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Your best bet would be to read specific reviews of each toolset due to all of the overlap and conflicting focus areas.

If you're just looking for an all around organic toolset, then you're fine with Moz, and you might selectively want to do single paid months on other tools like SEMrush and ahrefs to collect additional data.

But, if you do enough work in a particular function (eg link building, or keyword research, or technical SEO), you'll need more than one of them. I personally use Moz, ahrefs, & SEMRush the most from your current list. Screaming Frog is another one that is a must-have agency side. URLprofiler is a strong choice as well.

Decision should be made on what you're doing most of the time. Doing tons of keyword research and technical SEO? Your best bet would be Moz, Screaming Frog, and SEMRush, in my opinion. Doing tons of content creation and backlink analysis? You'd be best off with access to Moz, Ahrefs, Majestic, Buzzsumo, and SEMRush. So - everyone will be different.

Here are what I would call the "generally accepted best features" of the ones you did provide:

• MOZ - Good balanced toolset covering content, offsite, and technical SEO considerations. Link database is smaller than ahrefs/majestic but getting larger all the time, and focuses on higher quality links and less "noise" from spam and scraper sites.
• Ahrefs - Very thorough link database, and some of their newer tools are strong.
• Majestic - Very thorough link database.
• Spyfu - Strong for keyword research & discovery - both PPC and organic.
• SEMRush - Strong for keyword research & discovery - both PPC and organic. I use this one daily.
• Raven - One of the best options for reporting. I think they focus on being a balanced toolset.
• Wordstream - PPC-only toolset to my knowledge, aside from keyword research that could be used for SEO.

These are all generalizations, however, and you're going to have to have a tool budget discussion with your agency at some point. $99 or 199 per month isn't going to cut it for an agency of any size. $499 would be a more reasonable budget cap.

College grad with perfect English?

1 - Show them how to run a CSV of a competitor's websites in Open Site Explorer (also Blekko and Majestic SEO are worth considering)

2 - Open the CSV in Excel, sort the entries by domain authority and then by domain name, and have them start color categorizing each row by the following (you'll have to hold their hand for a bit):

• (A) we already have a link from this domain
• (B) we don't have a link but I submitted our info
• (C) we don't have a link but maybe we can get one or it will take work (like a guest post or building a relationship or sending an email request) - in another column have them categorize what type of link it is (sidebar / resources / guest post / ad / etc )
• (D) we can't get a link from this domain (other sites owned by the competitor, etc.)

3 - Tell them not to bother with any site with domain authority under 20 or 10 or whatever your personal cutoff is.

4 - If they can get the link automatically, like submitting to a directory, have them do it. Quick them a run through on best practices for things like URL, phone numbers, and how to vary the descriptions, and then have them use some sort of auto-fill extension or plug-in so they're not retyping the same thing over and over.

5 - Have them transfer any links from category (C) to a new spreadsheet, which will be what they work on after the categorizing is done. The spreadsheet should be sorted by type - guest post, resources link, ad, etc.

6 - After a  few weeks (or a month or two) of that, they'll appreciate the value of creating awesome content and getting people to create the links for you, and they'll have an excellent idea of the types of link building your competitors are engaged in.

Their next project should be learning how to approach each link from the new spreadsheet they created in step 5, which you'll need to teach them a little bit. Have them start with writing guest posts and contacting guest post sites under your supervision. Then they can advance up to email requests and relationship building after they've done a bit of guest posting. That should keep them busy for 4 to 12 months depending on your niche.

I've got a couple ideas here.

1 - Set up Cross Domain GA Tracking

This would measure literal overlap in users over time. Basically - has this person been on any of our sites before?

I'd probably do this with a new GA UA account to keep the current accounts the way they are.

If you're not doing affiliate tracking between the sites then this added analytics layer may be a good idea anyways.

2 - Set up Leadfeeder.com accounts

This can show you some information based upon user IP address. Not much different than GA data but fun to look at.

3 - Analyze email lists

Assuming you've got lists built for each of these sites, compare them in rapleaf or full contact and do a subjective/manual review of the customers that you can pull data on.

4 - Set up retargeting scripts on all of the sites, and then run some retargeting campaigns

You should be able to get some general insights from Facebook, Twitter, etc on basic audience demographics. Basically building a custom audience and then pulling them into Facebook audience insights once you have enough people in that audience group for each site.

5 - Check social insights

If you have any social followers that are separate you should be able to compare page owner insights on these audiences.

6 - Keyword Overlap

Use the domain comparison tool in SEMRush and see how much ranking overlap there is. May or may not be relevant to the audience, but I can make an easy argument for a site merger if there's cannibalization there and neither site is ranking 1st for many of those keywords.

7 - Look at conversion data

If you're getting a strong conversion rate from referral traffic from sites B, C, and D, that should bolster your argument. By strong I mean above your site's average conversion rate.

General takeaways:

From what you've said so far, I think you can make an easy argument to merge sites C and D into the main site.

Site B is the harder decision, especially since I'm not sure how many constraints you have in regards to claims made on site B and the laws surrounding supplements and vitamins. Microsites can go either way IMO - I've seen great ones and I've seen some that never should have been separated. There's an easy SEO argument for merging them but it may not be the best brand decision.

A good relevant example is the bulletproofexec.com site and their upgradedself.com ecommerce store. Pure SEO standpoint would be to merge these 2 sites, but I think they've got a strong brand built up in one and they may not want to sell those products on their main lifestyle/blog site.

I can't speak to the current Godaddy website editor - but most wysiwyg website editors won't offer you the option to specify a canonical tag.

Additionally, if you put ... code inside of the body copy, Google will generally ignore it since it could be manipulated by third parties with access to comment fields or other content editors. So, that's not going to help unfortunately.

You might be better off implementing the 301 redirect if they'll let you do that.

Also - if you can edit the navigation menu to make sure users are sent back to domain.com instead of domain.com/home.html, that should remove the URL from being crawled, which will help as well. Do they give you the option to get rid of that "Home" link and add a custom one that points directly to http://www.answer2cancer.org/ ? That would get rid of Moz crawl errors as well for the most part.

Hey Patrick,

I have a good guess as to the problem. Has anyone installed Bot Filters on these accounts? If someone installed a bunch of bot filters incorrectly (for example a hostname exclusion instead of a hostname inclusion) that would cause tracking to disappear despite proper on-site installation.

August 2nd was the day that Moz published a blog post on this exact topic, so that in particular makes this my best guess.

If you want to post screenshots of the filters on these account I'm happy to glance at them.

Regarding this:

"I've also noticed that a lot of my competitors have links on lots of blogs that I can't seem to get links on. I would normally contact them and offer to guest post but I can find any contact details. I'm beginning to think my competitors have set these sites up as well for link building purposes. Is that ethical?"

Is it ethical? That's the opening question to a long and drawn out debate. It's certainly a bit spammy, depending on how crappy the content is on the blog. It's hard for me to tell you not to do that, because it's obviously working for them, but before you do, please try the "create awesome content and promote it" option first.

How about creating "the UK guide to hiring a wedding band" or something like that? Should be worth a good number of links from all of the bridal/wedding blogs in the UK if you make it a darn good piece of content. Or interview the bloggers at the 20 biggest bridal/wedding blogs and see what the most popular wedding music trends are or some BS like that. They'll often link back to your article after it's published because you asked them to contribute.

Please try that stuff before you start building crappy link networks.

The best solution is to use  on those pages.

I believe that using robots.txt will still allow the URLs to be shown as URLs in search results, so that is less ideal. Not certain if that's still the case, but it used to be that way.

I personally would not nofollow links to that page, because if you use "noindex, follow" it will in turn pass value to other indexed pages, and nofollowing links to a noindex page isn't supposed to increase pagerank to other links on the page.

I only see one sentence before each video that has unique content on the pages. I ran the two URLs through this tool: http://www.webconfs.com/similar-page-checker.php and it reports 98% similarity. I'm guessing it's based entirely on text, which is likely what SEOmoz is based on.

The good news is that it's easy to fix. One video is 20 minutes long, and one video is 40 minutes long. Write at least a paragraph of good description about what the topic of each video is, and add that to the page.

Bonus points if you write more than one paragraph for each page, and 100x bonus points if you provide a transcription of the speech.

Once you do that the duplicate content error will go away, and you'll have better luck with getting traffic to those pages if that's a goal.

Yes, absolutely. Lots of benefits here - locking in a domain that otherwise may have been taken by someone else, aging the domain with some basic content, etc. The downside is $10 and the risk that you don't move forward with that product.

Only caveat I would add is that it may make more sense to simply claim the domain and redirect it to the product page on your existing website, but this really depends on branding and other business factors as much as SEO best practices.

You're not going to see any damage in terms of SEO. I can hardly imagine a case where hashtag consistency directly or indirectly contributes to anything search-related. The decision should be made on what's best for the conference attendees. If they're seeing tons of junk in their hashtag stream, especially within 7 days before or after the event, then it's probably best to switch (and make sure your new choice doesn't have the same problem).

As far as buy-in, just make it very obvious to everyone what the new hashtag is - if it was really that much of an annoyance last time, the vets will do it and the new people won't know the difference. You can also have someone start sending @replies with the correct hashtag in a friendly manner if you really want to enforce the change.

You should stick with one format across the site:

1. domain.com/index.html and domain.com/subfolder/index.html
   **OR **

2. domain.com/ and domain.com/subfolder/

I typically choose the second option because it is agnostic of CMS or file type, and it looks better in my opinion. I would not mix the two across the site because it causes a confusing user experience.

So, to answer your questions directly:

My logic would tell me to still redirect the non"index.html" to "index.html". Am I right?

No, not necessarily. By telling us that there are examples where .html is more authoritative and there are examples where it isn't as authoritative, it's impossible for us to say which is the better choice. I personally would rewrite & redirect everything using the 2nd option above.

**The same question for www vs non www versions? **

I believe that WWW vs non-WWW is less important. You could decide based upon which format has more links or which one has been historically used. Consistency (using the same across the entire site), proper 301 redirects, and proper rel canonical tags are your priorities here.

One of the tragic downfalls of Facebook Pages, in my opinion, is what you just noticed.

The 8 likes are referring to http://www.fibers.com

Your 1500+ likes are referring to http://www.facebook.com/fibers

At this time, there's no way to combine the two counts (which is just as stupid as it seems, because the likes for a domain homepage should absolutely be tied to the business page's likes, in my opinion). Unfortunately this is an inherent flaw in Facebook's open graph, and not something related to the SEOMoz tool.

So, if you go to put a Like button on your homepage, you have to make the decision of whether you want that to count as a like for your homepage (which may help your SEO a little, but does little to nothing for your Facebook marketing) or count as a like for your fan page (which is great for adding fans, but does little to nothing for SEO).

For what it's worth, I tend to use the Like button box using my facebook page URL throughout the site to make sure people are fans, then I'll use a page-specific like button on all of the subpages of my site so that people can like individual products, etc. This is also how SEOmoz approaches the issue if you take a look at one of their blog pages. On the sidebar you'll see the like box (pointed at their Facebook page), and on the bottom of the post you'll see a like button for that specific post.

Those comments definitely have value since it's some of your only unique content. There will likely be lots of junk comments, but every few will be decent comments with good references to the songs.

Since your lyrics are for things like kids songs, or christmas songs, and you have a way more attractive theme than most lyrics websites, I could see that earning you some decent comments that people wouldn't post on a junky looking site.

Regarding Pagination / AJAX Alternatives:

AJAX would look nice if you can find a good SEO-friendly version, but that sounds like lots of work with questionable SEO value to me.

How about just loading all comments in a div that has a set height and overflow:auto; in use, and apply some custom formatting to the scrollbar appearance using javascript or jquery?

• http://www.net-kit.com/jquery-custom-scrollbar-plugins/
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1256258/div-scrollbar-any-way-to-style-it
• http://www.n-son.com/scripts/jsScrolling/jsScroller.html

Regarding Spell Checking:

It looks like your whole site is PHP. If you're handy with coding your own PHP, you could quickly borrow the code from a spellchecker such as a wordpress plugin, use it on your comment forms, and make it automatically apply that to the users comment. Then, give the user a pop up window after they click submit that says "Your comment has been spell-checked, click here to edit any of our changes" so that users can override it.

It requires some extra effort upfront on your part, but could result in some very high quality content for the niche.

Add Social Buttons:

I would get Like / Tweet / +1 buttons up on your site, I imagine that will be a good indicator that you're not a junk site. You have share, but these easier-to-click buttons get a way higher usage rate IMO.

Brent's answer was partially correct, however he was incorrect regarding Open Site Explorer's social data. OSE's social data for Facebook, Google+, and Tweets is always up to date, and not subject to the same update schedule as other OSE data.

The discrepancies work like this:

• 17 (which is actually 19 now) is the number of people that have liked the URL http://www.goldmaxusa.com/
• 94 is the number of people that have liked, shared, or commented on the URL http://www.goldmaxusa.com/

You can see this difference broken down at http://sharedcount.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.goldmaxusa.com%2F

• 560 is the number of people that have liked the URL http://www.facebook.com/goldmaxusa

The difference is the URL being liked. Your facebook page is not associated with your homepage in regards to likes. If you're thinking to yourself, "boy that's a stupid way to do it," you are correct. It's a terrible way to do it. But that's how Facebook set up the opengraph to work.

On the top menu, I select All Links, only from External sites, pointing to entire Root Domain, not grouped by domain.

I export that as a CSV, open in Excel, and do a custom sort in this order: (A) Followed Links (Z to A), (B) Domain Authority (High to Low), (C) URL (A to Z).

Work your way down the list and color code as you go. Typically mine will look something like this:

• Blue for Links we already have.
• Green for Links we can get with a little work (such as a guest post on a blog)
• Purple for Links we can get, and I have already applied/submitted and need to check back in the future.
• Red for obviously Paid Links
• Black for Links we cannot ever get. Typically these are from other sites owned by the competitor.
• Yellow for Spammy Links that I don't want us to get.

If your competition uses a particular type of link strategy extensively (such as widget link building for example) you'll want to add another color for that.

Run a new Copy of that same report for the domain in 3 to 6 months, add it to the bottom of the existing spreadsheet, go to the Data tab in Excel and select "Remove Duplicates." Then start tackling the new links on the bottom.

Do you already have a job where you can practice SEO? Alternatively, do you have a personal website you can practice on? That experience is far more valuable then a certification. I don't think it lends much credence to any SEO agencies that are hiring, they're looking for things like hustle & creative thinking.

Between reading every SEOMoz blog post ever written (or at least most of the ones written in the last 2-3 years), as well as the Beginners Guide to SEO, and actually doing it on a site, you'll learn most of what you need to know.

Just my 2 cents, I've never heard of SEOCertification.org but for all I know they might be reputable to someone...

I don't believe that it directly affects rankings, but it's certainly a reasonable method to red flag a domain for unnatural looking link profiles. It would also be natural to compare them to similar sites as you pointed out. News vs News, Gov vs Gov, Video site vs Video site, etc.

"From that, if you are a news site, my assumption would be to try to stay consistent with around 55-65% of your links coming from .com domains, around 9-15% from .org, etc etc ."

No way - I'd attempt to build all of the quality links I could - to hell with what's 'typical', doing what's typical will only get you typical results. You have to outperform to rank better, and trying to stay within a natural profile as determined by your competitors' efforts is not what makes you shine.

So, I definitely don't think going outside the typical profile would automatically have a negative affect, but I definitely think accumulating an extreme number of .info links looks spammy, and if I ran a search engine it would definitely be one method I would use for red flagging sites for manual reviews. Going outside the natural link profile might get you looked at by the webspam team, if they ever get around to it, but if you're playing by their link quality rules I don't think you need to worry. Eventually the TLD landscape is going to change from where it is now, and Google is fully aware of that and unlikely to punish you unless the links suck.

If you have evergreen content that's going to repurposed every year, it's definitely best to have a URL without the year, unless the year is relevant to the content*.

If it were my site, I would create a new page (not blog post), titled /top-valentine-gifts/ or whatever you choose, and create a link on the 2011 page to the new page - something like "Click here to see the best valentine gifts". Feel free to make the title & h1 for the page say 2012 and update that each year, just don't include it in the URL.

If you're concerned about blog subscribers seeing the content in the blog section or the RSS feed, then I would create a blog post along the lines of "Best Valentine's Day Gifts for 2012" that has some unique content that is valuable for this year, and link that to the primary page that has content relevant to all years.

*** If the year is relevant to the content:**
One example of where I would use the year in a page URL is if the content was going to be relevant only to that year, such as Best Movies of 2011 or 2012 Olympics. If there is value to keeping that content around for years with the original content on it, then that's a good argument for creating new pages for each event.

If you're really savvy, keep tabs on who links to your 2012 Olympics content, so that you can contact those people when 2014 rolls around...

Yes, absolutely. Anchor text is one indicator of topic of the page, but the link itself is valuable regardless of anchor text.

Most links in a "natural" link profile won't have ideal anchor text. Your brand name, the raw URL, and things like your personal name or "click here" will typically appear frequently, so those are good things to have in your link profile alongside your optimized anchor text links.

Ignore those errors. As long as the title tag isn't empty and aren't the same on multiple pages of the site, you're fine in regards to how short the tag is.

That said, I'm not sure what length triggers the error for SEOMoz.

The early links are important early on yes, though I want to clarify that the later links can't be junky ones. Also, you have to build links at a steady pace - don't build a ton right after you launch the site and then stop - that's bad.

Balance your link building efforts with your content efforts. I'd say for most sites, you probably shouldn't spend more time link building than you're spending on content creation.

What types of links you get will be somewhat dependent on what type of website you're promoting. A blog and a small business will have different strategies, for example, though there's definitely some overlap. If you feel like letting us know the type of site or the niche we can probably give a more targeted answer.

There's plenty of great link building posts on SEOMoz, but here are a few good places to start for someone who hasn't done much link building in the past:

• Growing Popularity & Links / What is Link Building? - SEOMoz Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 7
• Complete List of Link Building Strategies - Point Blank SEO

I would give you more resources, but completing all of the items mentioned in the second link should probably take you years, since many of them are never ending strategies.

Hey Ron - you'll want to set up a permanent (301) redirect from http://www.cedaradirondackchairs.net/index.html to http://www.cedaradirondackchairs.net (without a slash at the end). You appear to be on a Windows/IIS server which I'm not as familiar with, but if you have IIS access you should be able to set the redirect up with one of their modules or webconfig I think. This stackoverflow thread may have the answer to your question: http://serverfault.com/questions/116025/iis-301-redirect-from-index-html-to-for-seo-canonicalization

You'll also want to change the home button on each page of your site to point to http://www.cedaradirondackchairs.net instead of http://www.cedaradirondackchairs.net/index.html.

So, first off, I wouldn't rely an alexa.com data for any backlink data. For that information you'll want to use OpenSiteExplorer.com and Majestic. Take a look through the links on these two sources to get a better idea of which valuable pages are linking to the site, since the highest Page Authority and Domain Authority links listed are likely giving them the most value.

Judging Directories:

If the page looks sketchy, then in most cases, that's a good indicator to not build a link there. There are exceptions, but gut instinct should be combined with checking the OpenSiteExplorer metrics for that site and that page.

Here's a good guide to judging whether a directory site is worth getting a link from: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/using-blekkos-seo-data-to-evaluate-web-directories-14678

Content Link Building:

In terms of building links for high quality content, you'll get a lot more mileage out of focusing on those high value industry sites. Anything directory-like for content is usually junk. Try B2B focused sites like LinkedIn and BizSugar for getting the content out socially, and use email outreach to existing and potential industry partners to get them to share your content with their audience. Here are some good email outreach templates to get your started: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/linkbuilder-gmail-productivity-setup-and-outreach-examples

In short, your gut instinct that those paid directory sites will offer you little benefit is correct for the most part.

Our site has a number of, shall we say, unoptimized URLs. I would like to change the URLs to be more relevant; if a page is about red widgets, the URL should be www.domain.com/red-widgets.html, right?

That's the best way to target that keyword, yes.

I'm getting resistance on this, however, based on the belief that you lose something significant when you 301 an old URL to a new one.

An optimized URL with 301 links is going to be better than a non-optimized URL with the same number of direct links. We don't know the exact loss in link value for a 301 redirect, and we don't know if it changes over time or in different circumstances, so any answer to this questions will be somewhat subjective. That said, I think most other SEOs would opt for Good URL with 301 links, and then they'd proceed to go build new links and change old ones where possible.

A personal guess is that the majority (>90%) of the link value is maintained in 301 redirects, however I couldn't say how it changes over time.

Now, I know that if you have a long chain of redirects, the spiders will stop following at some point, and that is a huge problem. That wouldn't apply if there's only one step in the chain, however. I've also heard that you lose some link juice in a 301, but I'm unsure how serious that problem actually is. Is it small enough that we'd win out in the long run with better-optimized URLs?

Yes, you're better off with better-optimized URLs in most of the cases I've encountered.

The references listed by Branagan and Mike are good. I have personally seen Google Webmaster Tools list external links that were simply URL citations without a <a href="">tag involved, so Google absolutely looks at these and probably factors them in to the algorithm somehow. I'm fairly certain there is no answer to how much they count compared to a normal link and what value they pass.</a>

<a href="">It's pretty easy to reach out and ask the author to add a link. Just be really nice about it and there's a 50% chance you'll get it. If not, no worries, move on and acquire some new links. Unfortunately it comes with the territory. We had a client get their domain mentioned on PCWorld.com last month without a backlink. It sucks, but all you can do is ask nicely and hope they throw you a bone.</a>

Hi Joshua,

There's not a perfect cutoff mark as far as URL length. In general, I try to clearly identify the keyword targeted as the page URL, and stick to one subfolder, or occassionally 2 subfolders on a larger site. Beyond that, I try to avoid being redundant, which is the biggest issue with the example you presented - you should try not to duplicate long strings inside the URL - in this case using "german-shepherd-puppies" twice is what makes it too long and redundant.

Assuming you want to target the keyword "Long Haired German Shepherd Puppies", I would rather see a URL like one of these:

• http://www.farnorthkennel.com/puppies/long-haired-german-shepherd/
• http://www.farnorthkennel.com/long-haired-german-shepherd-puppies/

Then for the actual page for Lava or one of the other dogs you'd probably do one of these:

• http://www.farnorthkennel.com/puppies/long-haired-german-shepherd/lava/
• http://www.farnorthkennel.com/long-haired-german-shepherd-puppies/lava/

That is an effective URL that isn't too keyword stuffed and isn't redundant.

Taking a further look at the site, you could also consider options like these:

• http://www.farnorthkennel.com/girls/lava-long-haired-german-shepherd/
• http://www.farnorthkennel.com/puppies/female/lava-long-haired-german-shepherd/
• http://www.farnorthkennel.com/german-shepherd-puppies/long-haired/lava/

When you go to example.com, does it automatically refer the user to www.example.com?

If not, that would fix the issue without having to mess around with Bing Webmaster Tools. Go to http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection and scroll down to the Redirecting Canonical Hostnames section.

Hi Moshen,

My guess is that somewhere on the site, someone created a pop up window or another load effect and they used void(0) to create a link. The better practice is to create a normal link and control what happens when it's clicked by using Javascript. You could also add rel="nofollow" to those links, but it's less ideal than the first option.

These explain the issue as well for additional reference:

https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/3ShUdX7_GqQ

This answer (http://stackoverflow.com/posts/134957/revisions) to this question.

This: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCY5pbAuYpk

It's nothing more than a solid link. Don't hinge your strategy on getting in, few of us do nowadays in competitive niches. Apply to be an editor and move on with your life...

If you have $299 in your budget for a good link, then sure. It's not the worst way to spend $299 as far as SEO is concerned.

If you're pretty creative and on a shoestring, you can probably do something really awesome with $299, and then create original content out of it, and you'll have a better chance of getting a variety of links from different domains that don't cost you an extra dime and last for a longer time. But that's certainly more work.

1) After login to google analytics from admin section i have to transfer property to universal analytics ? right?

Click over to "Tracking Code" and see if it says analytics.js or ga.js. If it says ga.js, you'll need to do this manually and you haven't been auto-upgraded.

2) I have to wait either 24 hours or 48 hours before retagging or doing any changes in UA. So how can i know my property transferred sucessfully?

If I recall correctly, you can fire Classic GA code into an upgraded account, but you can't fire Universal code into an account that hasn't been upgraded. So - if you have to do the manual process - you want to let the process finish and roll out the new Universal code after it's done.

3) After property transferred to universal analytics, i have to configure the session timeout and campaign timeout periods via the Google Analytics Admin page. ( By default, sessions end after 30 minutes and campaigns end after 6 months ) is it okay if i don't change this settings?

You don't have to edit these unless you want a different default setting. Read more about these settings at https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2795871?hl=en.

4) As of now in my analytic i have configured google adwords, google webmaster and google merchant. In analytic i have also set custom alerts, goals, funnels, enchance link attribution, eCommerce etc but google analytics code i have already added in google tag manager, so i have to some manual changes for all such things? or all the things i.e goals, funnel, alerts etc will be transferred automatically at time of transferring the property?

Your connections to Adwords, Webmaster tools, and Merchant Center should be fine.

Your goals should be fine, so should your custom alerts.

For E-Commerce, you will need to check the "Enable Enhanced Ecommerce Features" checkbox under "More Settings" in your Tag Manager tag for GA. Enhanced Link Attribution no longer shows up on any of my GTM accounts so I think they either removed this or made it default. I can't say for sure, but a few posts in webmaster forums confirm this uncertainty.

You may still need to do some custom programming on your transaction confirmation pages to track e-commerce transactions properly. They won't record automatically unless you're using a shopping cart/platform that fires them for you.

If you have any event tracking code on your site (eg file downloads, or outbound clicks), you can upgrade it to the Universal event tracking syntax, or you can kill them off, but you have to rebuild the event tracking in GTM if you do that. Either way is fine, but pick one or the other.

5) In Google tag manager i have already configured following tags:

1. Name - Google adwords Conversion Tracking b) Type - Adwords Conversion Tracking c) Rules - order sucessful page
2. Name - Google Analytic Page view Tracking b) Type - Classic Google Analytics c) Rules - All pages
3. Name - Google Analytic Conversion Tracking b) Type - Classic Google Analytics c) Rules - order sucessful page
4. Name - Twitter Conversion Tracking b) Type - Custom HTML tag c) Rules - order sucessful page

So at time of transferring property all this will be transferred automatically?

#1 and #4 should work fine if you have them set up correctly in GTM.

For both GA tags, you'll need to switch them to Universal manually, instead of Classic GA.

As mentioned above, for the GA conversion tracking tag, you might have to take care of some coding on the website to push sales data into the data layer for GTM, which can then be used to fire off the GA transaction tracking.

6) Also at thank you page of my website I have scripts for goal setting, Affiliator, so there is no relation of this with migration right?

Unfortunately I can't answer this one - leaving it for someone else.

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Read through these three guides a few times before you do the process to make sure you have a full grasp on the conversion process - then get started:

• http://conversionxl.com/google-tag-manager/
• https://blog.kissmetrics.com/universal-analytics/
• https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/upgrade/

Correct, those social metrics are getting pulled directly from the API for each social service, so unless SEOMoz has applied a slight time delay or cache, the only delay is the one from Facebook, Twitter, or Google. To my knowledge, that's pretty close to immediate.

If you want to compare social shares month-over-month, just check it 30 days later and it'll be correct.

The other OSE data can be tracked back to the last index update on the update calendar. The last index update was from May 1, but it represents crawl data from roughly Jan to mid-March IIRC. The update next week should be much more "fresh."

40 x 40 =  1600

Yikes!

Do you really have 40 products, or can any of those products be combined in a reasonable way? For example, after looking at your site, can some of the "hen parties" go on one page titled "Cambridge type hen parties" where type is changed out with a different phrase? Then that page can have a few paragraphs of content and unique photos, and then link to the specific "salsa hen party" but non-city-specific page? This would be a lot easier to manage, and it's hard for me to imagine that "Cambridge salsa hen parties" gets a ton of traffic that you couldn't capture with a more generic page.

If you were to have just a few pages per city at most it would be reasonable to rank them for those long tail keywords such as "cambridge hen parties" using some good anchor text links in addition to good unique content on each page.

On the topic of unique content for localized pages:

There was a good post that went up today that addresses this topic:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understand-and-rock-the-google-venice-update

I'm going to quote directly from the article because he gives a few good ways to add more content to these localized pages:

**Unique Localized Page Content: **This is the true issue with localization. Most sites have cookie cutter content that might rank for locations, but it also might lead to a nice Panda slap for duplicate content. I would not build content and just replace the location information. If you are still doing this you are playing on dangerous grounds. Scaling localized page content is not easy, not very fun, and definitely not sexy. So, the companies that can make it easy, fun, and sexy are going to be the clear Venice winners.

Here are some ideas:

1. Location based reviews – Instead of one testimonial site wide add a testimonial in every market you can. It helps to sell the “locationalism” to the searcher and it’s content that doesn’t have to be written by you… just gathered.

2. Gather “Why I love my city” user generated content – Ask customers to write up information about their local city and why they like it. It’s unique and fun to read.

3. Write out directions to each location – Have you ever heard people tell directions the same way? No chance of duplicate content with directions…ever.

I would also add that you should consider the following on each city page:

• Information about the facilities in each city (this is assuming you have physical locations)
• Video from the facilities or video testimonials from customers in that city is excellent content

NTP stands for New Tab Page - when you click the APPS button that is mandatory in your bookmarks tab, and then click webstore, it creates this URL: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/apps?utm_source=chrome-ntp-icon. That Source then carries through into your analytics reporting.

App Launcher and App Launcher Search are both related to Chromebooks I believe: https://www.google.com/chrome/webstore/apps-launcher.html

The Info Dialogue is new to me but probably related to a screen that generates inside of the App Launcher.

Hope that helps!

Hey there. To answer your first 2 questions:

Do "the PA & DA rating(s) in the results page for a domain search takes into account any penalty signals the site may be showing"?

Kind of... Page Authority (and DA) are calculated using a number of factors, one of which is MozTrust. MozTrust can be used as a rough indicator of the trustworthiness of a site (as measured by the "distance" in links from trustworthy websites like universities and government websites). I wouldn't describe this as a "penalty signal" however.

"whether there is a 'real' way to identify how much value links from the source will give you (if for example, there's already x10 other links away from that page or x100 links away from that domain)"

I personally don't find much value in calculating this. I don't care too much if there's 20 links on a page or 500. If it's a high quality site that's relevent to my website, and there aren't links to spammy sites on the page, I still want that link. Furthermore, there is value from the link that goes beyond raw Pagerank. You're still increasing your total Linking Root Domains (a very important link building factor) and other misc metrics that Google may take into account separately from Pagerank passed by the link.

"Basically - what else needs to be taken into account when using this app to identify link sources, etc."

Assuming you're currently looking through your competitors' backlink profiles in OSE and trying to replicate those links, the only links I would skip are links that appear to be from spammy websites. This is a subjective measure based upon a number of visual indicators, and a handful of objective indicators (like whether that site is indexed in Google for example). Here's a decent post that goes over some of the red flags you should look for when deciding whether or not you want a link from a site: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-evaluate-guest-post-opportunities

The video links that Branagan left are also good resources to learn more about OSE's link metrics.

They'll definitely help, both for Google+ Local listings, as well as localized organic listings (without a map in the SERP).

Do you have physical locations in those cities? Or are you trying to rank pages for those cities without having a physical presence? If you're trying to rank without the physical address, you'll have to compete without many of these local directories. Not impossible, but easier if you have the address to work with.

Hi Jill,

Your images on those pages are all thumbnail JPG files that are about 2kb. That's not a big deal - those shouldn't need to go on a separate page - I personally would put all of them back on a single page and focus on other site speed improvements.

A bigger deal is the large number of CSS and JS files that have to be loaded. Take a look at the page load times reported by a tool like Pingdom or Google's Site Speed tool. Most of the site load time is spent (A) contacting the server and (B) loading all of those CSS/JS files.

A couple tasks I'd work on to improve site speed:

• Read this excellent guide to how Portent lowered the load times on their Wordpress site. You should be completing many of these same tasks, although some are fairly technical.
• Use a caching plugin (w3 total cache or wordpress super cache). This plugin can always minify and combine all css files and all js files into 2 total files, which should help greatly.
• For better or worse, I've found that upgrading to a VPS instead of a shared host is the fastest way to speed up a lagging Wordpress site, especially one with a ton of plugins. This should be done after you set up caching and other tasks, however.
• Deactivate any plugins you're not using.

Hope that helps, let me know if you have any questions.

There's a couple of approaches, but I think the content grouping feature is your best bet. Here's the official overview page: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2853423?hl=en

Essentially, you'll be firing code on that page template that tells GA to add the page to a specific content grouping OR you can tell GA to dynamically assign content grouping based upon a full or partial URL, or page title. In this scenario, I think the first option is more likely. The full instructions are here: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2853546?hl=en. Essentially, on blog pages, you'd want to fire your normal GA script, with the bold line below added:

This is going to be easier with Google Tag Manager if you're able to do that, but if not, hard-coding into the site will work as well - you'll probably have to create a header-blog.php file in your theme and use that header in your blog instead of your normal one. To my knowledge, Yoast GA doesn't support this yet, but there is a ticket for it at https://github.com/Yoast/google-analytics-for-wordpress/issues/26.

Content groupings aren't historical, so you'll also want to set up a "Blog" segment that includes any of your old parameters (eg 2015 in the URL), as well as the new parameters (content grouping = blog). This should make historical analysis easier.

I don't want to drone on for 10 more paragraphs, so check out those resources and let me know if you have more questions on implementation.

Hey Sri,

Multiple Images on the Same Page:

In a single blog post that has many images, ideally you will want different alt text for each image.

For example, a page of content talking about chocolate donuts might have three images:

• chocolate-donuts.jpg (appropriate alt text would be "chocolate donuts")
• chocolate-donuts-and-coffee-mug.jpg (appropriate alt text could be "chocolate donuts next to a coffee mug" or could also be "chocolate donuts and coffee")
• chocolate-donut-shop-los-angeles.jpg (appropriate alt text would be "Jimmy's donut shop located in Los Angeles")

Hashtags:

Regarding the use of hashtags, I don't see a point to doing this. While a quick test of "donuts" versus "#donuts" in Google image search is showing me different results, I don't think there's enough keyword volume for the hashtag version of any word to both doing this.

That said, you can write whatever you want inside the alt tag, it just won't provide much benefit in my opinion. All of the following are technically fine, however #1 is the only one I would use:

For the same reasons, I don't see a point in using a hashtag in the <title> <em>unless</em> you're trying to target search queries for that exact hashtag.</p> <p> </p> <p>Hope that answered your questions but please let me know if I can clarify anything.</p></title>

The best approach to DMOZ (to keep your sanity) is to treat it the same way you would any other link that a competitor has: it's trustworthy and valuable, but not a requirement. If you can get a link from a page with similar PA & DA, I would consider that a rough equivalent for the DMOZ link. Links from DMOZ supposedly do not get a special "bump", it just happens to be a trustworthy and quality link.

Here's a couple of Matt Cutts videos that talk about DMOZ - infer what you will from them:

• Why is Google Still Taking Notice of DMOZ? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rej2TkVEehg
• What Role Does DMOZ Play In Rankings? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCY5pbAuYpk

OK, got your PM. So the short and sweet version is you need more quality links.

OSE shows 23 linking root domains to your entire domain, which is on par with your current PA/DA (doesn't address the drop of course).

Also, for your homepage I see 456 links from 5 domains. Don't focus on total links, it's a deceptive metric. Focus on Linking Root Domains instead of total links - aside from PA & DA, that is the only other monthly metric I track from OSE.

Go to Google Webmaster Tools into the link section, it says 1000 links, but in the top left section titled "Who Links the Most" click "more" and at the top it will say "Top XXXX domains that link to you". What is that number? I'd guess it's under 100? If so, that's confirming what I said above about getting more quality links and focusing on linking root domains.

When I search google for "yoursitename.co.uk" the mentions I find aren't much better, which tells me there's lots of low quality links (not necessarily created by you) and not enough quality ones to balance it out. That said, I do a site:yourdomain.co.uk search and see over 25k URLs indexed, so Google hasn't abolished you from the SERPs...

I'd recommend reading the following two posts. The first will take you 20 minutes to digest at most. The second link should take you a few years to finish doing, and when you're done you'll be far beyond your competitors.

• Growing Popularity & Links / What is Link Building? - SEOMoz Beginner's Guide to SEO, Chapter 7
• Complete List of Link Building Strategies - Point Blank SEO

Focus on delivering quality to your audience and interacting with other forums and sites as often as possible to draw people in, and you'll stick out from the competition.

Hi Jatin,

If you have any kind of unique content on a tag or category page, then it's reasonable to index it. For example, a category page with 1-2 paragraphs of intro text explaining what types of content are found in that category. In this case, any posts or post teasers showing up on that category/tag page would not be unique content.

If there is no unique content on that page, then I'd suggest noindex for category and tag pages.

Hi Rogerio,

mememax is correct in that the content won't be counted the way you're hoping. You can use an iframe embed code with a link outside of it, however:

<iframe></iframe>

Built by Brand Name.

This will not count the links inside of the iframe, however, but it's another option if you're trying to embed dynamic content of some kind.

Pages with only 1 paragraph of unique content probably won't be worth much to anyone: Google or users. So, in my opinion, the number of links in an article that short isn't worth bothering with.

Are you paying for these articles? If so, instead of paying for 5 short articles, pay for one longer article from a better writer, and distribute that as a guest post on a real blog, instead of submitting to an article site.

You should be monitoring them periodically. A quick scan monthly or quarterly depending on how large your site is should be sufficient. I've read reports within the last year that say Bing tends to be picky about sites with 404s in their sitemaps and will begin to distrust them if they get too messy.  I am assuming that Google doesn't like it much, either.

It's very easy to check a large number of links easily, luckily: download the Check My Links Chrome Add-on here:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ojkcdipcgfaekbeaelaapakgnjflfglf

Click that while looking at your sitemap, and it will test all of the URLs and make any errors stick out in red. Then fix them.

On the other hand, GWT will report them within a few days of finding them. If you're already in your GWT on a frequent basis, make that one more task to check on.

You should be fixing all 404s with 301 directs. Read "How to Fix Crawl Errors in GWT" for any tricky ones that you can't figure out.

So, here's a few ideas, focused on press opportunities specifically, but with some other link ideas tossed in as well.

1 - HARO

We've had a lot of success with HARO for clients. They won't have many opportunities specifically for window improvements, so you'll have to think broader - general construction, green/energy improvements, and general business ownership queries are all going to be relevant, especially if the business owner is fairly personable and willing to get involved. For our clients, we monitor the requests and forward the ones we feel are a good fit. If the client is willing to read 3 emails a day, they'll see a number of responses on their own that might be good as well.

2 - Case Studies

This is a longer term project. Have the contractor ask their clients for energy bills a year before and the year after a project. You might have to incentivize this somehow to get participation.  It's tricky to draw too many conclusions, but year-over-year energy savings on average across a wide range of clients would make a good study. There's a number of variables that might be hard to account for - weather and personal energy use being the primary ones - so there might be some kinks to work out in this concept, but I think those could be mitigated somehow.

Anyways, in regards to PR, a study like this could produce at least a handful of links, particularly from energy conservation and window-industry publications. Might not be a ton of results, but enough relevant industry publications could be a major boost for a contractor in a boring niche.

3 - Events

I've seen some other "boring" companies that put on local events with a charitable focus and managed to get a decent handful of links, including a few news organizations. At the risk of tooting my own horn, there's quite a few opportunities out there to build links with local events, and it's a very natural topic to get covered by local press if the event is interesting enough.

4 - Image Marketing with Conservatories, Window Boxes, etc.

While I'm sure many of their projects are pretty straightforward, I'm sure they also have some more elaborate designs and projects. Conservatories and bey windows are great examples of really attractive projects that people like to look at. Even if they're not the business's primary focus, you've got plenty of opportunities for visual marketing on social networks like Houzz, Pinterest, Facebook, and Flickr. It's a long shot that these will generate press, but they can certainly generate links and traffic, especially if you've got a really nice gallery/portfolio on the client's website.

Hope that gets you started!

It's real, has been for longer than many people realize IMO.

If it's done sloppily then it can be easy for the victim to demonstrate to Google that they weren't responsible. Sadly, it's easy for the perpetrator to make it look like it was done by the site owner.

I sleep knowing that if my domain doesn't have a history of sloppy spam and hard-core anchor text optimization, it's easy for me to point to the start date of any negative SEO campaign as post-Penguin. That's pretty good evidence that you didn't just suddenly start building shady links to your domain.

If you already were building shady links and someone else just sent more in your direction, there's not much to say other than that sucks, and you're going to have to spend a hell of a lot of time contacting webmasters to remove links and documenting your process.