I just did a quick analysis and it looks like your domain strength is low (DA 17) and you are trying to rank for moderately competitive keywords 30-40%

The only way you can rank for the keywords mentioned with that low of a domain strength is by AWESOME on-page-optimizations. Use the Term Target Tool tool to help with the process. Shoot for an "A" on each page and definitely have an exact match in your title tag. Currently your home page only has a grade of "C" for the term "federal auto loan" so there is room for improvement.

Keep focusing with your on-page, you have a sharp looking site so once you get traffic there you should be all set!

Good luck - Kyle

Are these pages currently indexed in Google yet? Try doing a site search on the specific URL (site:www.domain.com/page). If the URL shows up, then you don't have an indexation issue.

The next step is checking your keyword targeting. So a few questions:

• What keywords where you hoping to rank for?
• What is the average traffic for these, and the difficulty?
• How often and where do these keywords show up on your page?

Let me know the outcome of the site search and the answers to the questions above and then we can go from there!

• Kyle

GWT was the first placed i checked unfortunately you can only remove directories or pages. I need entire subdomained sites to be removed (in fact they shouldn't of been indexed in the first place).

We use subdomains for our development testing environment when creating client sites and once the site is approved we push it live replacing the old site. Somehow these testing sites are getting indexed and it may pose a threat to duplicate content on different domains. So i am trying to find a solution to get the subdomains (100's of them) unindexed.

I understand a 301 redirect is best but that isn't really applicable since these test sites still need to be reached by clients.

Thanks for the quick reply, i will have to try that. Essentially i am trying to get the site un-indexed but i wasn't sure if a 503 would do the trick.

If i turn an application off displaying a 503 error will that get my site unindexed from search engines?

Thank you again for your help, i did some more research and digging and found this: https://bitly.com/pages/help#i_0_1

Thank you for the response Ryan. So you don't see any issue (specifically with link juice) with using these shortener services to make longer URLs more manageable in off site press releases and articles?

Sorry, i accidentally posted this question three times somehow? As i mentioned on the other response, I use Google UTM link tracking to measure how successful articles and press releases are on other websites (linking back to my pages). Sometime these query based URLs get quite long and my client suggested trying bit.ly.

So i was trying to see if anyone had experience with using bit.ly and if they have seen the links pass link juice.

Thank you for your response. I don't plan on using this for twitter. To track how successful certain articles & press releases are I use Google's UTM link tracking. At times these URLs get quite long and my client asked about using Bit.ly URL shortener. I just wasn't sure if they acted as 301's or not.

Have you done this in the past and found that you still got credit for the links? or have you only used it with social media that are normally no follow's anyway?

Do URL shortener services like bit.ly act as 301 redirects? I was thinking about utilizing one for longer query based URLs and didn't want to risk losing link juice. Thanks for the insight!

Regards - Kyle

Are URL shorteners like Bit.ly considered 301 redirects? I was thinking about using them for some longer URL's in press releases but i didn't want to loose any link juice through the service.

Thanks for the info! - Kyle

There are many possible reasons. Try resubmitting a new xml sitemap to Google Webmaster tools and that should speed up the process.

The short answer for your question, yes it normally takes a week to two weeks to get sites fully re-indexed in Google. Of course there are special occasions when it turns around faster, but generally speaking 1-2 weeks. The easiest way to check if they have been reindexed, is to search for branded keywords and see your new titles/meta descriptions are in the SERPs or if it is still the older ones.

As for optimizing your pages, shoot for an A in the term target tool (http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/on-page-keyword-optimization/new).

Part One:

If the only reason you would spend $1000 on a domain is because of its age then i think it is a bad idea. Focus on a domain name that makes sense for the company and its mission, don't make ALL your decisions in the name of SEO. If it happens to have a targeted keyword in the domain or some old backlinks, then bonus.

Part Two:

Do you have to have a .com to rank well, of course not. However a few things to think about if you go with what you are thinking in part two...

1. Is this client a direct competitor of the person who owns the .com? 
   If so, procede with caution, especially if it is a copyrighted or trade-marked term.
2. Is the .com targeting the same keywords as you? 
   If so, then you may be hurting yourself by confusing customers and end users.

Personally, without knowing any other details on the project, i would keep looking. Find a .com domain if that is what you truly want. Keep wordsmithing different variations and utilize Google's keyword tool to give suggestions. You'll find a winner eventually.

Good luck - Kyle

Welcome!

The best area to look at as a beginner/intermediate is the seo guide: http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo

Do you have any specific aspects you are looking for strategy in: on page, link building, etc?

I agree social media is a most... depending on the niche. My normal suggestion for people trying to ease into social media is to use social bookmarking (add this, share this, etc). With social bookmarking you can see what channels your users prefer and based on your analytics you can make educated steps with your social media plan.

This question seems to be popping up a lot today on the forums lol.

Diane, i fully agree with Simon on this one. Focus on your user first and stick to one domain if possible.

This happened to me in the past. My client's site had a custom 404 that redirect all missing pages to the homepage. When roger bot (seomoz crawler) searched for the robots.txt page (that was non-existent) it continually got redirect to the homepage.

So on that note, check if you have a robots.txt file. If not, add one and see if it solves the problem.

Your ranking and site crawl reports update weekly like Opt mentioned. If you want to manually check your on page or ranks you can use some of the single serve tools on the research tools page (rank tracker, term target, site crawl etc).

Sorry i may have worded that oddly in my reply. They would certainly count as a direct match if they are in subdomains. What i was trying to stress is that Google doesn't value direct match domains as much as they use too. However, Bing and Yahoo still do.

So my suggestion was to direct your focus to other important aspects of SEO. Go with a keyword match in your URL off your base domain, focus on those back links with great anchor text, and spend plenty of time on your on-page aspects.

With all of that you will out rank any exact match domain.

For every 301 redirect you do, you lose a little link juice.

Also, from my experiences with direct match domains... in google it barely helps. However yahoo and bing still place a lot of value in it. I would focus on building relevant links and on page optimizations for your site rather than trying to get keyword matches in your domain.

I would go after backlinks with the anchor text of "car rentals" back to www.rentals.co.uk/car-rentals. It will increase your domain authority and page authority without the risk of splitting your links across domains.

In my experiences with on page optimizations never choose more than 1-2 keywords to target on a page. You should have one short tail and one long tail keyword at most. For instance, your homepage should be targeted to "Boston Cosmetic Dentist," after that you shouldn't have it focused on any other pages for risk of keyword cannibalization. Then for your teeth whitening page. Have your short tail keyword be "Teeth Whitening" and your long tail be "Boston Teeth Whitening."

It is important to cater your website to the user not the search engine. Simply adding dentist three times in your title and h1 tag will do no more for you thank listing it once in your title and h1.

Good luck!

Cufon is a font sifr used to emulate non-web safe fonts on the web. All of these classes and span wrapped around the H1 are being added on page load. If you actually review the source code you can see that is not what the search engines would see when crawling the page.

In regards to stuffing content into the H1, i wouldn't stress over it to much. As long as your targeted keywords show up in the title/meta and a few times on the page you will be all set. Cater your site to the user not the search engines.

Good luck!

What technology is being used for your navigation? If you are using javascript for dropdowns or links that will definitely effect your link juice flowing to internal pages.

In my experiences there is no direct correlation with ppc and organic. However, i have noticed one indirect benefits of pay-per-click overall. When running a ppc campaign through Google they re-scan your site very often to create your keyword's quality score. Due to this increase in crawling i have found that new content gets indexed faster.

Once again, this is an indirect benefit. In no way does a quick indexation mean a higher rank. it just simply means you turn around on releasing content can be faster.

I definitely agree going down to one domain is a good plan and janmi is correct. You will want to make sure you redirect your specific language site to the relevant directory. In regards to increasing your rankings, focus on your on-page optimizations for each language. I am currently going through this myself and got some great feedback a couple weeks ago:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/international-seo-3

In regards to tracking your success, use your analytics to track the increase of traffic per language with an advanced segment of non-paid search.

Good luck!

I'm sure we have all read about the latest round of Google's algorithm changes also known as the "Panda 2.5" updates. This latest update seems to have hit some pretty large press release sites including PR Newswire and Businesswire (both of these have a great page rank and domain authority making them a great tool for SEO's in regards to inbounds links).

Ultimately this update has directly affected their sites traffic, keyword rankings, and the number of indexed pages in Google. But what will this do to our smaller sites that benefit from these great links? Will these panda updates continue to target these content farms and lower their domain authority? Will that extrapolate out and effect the domain authority of our sites?

What are your thoughts for those of us that utilize these services, should we re-evaluate our process?

I look forward to a great discussion.

Regards - Kyle

Joshua - thank you for the reply, it is always helpful for me to compare stats with others in the industry.

I also found it odd that the direct wasn't higher, however they domain has a great keyword in it so they benefit quite a bit from that. Other than that they have a pretty low domain authority (less than 20).

Hey Mozzers - i was hoping to have a discussion with you guys on conversion rates and would love any feedback on comparative metrics. I plan on keeping my client anonymous and feel free to do the same if you would like.

Lets start with some background. This client is an online retailer selling golf training ads, the products range from $20-40, he is based out of the US and this site is targeting consumers (B2C).

So far i have assisted him with some site analysis and setting up some pay-per-click campaigns. I feel like his site is doing pretty well conversion-wise but i have little experience with conversion metrics with ecommerce (mostly just lead generation, etc).

Here is a quick break down on channel conversion rates:

PPC: 0.8% - 1.7%
Organic: 6.8% - 15% 
Direct: 6.2% - 13%

His overall site conversion rate is between 2-3%

So my question is to you guys. Is this average, above, or below in your past experiences? Based on my research a site conversion rate of 2-3 is pretty good for ecommerce, however i felt like my PPC conversion rate is kind of low.

Thanks for the insight - Kyle

We are fortunate enough to have a native speaker translating for us. Thank you for all your help!

Thank you for the awesome and detailed reply. Spoke to the client, they where not looking to target the country specifically. This was just a translation since a large portion of there client base is out of europe (germany specifically).

So the sell barcode scanners for production lines. For their english version of the site we target the different types (camera barcode, laser barcode, etc). So we would optimize the german pages for the same keyword just in the different language?

Thank you for all the help!

My client just launched a german version of their site:

English Version:
www.domain.com/en/....

Germain Version:
www.domain.com/de/....

Is there a best practice to get the new section of the site indexed in www.google.de? Are you able to submit a different sitemap to each Google domain? How do you go about doing keyword research, its got to be different search trends than google.com, right?

A am complete beginner when it comes to international SEO so any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Regards - Kyle

That was going to be my assumption but i wasn't 100% sure how they worked with sub domains. Are you able to supply a little more information on implementation? It is extremely important that it only blocks: sub.domain.com and not domain.com

This is a pretty quick and simple (i'm hoping) question. What is the best way to completely block a sub domain from getting indexed from all search engines?

One item i cannot use is the meta "no follow" tag.

Thanks! - Kyle

Agreed, i just found it odd that they currently rank for "print and apply" but not for "print-and-apply" it leads me to believe that if we did target one way or another it could influence rankings. I would be intrigued if anyone else has seen this before.

I have a client that has been optimizing for "print and apply" for the past 5 months. Yesterday they decided it was more grammatically correct to use "print-and-apply."

There question to me was "is this going to effect our SEO?"

So...

I checked the difficulty using the keyword analysis tool, both keywords had the same broad/exact adwords traffic as well as difficulty percentage. When reviewing the top 25 listings for each keyword it looks like the same sites rank in the SERPs between 1-8 and then after that it is completely different.

So, is there a better keyword to target? Are these two keywords different enough to truly have separate search results?
The top 8 results didn't even target "print-and-apply" in there content or title tags...

Thanks for the input/discussion - Kyle

Well the reason i asked to see an example was to ensure that you had the correct doc type and markup for the title tag. I may be just misunderstanding you, but the title tag is not a META tag. It is its own tag all together for instance:

<title>HTML5 Exampletitle>

Instead of the depreciated tag:

Do you have an example of your page to review?

I personally have never had an issue with the customer support tickets, always quick and courtesy. As for the "private questions" i have found them to take a full week (7 days) until i get a first response. I'm not sure if they are taking that long to formulate the best response or if they are just that busy?

I have had some hit and miss experiences with Joomla so i couldn't give you a great recommendation. However I have had success with a few other open source CMS/Ecommerce solutions that work well on shared servers and have SEO friendly URLS:

http://www.opencart.com/
http://www.magentocommerce.com/

From what i have read Google wants their crawler and end users to see the same content and have the same experience. Based on that, if you have a header image that says "Great Deals" and you want search engines to read that, simply place that content in your ALT tag (SEOMoz has even posted studies showing that the ALT tag holds more relevance than the

in regards to keyword placement).

So my question to you is why would you need the

to be their in the first place?

Well this may be a self promotion, but the company i work for has a great development team specifically in regards to custom CMS sites that utilize the .NET platform. We also have a growing web design and marketing team, feel free to check out our website and portfolio: http://www.hileman.biz/

Some external references for our company:

http://www.kentico.com/Partners/Hileman-Enterprises-LLC.aspx

https://adwords.google.com/professionals/profile/org?id=03470296118255362028&hl=en

I see what you are saying, just seems so strange that some directories are okay and some are not. Maybe the its authority they have for instance yahoo vs absolute directory?

None-the-less, thank you for all the feedback, definitely helpful in making my decision.

You made a very good point. What about directories like dir.yahoo.com? Or association sites that are directly related to their industry?

I am not disagreeing with you i am just trying to understand if there is a line of black and white or if it is gray.

Thank you for your reply!

Have any of you ever purchased a directory listing with Absolute Directory (http:www.absolutedirectory.com)?

I was thinking about suggesting it to some of my clients since it was inexpensive, had a good domain authority (58), moz trust (5.81), and didn't seem to be filled with any ads or obtrusive content. Any thoughts? Is this to good to be true?

Regards - Kyle

I have always been under the impression that top level (or root) domains can hold different domain authority than that of a sub domain. Meaning that sub domain's and TLD can hold different ranks and strength in search engine result pages. Is this a correct or just an assumption?

If so when i add a root domain and subdomain into the campaign manager i get back the same link information and domain authority?

www.datalogic.com
www.automation.datalogic.com

Have I made an incorrect assumption or is this an issue with the SEOMoz campaign manager?

Is there actually a published article with statistics that state that more followers/fans give you higher ranking in SERPs?

You would probably need more information than just looking at the client side. The only way that could work out is if the file extensions were .aspx or .php or something like that.

Essentially what i was getting to, is you would set the redirect differently depending on what type of hosting you are using. If it was microsoft base you would set it in IIS, while if it was linux based you would added it to your root .htacess file.

Hope that helped!