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Hi David,
In looking at your source, it looks like your meta description is, "Buy Trust Deeds from Trimark Funding Inc. - Buy Trust Deeds for High 9% Annual Returns - Consistent Monthly Income."
The keyword is in the meta keywords tag, but not in the meta description tag.
Hope this helps.
Mike
Hi Richard,
As long as your 301s are set up correctly, Google should eventually drop the old URL from the SERPs.
Make sure that you do not have a temporary redirect, 302, set up, which would prolong things.
If you want to try and speed things up, you could resubmit your sitemap using Goolge Webmaster Tools.
Hope this helps.
Mike
At this point, no - there are not positive or negative effects you'd need to worry about.
If you are wanting to switch from one to the other, you will want to make sure you you have the proper redirects/canonical tags in place.
One way to choose which option is best for your situation would be to check your analytics and see which site is getting more traffic (if both the http and https versions of your site are accessible).
Matt Cutts did make a comment earlier this year that he personally would want to give a boost to secure sites - but that is not currently in place.
Depending on your audience https may be more appropriate. For instance, if you Google "banking" - you can see both http and https websites ranking - savvy users will probably notice the secure sites and visit those. I guess it all depends on your industry and your audience though.
Hope this helps.
Mike
Hi Ruben,
I believe what Matt Cutts was getting at is that guest blogging, for the sole purpose of SEO is going to get you penalized.
If you are guest blogging to drive awareness of your brand, provide thought leadership, etc. is still something that is accepted an encouraged.
SearchEngineWatch.com has a great article regarding Matt Cutts' comments on guest blogs, as well as a quote from Ryan Jones, "Guest blogging can still work. You wouldn't turn down a column on CNN or an editorial in the Huffington Post if they said you wouldn't have a dofollow link would you?"
Hope this helps.
Mike
Hi Tim,
As of right now, you are correct in what you are suggesting. Google will not give rank to your redirect - meaning grape.popsicles is not going to appear in the SERPs.
This is a great strategy for other marketing purposes though (flyers, campaigns, etc.)... utilizing them as redirects. If you did get a bunch of sites linking to "grape.popsicles" though, that link juice would pass through a 301 to the final page.
Another option would be to create micro sites for each of the gTLDs that would then link back to your main www.company.com site. You would have to do this in a strategic way though... not just linking all of your micro sites to attempt and pass link juice around. For instance, your company site could be more targeted for parents and your micros be more targeted for kids with fun summer activities to do while enjoying your popsicles.
Still a good buy either way you decide to take it.
Hope this helps.
Mike
You can also use Google Alerts to both monitor your competitors website changes, as well as general mentions of them on them web.
Mike
Hi Joel,
Sounds like you have everything setup correctly so far with the canonical and GWT.
Next step would be to do a 301 redirect from the https version to the http version. After that and your changes above, it should get remove from Google's index.
Note: You may also want to run a scan with a program like Screaming Frog to ensure that you are not accidentally linking to the https version somewhere on your site or in your sitemap.
Hope this helps.
Mike
If you cannot create and update an XML sitemap for your site, you should consider creating an HTML sitemap. While you cannot submit an HTML sitemap to search engines, spiders can crawl your HTML sitemap and crawl pages deeper into your site.
Matt Cutts says that if you can only do 1 type of sitemap, do an HTML one, because it helps both users and bots.
Hope this helps.
Mike
Another option - you could install the free version of ClickTale and get some form analytics information or purchase it to get full details.
Or you could install the code just on a specific form page and use the visitor recording functionality, to see recordings of exactly how users are interacting with your forms, how much information they are filling out, etc.
Mike
Whoa! Those are big PDFs and a lot of products.
If that is the case then I think the only way you could get people to link to your actual webpages vs the PDFs would be to offer them 1) a summary of the PDF 2) frequently asked questions about the product 3) how-tos not covered in the PDFs or something.
As far as the canonical idea, that is not really what that tag is used for according to Google -
"Must the content on a set of pages be similar to the content on the canonical version?
Yes. The rel="canonical" attribute should be used only to specify the preferred version of many pages with identical content (although minor differences, such as sort order, are okay).
For instance, if a site has a set of pages for the same model of dance shoe, each varying only by the color of the shoe pictured, it may make sense to set the page highlighting the most popular color as the canonical version so that Google may be more likely to show that page in search results. However, rel="canonical" would not be appropriate if that same site simply wanted a gel insole page to rank higher than the shoe page."
Mike
Hi and welcome!
I'd check out these two links. They have a ton of how-tos and videos and FAQs... I reference these ALL THE TIME!
Hope this helps.
Mike
Hi Jess,
Using Screaming Frog, it looks like your /blog page actually has 131 links. If you add up your footer (30), plus links to your homepage (6), plus pagination (9), plus Link Building and Content article (5), and your Alex Bogusky Video article (6) - you already have 50+ and that is not including top and side navigation, as well as the rest of the articles on your page.
Matt Cutts sums things up really well in this article saying:
"...Google will index more than 100K of a page, but there’s still a good reason to recommend keeping to under a hundred links or so: the user experience. If you’re showing well over 100 links per page, you could be overwhelming your users and giving them a bad experience. A page might look good to you until you put on your “user hat” and see what it looks like to a new visitor.
But in some cases, it might make sense to have more than a hundred links. Does Google automatically consider a page spam if your page has over 100 links? No, not at all. The “100 links” recommendation is in the “Design and content” guidelines section, and it’s the Quality guidelines that contain the things that we consider webspam (stuff like hidden text, doorway pages, installing malware, etc.). Can pages with over 100 links be spammy? Sure, especially if those links are hidden or keyword-stuffed. But pages with lots of links are not automatically considered spammy by Google.
So how might Google treat pages with well over a hundred links? If you end up with hundreds of links on a page, Google might choose not to follow or to index all those links. At any rate, you’re dividing the PageRank of that page between hundreds of links, so each link is only going to pass along a minuscule amount of PageRank anyway. Users often dislike link-heavy pages too, so before you go overboard putting a ton of links on a page, ask yourself what the purpose of the page is and whether it works well for the user experience."
Hope this helps.
Mike
Hi Christina,
For the location that you actually have an office, I would suggest having a single page devoted to that particular location (landing page as Bereijk suggests). Then I would use GetListed.org and list that physical location's information in all of those business directories.
I would then create landing pages for the other locations using a similar structure seen in Perfecting Keyword Targeting & On-Page Optimization.
That said, if the particular search terms you are going after include local results, only queries regarding your physical location will appear in the local results. So for instance is someone searches "SEO" from say Essex and your physical address is in Essex, and if Google applies the local SERP, your address and site information may appear; however, for the location landing pages you create, someone would have to do a search for "SEO London" to find your SEO London page, because it does not have a physical address located in London... does that make sense?
(the above is just from my personal experience. we did this for a ton of different locations at a previous job I held. in my opinion it was a waste of time, because my particular industry [at the time] would not have searched for "ERP software los angeles" - because software is not part of the localized SERP [at least at the time] so no one was even making it to those pages)
Hope this helps (and sorry for rambling),
Mike
If you go to your Campaign and under the Rankings tab you can export your full rankings report to CSV. Once you have that report, you can quickly copy and paste the keywords from that campaign across your other campaigns.
Hope this helps.
Mike
Hi Oliver,
In the research I have done on this subject, between 2005 and 2009 the NoFollow directive was used to preserve link juice and keep it from passing through to the particular link. This would allow you to reallocate that link juice to other, more important links on your page. It was mainly developed to discourage comment posters from spamming sites with misc. links; however, web masters soon figured that you could "link sculpt" your site... more or less hoarding your link juice and only pushing it through to your really important pages... making them rank higher.
In 2009 things changes. Matt Cutts commented on the subject saying, "So what happens when you have a page with “ten PageRank points” and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are nofollowed? Let’s leave aside the decay factor to focus on the core part of the question. Originally, the five links without nofollow would have flowed two points of PageRank each (in essence, the nofollowed links didn’t count toward the denominator when dividing PageRank by the outdegree of the page). More than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each." - more or less stating that link juice is discarded and not reallocated.
Matt Cutts also says, "Nofollow links definitely don’t pass PageRank." - So while the PageRank flows through the link, it is discarded, and is not passed to the linked to page.
"The essential thing you need to know is that nofollow links don’t help sites rank higher in Google’s search results." - Matt Cutts
I don't know if the subject of the article you were reading was about sculpting your site, but depending on who you talk to, there are many other tactics that can give you a higher ROI.
I hope this helps answer your question.
Mike
Personally, I would try and mix it up. From a user standpoint, if I am on your Google+ page and am wicked impressed, then decide to visit your website and am greeted with the EXACT SAME TEXT... boring. It would seem to me as a user that you just slapped up the Google+ site just to have it.
That said, Matt Cutts and SearchEngineLand.com say, "...duplicate content issues are rarely a penalty. It is more about Google knowing which page they should rank and which page they should not. Google doesn’t want to show the same content to searchers for the same query; they do like to diversify the results to their searchers."
So will you get into trouble - No.
Will Google rank your homepage higher than your Google+ page - It should.
Will your users have a fantastic experience - Probably not.
Hope this helps.
Mike
Hi Jesse,
It all depends 
Depending on the number of pages, the number of layouts, whether they need to write copy, perform usability testing, etc. And depends on the type of platform they are developing on OR if you are going to get a new platform.
The price changes with the number of iterations needed to layouts/design and the time frame you are looking at.
It also depends on whether you have a freelancer or agency do it. Without knowing the complete scope, I would guess somewhere between $50k-$250k if it is a pretty large site. If it is only like 50 pages and you only did a few templates, you could maybe get away with spending $10k-$30... depending on the people you work with.
First, I would look at design firms available in your area. Check out the websites they have developed and contact someone at the company they developed for and ask them about their experience. Do this for a handful of firms. Then contact each firm and ask them for a quote. After you have quotes from firms, go out and ask some freelancers... look at their work... ask for a quote. You will probably have to have some sit down, in person interviews with these people to make sure that they really get what you are asking for.
I know that doesn't completely answer your question, but hopefully it gives you a few things to think about.
Mike
Hi David,
It sounds like you did everything right. As long as you cannot see the dev site in the live SERPs, you should be safe.
I have seen it take MONTHS for WMT to update any information regarding crawl stats, resolved errors, etc.
Just keep a close eye on things, but you should be safe if you can't find it by doing a Google search.
Hope this helps,
Mike
PS you may want to check Bing as well.
When you are in your campaign settings, under Manage Keywords, place a check in the box(es) adjacent to the keyword(s) you want to associate a label. Then, use the Add/Clear Labels dropdown to select a current label or create a new one. Finally, click Add Labels to add the selected labels to the selected keywords.
Hope this helps.
Mike
Hi David,
This typically happens when your PDFs are full of content people want. I have seen this personally with a previous company I worked with and their spec sheets (it was for a software copy). This is good and bad - good people find your content awesome and are linking to it - bad that your PDFs are ranking vs your pages.
Solution - make your pages better. You could potentially take the content from your PDFs and make a page - this in theory should still compel people to link to you. If your PDFs are massive in size, you could consider condense the contents into a webpage that contains FAQs, a summary of the information, etc.
This isn't a bad problem to have. If you can't beat them, join them - optimize your PDFs for search.
Hope this helps.
Mike