site the way they did?

I'd also do a Screaming Frog or Xenu crawl to check the health of the site and see if there's a lot of broken links or missing page titles, content, etc. Also, maybe do a page load test, too, which is really easy and there's a ton of sites that do those. Check backlinks (SEOMoz tool) to get at least an idea of how spammy or legit those are.

We "put up with it" because it's part of every facet of any business. There's always trolls. I mean, at this point if anyone believes that a Nigerian prince is going to send them millions as a thank you for fronting him money via a wire transfer, serves you right for getting hosted. That email scam has been around for years and people still fall for it since a sucker is born every minute

The best source for topical information is your customers, trade groups and general trends. First , are you noticing an uptick in a certain service or are you getting the same question over and over? These would mean people want to know about that topic.

Next, look at seasonality - March is home improvement time so what can people do to kick off their lawn care? Summer: if it's extra dry, what considerations should people think through to manage their lawn care? Or, if it's overly wet, what might they need to know? Fall: what should people do to prep their yard for winter? (Depending if you are in an area with more traditional four seasons.)

From industry trade shows - are there certain plants or trees that are a hot trend and being pushed? Is there a fear of any type of bug or insect infestation people need to counter?

What about best practices or care tips? "Tips from the pros." Your industry has plenty of information there - it's just a matter of you looking at it from a different perspective.

Google Trends is one way to see what people are searching for, and same with the Adwords keyword tool to gauge what type of searches people are conducting - not to mention any analytic data you see that drives traffic.

Think less like a business person and more like a reporter - address the topical relevance (timeliness - there's a reason why tax articles are more popular starting in January because it's when people start preparing, not in September), the problems (what problems do customers have and how can I solve them?) and the share. (Who, what, where, why, how?)

I went to SMX West last February and I found it to be very valuable. I'd consider myself a middle-experienced SEO; I say that because I am constantly impressed with the technical proficiency of many of the posters in this forum and their depth of knowledge. That said, I felt like there was a good balance of presentations for the different levels of knowledge and it was a great way for me to immerse myself into some more technical and advanced learning opportunities.

I liked the variety of presentations SMX offered as well as the access to experts and general networking. I was able to balance my interests of SEO, PPC and social media and come back with some actionable (key word there) insight to help our performance. I'd attend again, no question.

Although not on the East Coast, this year I want to look at MozCon in Seattle. The SEOMoz team was in Milwaukee this October for a Mozcation and if that's a taste of what their annual, bigger conference is like then I think it'd be a worthwhile investment.

Good luck!

Makes total sense and I've found the same thing - people like a human element. And, animal stories are always a great route to go - few things showcase a better side of humanity than helping animals, and it's even better when you have a strong community tie to it.

For any project to be effective, things have to tie together, right? It needs to make sense to the audience. Human interest angles (an interview with the GM/profile of the GM) is a great starting point to bring in her love of animals and tie to the company, without the company or product being the focal point. And, to your point, it's can be used for FB content/social. The campaign can stem from that with the CTA of her helping to drive and encourage others to help animals (like the points you made about # of likes = sponsorship).

That can be the foundation, then shift towards the outcomes: what animals are sponsored, what their needs are, etc. You can do it in waves: establishing the connection between your company and animals, profiling your GM, shifting the focus to how the sponsorship of the animal is making a difference, how to drive the audience to get involved.

While slightly self-serving, is there a way to maybe leverage a patch into your project? I realize this could be asking a lot, but to tie it close with the company and what you do, I'm throwing it out there: a special patch that's part of the relationship with the Animal Sanctuary? Maybe with their logo? It could start as maybe a graphic design logo to use in any postings and such, then if there's a way, it could be manufactured with proceeds going to the sanctuary.

You can also do votes/polls = what animals to sponsor? Animal/sanctuary fun facts - easy sound bites for social media dissemination.

Again, it goes back to trying to make it less passive - how can people be part of something vs just reading about it or clicking a button.

SEO for these videos may need a bit more help. Higher number of views is good, however, selecting specific keywords - per video - is important, using them in the title, text and closed caption also make a big difference.

So,for example, I wouldn't recommend trying to optimize multiple videos for "ledato guitar lesson." Inbound links to the videos/video embeds also play a role. This is a great site for video SEO that can get into lots of detail: http://www.reelseo.com/

Wanting to use long tail keywords is not really the same thing as keyword stuffing. You're just using anchor text to highlight the long tail keywords ("hiking shoes") that best describe your product vs. stuffing a page to an un-natural level with just the word "shoe" in an obvious attempt to rank for the term.

So I wouldn't fear stuffing penalties, although...depending on how crawl-able your new search page results will be, then be prepared that it can change what page ranks for what keywords unless you use a robots.txt or something to block/control search engines from accessing it. Ex: dynamic pages competing against the actual product pages for rankings for the long tail keywords.

And that's not the same thing as a penalty, that's just possibly what can happen when you make changes to content.

I think EGOL makes some great points, especially about content vs product/sales. And, given that I work on an incredibly complex site that often poses many SEO challenges, here's how I happen to look at it:

• Low volume words that are highly competitive you hope would mean a more targeted audience. (So, not throwing everything against the wall to see what sticks.) One issue: if it's, let's say 100 searches a month, then the best you can hope for is a percentage of that.
• Fact is, not everyone who may be looking for a "lockout tagout custom procedure" may search for that long tail. They may just search for "LOTO" - so, I have selected to build a keyword/SEO strategy that build long tail into short tail/broad terms.
• Also, what I have noticed is that even with the short tail, our bounce rates haven't taken a hit, perhaps because the meta descriptions give enough info away so people can tell before the click if we may be right for them.
• And, our rankings for a section where we did a much better pyramid build with keywords/content/like subjects has steadily improved in visibility - giving me hope that if you can manage the technical with understanding what Google wants (good, relevant content), it works.

Good luck!

Andrea

Hi Gareth,

Alt image text, a smart file name (keyword rich), a good (re: fast loadable) file size and captions are all solid starts. That data helps to tell Google as much as possible about the image.

Do you have a nickname or any branding specifics you need to adhere to? OK, that may be something bigger corporations care about, however, there's implications here: whatever you pick for Twitter will feed into whatever you do for other social media, so I'd suggest looking at your overall branding "wants" before making suggestions. For example, people could look on YouTube and Facebook for the Twitter handle you select, so pick something you don't mind carrying over.

I'd suggest being more specific in your location (it'd help users better identify where you are located): Pilates_Bois_Franc (which you may have already looked into but can't get). Is there some other regional/local tie with Pilates you could opt for?

You're better off, IMHO, looking at a branding tie across social media/Web that ties into one or two keywords than just picking a keyword focus that then may/may not support the brand.

While not exhaustive to your questions, Wednesday SEOMoz hosted a Mozcation in Milwaukee and one of the presenters spoke to mobile. Here's a link to his presentation, in case you find it interesting:http://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/14562864?hostedIn=slideshare&page=upload

If you block with robots.txt link juice can't get passed along. If your canonicals are good, then ideally you wouldn't need the robots. Also, it really removes value of the social media postings.

So, to your question, if you have the tracking parameter blocked via robots, then no, I don't think you are getting the link juice.

http://www.rickrduncan.com/robots-txt-file-explained

When I want link juice passed on but want to avoid duplicate content, I'm more a fan of the no index, follow tags and using canonicals where it makes sense, too. But since you say your URLs with the parameters aren't being indexed then you must be using tags anyway to make that happen and not just relying on robots.

To your point of "are you sure":

http://www.evergreensearch.com/minimum-viable-seo-8-ways-to-get-startup-seo-right/

(I do like to cite sources - there's so many great articles out there!)

There's going to be a ton of possible answers to this, but my two cents: depth of technical skill set and global knowledge really set experiences pros apart. So many newbies are so focused on the basics - on page optimization and basic HTML coding - that when you come across those who can identify and diagnose true technical issues and work across sites at a global level, you can tell the difference in skill set.

I mean, look at some of the questions that get asked in these forums - great indicators of how complex this can all become.

I agree; it's open for interpretation. However, each also has their own community behaviors. To repeat the same thing across all three, well, then why would I bother reading G+ if I can just get it with Twitter? Think about the user's perspective/

It may be more worthwhile to read up on social media best practices to better understand the expectations of those social communities so you can tighten your strategy and execution.

http://www.hubspot.com/marketing-resources/

http://mashable.com/2011/04/28/14-best-practices-for-long-term-social-media-success/

http://www.slideshare.net/search/slideshow?searchfrom=header&q=social+media+best+practices

It's a limited solution. It can get visibility fast and possibly drive traffic. It can also (unintentionally) interfere with your site - for example, a product news release could do well and the product page on your site could rank lower. So it also depends what the CTA is and what you want to rank best.

Even with good content, you need a way to get it out there to get visibility which is what a service like this can do. Then again, it can also do it for not really great content.

Use the SEOMoz rank tracking tool (http://ranktracker.seomoz.org/) for objective - non personalized or influenced - ranking results.

I don't think either of those are really the best examples - Amazon ranks well for several factors that don't have to do with keywords and Ebay is too "owned" by people posting content vs. the site manager managing it.

Retail sites like Kohl's do this (ex: womens>womens dresses>womens maxi dresses) and same with bestbuy.com, and REI.

http://www.searchenginepartner.com/Latest-SEO-News/seo-trends-utilysing-lsi-and-the-long-tail.html

Can't stress enough how much I agree about it being a bad investment and that just because there's people in the circles it doesn't mean any of them will stick around once it changes hands.

I try to not leave content along for "never" as it's good to watch page performance. Since search engines change their algos and keywords can grow more competitive, I don't feel the need to constantly update my content for "freshness," but I do look at performance and change if I'm not getting the results I want. I'm not a news site, it's not a blog and we aren't always adding or changing products, so I take freshness with some grain of salt.

Because a page works well at a certain place in time doesn't mean it always will and being proactive can help keep it steady.

There's a few thoughts on this one: many say keep it brief (70-100 characters). Others say it's part of content and should be the length needed to best describe/support the image. (For example,  since blind people use software that reads the image text to them, what might they need to be able to 'get' it?)

Focus on being brief and reconsider how wordy you are being if you hit more than 12 words.

Whenever you have crawl issues, the SEOMoz help team is the place to go. They're the only ones who can look into your account to see if there's an issue or such. (And they are really nice and quick to respond.)

H1 is a tag search engines use to help identify what your page is about. Using "overview" for all H1 would imply that your site is about "overview." (Ok, I'm dumbing it down a little bit, but I'm doing it to make a point.)

The more specific an H1 tag can be to the content of a page, the better. It's easier for search engines to understand your page and it's a better user experience (how valuable is "overview" all over the place?).

It looks like the only content on the pages you shared that's different is the basic job info in the grey box, which is why it'd be flagged as duplicate; the majority of the page info is all the same.

It's not a surprise and it's not that uncommon. I wouldn't see it as a huge performance problem; most every site has an issue similar to this - it's clearly not black hat.

Assuming you want to track keywords for your domain, I personally use RankTracker so I can see my keywords for my domain and they give a ranking between 1-99, then tell you if it's not in the top 100. So it can fill the 50-99 information gap.

Dana makes an interesting point of Boolean searches. Unless you're using a tool that specifically uses that method (like MyBuzz Metrics), most tools are set up to already assume it's one phrase and thus don't need quotes.

You'll probably get way better - and more in-depth - information by reading some articles on reputable sites, including SEOMoz, like SEO5 mentioned. I doubt there's enough room in one of these forums to be able to post the full POV on each of these to give you the value you are looking for.

In addition to Moz, check out http://searchengineland.com/ and http://www.searchenginejournal.com/.

We had the same issue! There was a lot of desire to optimize everything, which, of course, is nearly impossible for that many pages and content that can be so similar. So we shifted our strategy to focus on the right pages, knowing that as pages got much more niche Google would still index them for very specific terms. With our focus on harder/broader terms, we were able to craft what we wanted for more competitive terms and also, like you, spend time focusing on things like rich snippets.

Are you doing any A/B testing, is that how you're changing out colors and such? That's been really interesting for us, same with changing the call to action wording.

Luke - quite the project you get! I admit, I usually stay away from books since they can get out of date pretty fast for this subject matter, so here's some websites to check out:

We've recently invested in Eloqua for our marketing automation, which is probably too big of a tool for many companies, however they have great email campaign resources. http://www.eloqua.com/resources/

And, Marketo is sorta similar to Eloqua: http://www.marketo.com/b2b-marketing-resources/

This site has some great examples people post for A/B testing, so there's usually good learnings you can gleen: http://www.abtests.com/ and implement.

I also like content Hubspot creates: http://www.hubspot.com/products/marketing-automation/ & http://www.hubspot.com/marketing-automation-information/

Hope that's a decent start!

We have this across about 30,000 products (yea, that many). I can't stress enough how much of a duplicate page/title content mess it can become. If your system allows for canonical and pagination it's totally worth the effort.

My two cents? I spent 12yrs in the PR field (and transitioned into SEO/social media) and I'd be very careful to ask the right questions to determine what PR agency to work with. I know - and worked with - few who knew how to properly optimize a release. And, while they did have media contacts, PR Newswire did a lot of the leg work. Pitching a story to a reporter or blogger was really the value the PR person brought to the table. And, link building was never something that was regularly brought up. In the past two months, the majority of the PR pros I network with like to tell me "SEO is dead" which tells me everything I need to know about their understanding of SEO.

Again, I am sure there are plenty of seasoned PR people who have an understanding - there's also lots of agencies who like to sell their services even if they don't have the depth of knowledge. Like any business endeavor, it's just a matter of due diligence to find the right fit.

Freelancers have way better prices because they don't have the same overhead costs as agencies, so that could be a more affordable route.

I agree - try Screaming Frog. I use it - and prefer it to Xenu - and it's free for up to 500 URLs or $99 for a license for unlimited. Even with a slower computer it can run in the background (leave it on overnight).

For whatever reason, the URL you posted isn't formatting correctly for me to be able to see it all (it gets cut off), so I apologize if I can't speak directly to your example.

I will tell you from my personal experience that the way our place uses tracking codes has indeed created duplicate content.

Example: www.domain.com?cid=102is the same content as www.domain.com - so unless you prevent it before these URLs get indexed, you can have a mess to clean up. It comes up in Moz, Screaming Frog, etc.

It's all of those. Those are all ways you seem too fake and "perfect" and it flags Google. Similar phrases (ex: labels, labeling, labeling printers, identification labels, etc.) are all more natural variations of each other that hit home the essential core message (we're know labels!) in a more natural way than having just the word "label" everywhere.

I agree - and also look at any possible technical issues. if the on page is good, then most likely something else is afoot. I won't speak to if it was for sure Penguin because I don't want to speculate.

And what I mean by technical issues: is a page looking fine but registering a header check of a 404/500? (I mean via a tool like this: http://www.seoconsultants.com/tools/check-server-headers-tool/). Or is Webmaster registering an unusually high spike in errors? Those things can add up and have an impact, too.

Question - when you say major video sites, do you mean like YouTube and Vimeo? I'm just curious why you'd want them to not be part of your own account/channel within each for better branding...which is part of the strategy.

First, what's your goal with the videos? And why would you want them to live outside of your hands (ie., have a third party manage and post, and I assume then also oversee all the title/description/tagging, etc.) when the best SEO would come from keeping it under your umbrella? While you may not think there's time to manage this on your own, what do you want to get out of it and then is that worth the trade off of losing the ties to your ownership?

(Granted there are a lot of variables to take into consideration - like if you have embedded links in the video that can drive viewers back to your website, and ultimately what the CTA for the videos include, etc.)

URLs - headache! We have a terrible URL structure because of the ways we have to pull data, so this is something that I have checked into, too. Now, I will say there's lots of differing opinions on this. I will share with you what someone from Google said last week at SMXWest: they just want you to know about bad links, they don't penalize you for them.

I'm not saying that's the end-all-be-all answer, but she knows that there's a perception that it can 'ding' you when the reality (according to her) is that they drop 404 pages from their index because they don't serve up bad pages. You have lots of bad pages, less linking ability, less pages to have rank and you can lose online visibility. There's a difference between losing visibility because your overall content offering is reduced by bad links and those pages never having existed in the first place.

There's a good chance there's something else going on -one of the things I adore about this forum is that people here have crazy skills and I have witnessed them uncover an issue the original poster didn't even know they had.

It could also do with Google determining that your page is a high quality one, so it now gets more visibility. Or, the number of inbound links has increased, which also influences rank. Personalization could be at play, depending on how you went about discovering the ranking change, so if you want to confirm, check it with SEOMoz's Rank Tracking to get a non personalized result.

Google sometimes will do this if it thinks that the deeper page (in this case) is a more relevant to the search query. And, optimizing is merely a way to indicate to Google what you want them to think a page is about; there's no promise that Google will agree.

Even with a small website, something outside of the homepage will rank - Google will crawl the site and offer up additional pages to searchers if they think there's good content there, regardless if you intentionally optimized said page or not. Trying to block out all the other pages isn't necessarily the best strategy. Rather than look at how your other pages work against you, look at how they can work for you. If you didn't put a no index tag on the page and it's already ranking, that's not a solution that works best for after the fact (but something to keep in mind as the site grows).

Sounds like part of the problem is that even with a few pages you cannibalized by trying to only use one keyword/variation. Even if the content isn't 100% the same, Google can interpret it as similar enough. Dr Pete did an excellent blog that may be able to offer some insight. I'll preface that he wrote about duplicate content, however it goes through when to use things like canonicals (not something that fits your case) so it may be helpful to at least read up and confirm what won't fix it: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world (he specifically mentions how canonicalizing your site to one URL can do lots of damage).

If you want to rank for more terms, then you have to have a place to put that content so Google can make the association, right? We also believe in three levels and it's pretty justified for many business (us: printers -portable printers - brand name portable printers). That's not unusual and your audience most likely won't think much of it.

As long as the content and long tail words make sense to your site and will be of value to the user, you should be fine.

Now, I'll preface this by saying I don't know what documents you may be looking at vs what I have access to. I see duplicate links from SEOMOz, so you can get to it.

For example, when I log into my SEOMoz campaign information and click on the red errors box, then the duplicate content box, there's a selection of duplicate URLs right below the chart. My current one is indicating it caught 29 duplicate pages of content for my Spanish signs product section, then I can see all the URLs listed out that it sees as duplicates.

Granted, SEOMoz only crawls 10,000URLs at a time, so for a major site like mine that's only part of what we have, but it's an indicator of stuff we need to fix. I download my campaign report into a CSV file and there's columns in that identifying what's duplicate, too.

Keep in mind that many, many niche sites have this same problem. I mean, there's only so many ways to write compelling content on a very technical subject, right? Images, studies, videos, articles, quotes, news releases - all sources for a way to freshen up what you are "borrowing" from the larger organization's site.