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I'm looking for some second opinions on this one. In talking with another SEO, he is of the opinion that if my company name is two words like Crazy Man, I should write some news release that have my brand combined as Crazyman because it is a variant of the brand name. He claims that Google does not look at my brand as Crazy Man, but as one word and in Google's mind Crazyman as one word is my brand.
What do you all think?
I'm going to answer this from the perspective of a user searching for a local company.
1. I HATE when companies do this. I click in, start reading some content, they even mention the name of my city a couple times. Then I click "Contact Us" and there is a long distance number, and no local address. I immediately leave the page because I wanted to deal with a local company. I feel a frustration for having wasted the last 1-2 minutes of my life.
2. I have seen very few pages like this have value. One approach that had value was a company that lists things to do near a city. The content was different for every city because they listed things within a 10 mile radius. The key hear was that each page was relevant and unique to my experience.
3. Whether or not I'd recommend this depends on the company and product. Floral company - maybe (depends on how they plan to deliver flowers for the customers), cellphone provider - probably (most cell phones are sent in the mail to you anyways even if you deal with a local shop), web design company - no (when people search using local keywords for a web designer, they typical want to meet with the designer).
Sorry Eran, I'll try to address this more specifically:
So they actually control those directories themselves, which we think is even worse (it is). I'm wondering what does the Moz community think about link directory submission (sorry, I'm not the community, just a member of it so I can't speak for all of them) - is there still something to be gained there (not really), is there any risk involved (very little), etc (not really sure what you are looking for specifically here, but hope my answers help.)
Typically you can trust that gut feeling that says, if it doesn't sound right, it probably isn't.
My guess is that this firm has a flat rate that they charge and they guarantee x number of links built per month. I'd shy away from a strategy like that.
I don't feel that you can say all link directories are bad, but I wouldn't spend much, if any, time building links in that manner. Not sure how much you are paying for their services, but I'd probably take the $200-$400 a month and hire some content creators, a social media manager, or something that has more value.
I'm in the same boat as both of you, so maybe we're all lost together?
Ask yourself, "If I was on this page wanting to use it, what would make the most sense to me as a user?" If the answer to that question is, "Yes, it would make sense to put OH Job in the link," then put it in there. If the answer is no, do not put it in there. You want your website to service the needs of your users, not the search engines.
Basically it goes like this, if the keywords you are wanting to rank a certain page for, don't naturally fit within that page, you shouldn't be trying to rank for those keywords. Otherwise you are "spamming" the web. Your users will land on the page, find that it doesn't fulfill their needs, and leave if the keywords don't fit there.
If the keywords do fit on the page, you shouldn't have much trouble ranking for a low comp phrase.
Actual pages reached through refinement.
Makes much more sense now.
I went through something very similar about 9 months ago. What we did is take the content from the landing pages and placed it on the sub-content pages with products right on that page. We then created a 301 redirect from the old page to the new. We then went and found all sites on the internet linking to the old pages and updated them if possible to the new URL.
We did see a little bit of a dance on the keywords, but over time we have actually climbed higher in the rankings for those organic terms we were afraid of losing. Best part was that this has increased conversions because customers get to the products much faster and the overall experience is better for the customer.
I'm a little confused as to what you are afraid of losing? From your description it sounds like you are saying you are going to make the pages that are receiving organic traffic more easily accessible from your main navigation?
However, I'm also thinking that you are saying you are considering replacing the landing pages with sub-content pages that can be drilled down in to?
Please help me understand a little more clearly.
This is what I thought it was, I just wanted to make sure that what I was thinking was correct.
I keep hearing this term "over optimization" and people assuming they have received an over optimization penalty. I also hear people say, "You need to optimize every page on your site."
So at what point does a site become "over optimized?" Are there any good reads around here that explain this better?
So is rank, link, and ironically four.
This might not be the best place to request it, but you successfully accomplished the task you had a desire to do. Try this page instead of the Q&A forums: http://www.seomoz.org/about/contact
I would say you are on the right track, especially keeping all your citations in mind.
I do wonder why you are wanting to change your address from reading St. to Street spelled out? The US post office standards say to keep it abbreviated.
Be very careful to make sure that when you move your old site to Wordpress that your URL's stay EXACTLY the same and the content does not have a major overhaul. Also, if images on your website rank well in image search, make sure that the URL structure and location of those images doesn't change. 12 years and ranking well is not something you want to lose.
The question of should you is completely up to you. Are you going to save money doing this? Is it enough money to warrant the time spent making the transition? How often do you need to be changing data? Do you have the technical know how to make the transition? Can you hire someone to do it for you? Will the end result be a better experience for your site's visitors?
These are just some questions to really get you thinking about whether or not it is worth it.
If having them there makes it easier for your visitors to navigate your site, it is not a problem.
Always remember, your visitors are what make you money, NOT the search engines. Make a good experience for your visitors while paying attention second to search engines and your site will do just fine.
I would be posting these on YouTube with a link to your site and not worry about the "unique" factor in your case. YouTube is a great source of outside traffic. If your videos are quality, they will drive traffic.
In that case I'd just make a generic "404 Oops Page" and not worry about 301's on the low quality pages. Spend your time on more worthwhile efforts creating great content.
I'd listen to the first line from Francisco, but disagree about Squidoo. You can get quality traffic from a quality written squidoo article.
Two links from the same website most likely will not hurt you and should help. Make sure you are getting authorship credit for those two blog posts. I think it's pretty obvious that you don't want all your links to come from the same website, but 2-3 is okay. It says to the search engines, "This site is good enough to receive multiple links on different pages within this high domain site."
If you are getting traffic from those 404's then there should be another page in your site that contains the content that is no longer found. 301 to pages that contain the content the visitor was originally looking for. If they felt the 404 page was worth visiting your site, they want to find the information they came looking for.
It is always a good thing to ask direct questions about what you are trying to learn. Otherwise, you will get very generic answers like, "Search Google" or "continue to read the forums here."
I would leave the posts as indexed. This is the true residing place of your content. Categories are there to help your visitors to find the indexed content. If you don't index your content, your users will have to click multiple times to discover the content when visiting from a search engine.
What exactly are you trying to do with your video? Are you trying to get people to understand a product? Are you trying to drive traffic to your website? If yes to either of these, uploading to YouTube is not going to hurt you. Embedding the link from YouTube on your homepage most likely will not hurt you. It may not help in the sense of having unique content, but it will help keep people on the home page longer.
Changing the video every 1-2 months can help if you have a lot of repeat visitors. Repeat visitors like fresh new content.
Jeremy brings up a good point. Perhaps you changed title tags on your site through a sitewide SEO tool, but Google had indexed them before you made changes. If that's the case, you may just need to wait for Google to crawl your site again and update the title tags.
If you have webmaster tools, you might check to see the last date Google crawled the site.
First thing to do is truly determine if you really need to remove those links, and second is to determine what your brand is. Start by reading this post by Marie Haynes earlier this week: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-difference-between-penguin-and-an-unnatural-links-penalty-and-some-info-on-panda-too
If NLP California is your brand and what people call you, most likely there is no problem having links to your site with anchor text NLP California.
My assumption would be yes, they think your company name is CCTV Cameras. I have seen Google add the company name to sites on other sites, but the only thing that is different is I thought they were making it appear more like this - CCTV Camera: [Rest of Title Tag]
Refer to Matt Cutts' blog for what I'm talking about, http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/, and notice his title tags.
I sell a product that comes in 9 different sizes, two materials, and two different shapes. People often search for this product by size, material and shape as follows:
#9 material1 square widget
#5 material2 circle widget
The dilemma I'm facing is should I create 1 page for each of these products resulting in 36 different pages, or should I create one page that the users can select size shape and material?
I'm thinking that from a usability stance, the 36 different pages are easier to navigate and determine price on, but I'm afraid that going the route that is easier for the customer to use in this case could hurt me duplicate content wise. I'm all about making a good user experience, but don't want to hurt myself because the content on all 9 sizes is basically the same.
Are images of the product enough to be considered non-duplicate content? I also list out the dimensions of each product, but beyond that there isn't much to delineate the content.
My plan is to create one page with all the content that relates to all of the products as a top level page with links to the individual products broken down, but just wanted to get some feedback from you guys before making the effort.
This may be an obvious question, but I just need to clarify for myself; do the pages at brand-state.com and company-name-brand.com have the exact same content/design?
If the answer is no, it's possible that keywords are on alt tags on one page and not on another.
If the answer is yes, you got me without having a look at it myself. Have you compared the rendered source code?
I can see them doing something with longevity tracking and repeat customers. They could possibly track to see if people are return shoppers to a site.
And then there is the obvious reviews of a store from Google Wallet users when you are a Google Wallet store.
I think there are other things that they could do just in the design of a site. They could possibly figure out what design elements make an experience easier on the shopper.
I hope I understand what you are asking and that you are looking to do this yourself at a low-cost, not looking for a company to do it for you. If I am understanding you correctly, I'd start with Google Analytics and their Expirements to improve goal conversions.
It's found under the "Content" tab on the left of your analytics profile.
At one point on a site I wrote a blog entry that was titled something along the lines of, Other Common Names for Our Products. I came up with a list of about 10 other names products were referred to as. I then used 1 day for the next week and a half writing a post about each of those names and explained why people referred to those products by those names other than the official name.
Some of the posts I had to be quite creative to come up with unique reasons, but it was kind of a fun exercise to go through. You might try something like this.
My campaign report says I have a 404 error for a sub page located at domain/products/contact.aspx
My contact page is not in the /products directory so what I'm wondering is if this means that somewhere on a site I have a link pointed to /products/contact.aspx. I've looked everywhere and cannot find the link if it is out there somewhere.
Yosepgr,
First it's important to not spell important as "impotent", especially after Irving's reference to viagra.
Write something like this:
I noticed your website at {put web address here} was linking to mine several hundred times. I visited your site to see why you liked my site so much and noticed that it's because your website appears to have been hacked.
You should consider cleaning up all of the links the hackers put in to your website so that you do not get a penalty from Google. You should also consider taking some safety precautions to prevent this from happening in the future. Some things you can do is check your site to see where SQL Injections may occur. You might also put in Captcha validations where your users are able to input information/register for your site.
I hope all goes well with your cleanup.
So just a quick fyi, when you responded to my question, everyone else can see it. You don't have to put it under each response.
If it is really beneficial to your users, DO NOT eliminate it.
As far as stopping the crawlers from seeing it, that may be worth a try to see if it helps or not. That is done using a robots.txt file.
If I were you before I blocked those pages with the robots.txt file, I would want to be 100% positive that all those number of links were having a negative effect on your site and that they aren't just being ignored.
Take a look at this article: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many it is a little old, but still very relevant in your situation.
I can't say that it would be better or just the same. I know that I would definitely try it and see what happens. That's a lot of SEO, trying things out see what happens. If it works, continue down the path, if it doesn't change course.
Are these site wide footer links on the subdomain site? If yes, they probably aren't helping you much at all if they are DoFollow or NoFollow.
I think you are asking if changing your site from www.domain.com to my.domain.com will have a negative affect on your SEO.
If I understand this correctly, yes it will have a negative affect on your seo, how big the effect is depends on a lot of factors. Links to the subdomain of www.domain.com do not carry over to your mobile domain of m.domain.com.
The answer to whether this is a good choice depends on how much of your traffic is mobile and how much is via the desktop. If 100% of your traffic is mobile, it most definitely is a good choice.
You won't see ALL of the link juice transferred from the other pages to this new one. 301 redirects are not as strong as an actual link to the page.
If there are too many, the best way to handle this would be to reduce them. 
Seriously though, we need more info. Can you group them in any way?
Did you mean to attach a file to this post?
Depends on where you publish the article as to whether or not it will be treated as quality.
Obviously links1.html?some-value is a different link than links1.html, but having the canonical will help to clear that up somewhat. If links1.html is the main target, the link would give you more strength pointed directly at it.
I've seen a few other real estate type sites take a hit similar to what you are describing. I attribute it to the amount of duplicate content across several real estate sites. I'd focus on creating unique content/promotions on YOUR site aside from the listings.
To get the most out of them SEO wise, my recommendation is to develop them in to full blown websites. 15-20 pages of unique content related to the topic. After developing these "micro" sites, they will bring in a lot of traffic not on for the exact keyword, but long tail as well.
I know this sounds like a lot of work, especially if your main site is not very big, but this is how you're going to get "the most" out of them.
Your suggestion of 301's on the old to the new is the best if it's doable.
I see the snowguards.aspx page as position 21 still. I haven't changed a thing on the home page for 5-6 months.
That's a really cool tool. Thanks for showing it to me. It doesn't appear that the site was hit with any algo update issues.
If I understand what you are asking correctly, then it is best to have only one blog. You want it in your website and drop the blogspot version. You only want one copy of your posts on the internet and you want them on your site giving your site more authority.
If the existing blog is really powerful and has a lot of links pointing at it, you may want to look in to 301 redirects to point the old URL's to the new blog within your site. I'm not sure if that's possible with blogspot, but something to consider.