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I don't have ideas -- but I bet the person answering the main phone lines for the company has ideas! So would the sales and customer service reps. See if you can meet with them and pick their brains. What are the most common questions they get tired of answering? What are some misconceptions people have about the industry? What would they love to have a blog post about to where they could just point people to the post instead of having to re-explain the same thing over again?

Though try 'free drug' and 'drug free'. Word order does matter a tad for that one.

I'd start with our guide to link building at http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links and also check out our blog posts about link building at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/link-building

This would not be the best way to go about obtaining links. There is no mention of if the links are relevant, if they are permanent, etc. It does go against Google's guidelines of buying links with the intent to pass pagerank and boost your rankings.

On a related note, keep an eye on the YouMoz blog. Next week there's a post coming up about how to market the experts in your field who aren't necessarily a big deal on the internet.

And remember that the toolbar pagerank reflects the PR of that individual page. Heck, you could have a link from SEOmoz on your profile page that has no PR at all and is no followed and nobody visits it and it won't do you a bit of good.

Also to look at -- are those 20 websites all connected in some fashion? On the same server farm? Have the same footer links? Have the same Google Analytics code? If they're all part of a network, it's really not going to do you any good.

Here's a good post Dr. Pete wrote on the subject about too many links that may help.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many

Hi Yoseph,

Here are some of the common reasons why only a page or two might be crawled. https://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/409821-why-isn-t-my-site-being-crawled-you-re-not-crawling-all-my-pages If that doesn't solve your problem, an email to the help desk (help@seomoz.org) will be able to fix things.

Keri

Hi! This post by Dr. Pete explains more about the "too many links" concept. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many

I feel it would depend on the nature of the posts. I am the one who is in charge of YouMoz posts for SEOmoz. I'm happy to post two great posts from the same author that link to different URLs, provided they are great posts and it's a relevant link.

If I see a post that starts out with "While I was talking with my coworkers at my custom shoe design store I thought of this great way to do x" and a second post with "I went to the mall and someone commented on my sparkly shoes and it made me think of y" neither are getting posted as-is because it's just a forced link drop that has no relevance to the post.

Is your traffic going down too?

Are your rankings going down in all of the engines, or just one?

Any reason why there are links to your site from a dating reviews site? http://www.datingsitecatalog.com/dyh-nwwy-90.htm

Has there been any link building? What type?

Are there any notices in Google or Bing Webmaster Tools?

Have all copyrights been respected? Are there any problems with using Hello Kitty, Power Rangers, etc. in the charts?

Dr. Pete wrote a good post about it at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many

Here's some information about our grading that should get you started http://www.seomoz.org/help/on-page-reports. Let me know if that helps!

What did you pay in legal fees to set this up? That's something that needs to be considered as well, to make sure this is viewed by the government as a legitimate scholarship and not a contest.

You're likely to have problems with the content of both of those sites. It looks like thin content that is nearly duplicate except for the search and replace of one location for the other. Google isn't going to want to return to the user dozens or hundreds of nearly identical pages. If you do a site: on the nanny site and go in a couple of pages, it says there are actually only about 100 pages indexed.

You're going to need to provide more value to the user if you want to get these affiliate sites actually ranking.

Matt Cutts chimes in on Alan B.'s SEJ article at http://www.searchenginejournal.com/get-over-yourself-matt-cutts-did-not-just-kill-another-seo-kitten/56842/ and mentions that he (Cutts) said the same thing in 2005. The series of tweets Matt made are copied below:

I think I covered this on http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-article-in-newsweek/ pretty well (search for “press release” to catch all the comments I made.

Ultra-short version: 1) don’t expect links from press release websites to help ranking.

2. Don’t expect press releases on many other websites, e.g. http://www.chron.com/business/press-releases/article/Levitra-Buy-Viagra-Cheapest-Prices-Guaranteed-3993998.php on Houston Chronicle to help either.

& 3) the benefit is not links/PR from the press release directly; it’s primarily when reporters write an article as a result.

but I think all of those points are implicit in my 2005 comments on press releases from http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-article-in-newsweek/ Hope that helps.

Just a quick check to make sure that you're using the same subdomain in both cases. Could the campaign be for non-www and the site is ranking for the www version?

Thomas,

Your answers from the day before actually didn't make a lot of sense (what does Mathas mean?) , and statements about something being a rule but no explanation as to where the rule came from were what likely got you the thumbs down.

Hi Chris and everyone else,

Thanks for the comments. I noticed some slow response times yesterday. Right now things seem fine from where I am, but I'll drop a note to the developers and have them take a closer look at things and see if we can make sure the slow response times don't happen again.

Thanks!

Keri

[disclaimer: I don't like content spinning, and I don't advocate it.]

Have someone who has native-level fluency read the generated content and make sure it makes sense. I've seen "think before you beverage" come out of "think before you drink" on an article about drinking.

Usually, high-quality sites won't accept spun content. For YouMoz, we reject content that is published elsewhere and reworded by hand.

The person asking the question asked about studies, stats, or measurable impact. Do you have any of these you could share? You might otherwise risk getting thumbs down and appearing to be answering questions just for MozPoints, when you're responding to questions that are several months old and giving fairly general answers when specific details are requested.

Howdy! Just wanted to point out this question is several months old.

The statement about "The same content in another language can trigger duplicate content issues" was a bit surprising to hear. Can you provide some more information about that?

I'm more accustomed to what Google says in places like http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=182192#3 where they state "Websites that provide content for different regions and in different languages sometimes create content that is the same or similar but available on different URLs. This is generally not a problem as long as the content is for different users in different countries. While we strongly recommend that you provide unique content for each different group of users, we understand that this may not always be possible. There is generally no need to "hide" the duplicates by disallowing crawling in a robots.txt file or by using a "noindex" robots meta tag."

Matt Cutts also talks about it being OK in a video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDg2AGRGjLQ.

I'm also interested in knowing more about content needing to be relative to the directory name. Can you give a few more details?

Hi Ayaz,

It won't update those statistics, but you can at least check your URLs to see what is fixed and what still needs work.

The page actually feels like it has too much information about what the actual surgery involves, and too little information about the hypnosis. How long does it take, both in how long is an individual session and how many sessions does it take? What is the cost? Does the hypnosis ever wear off? For what percentage of people is it effective? Do people have to travel to your office, or do you come to them?

How is the page for conversions? Ranking isn't everything, as in the end you are still trying to make money and have people inquire about your services. You might consider an a/b test and test a page that is more focused on the user and less on the search engines, and see if you get more people calling to inquire about your services. This page has a lot of extra content that is off-topic and appears to be written for the search engines (especially that huge footer) and isn't written for the person considering the service.

Hi Yoseph,

Did you get this figured out, or would you still like some assistance?

Miriam can give a more complete answer, but I believe this may be against Google's guidelines.

You can't force a crawl early in your campaign, but you can do a crawl on demand of up to 3000 URLs from http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/crawl-test.

Diane, could you rephrase your statement in your first paragraph? You pressed good answer and it came up that you pressed good answer, I'm not sure what the problem is. But if there is a technical problem I'm happy to look into it.

Is tracking your keywords in your campaign no longer working? On our page about the standalone rank tracking app (which is coming back -- I have helped test it), we do note that you  can use the manage keywords section of your campaign to track rankings. If this is not working, please let us know.

Hi Diane,

Would you mind giving a "good answer" to answers like these that solve your problem? The person who answers gets a few more MozPoints and encouragement to keep answering questions, and the question gets marked as answered, which helps keep the system clean.

Thanks so much!

Here's what Google itself has to say, from http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35291:

Advertising with Google won't have any effect on your site's presence in our search results. Google never accepts money to include or rank sites in our search results, and it costs nothing to appear in our organic search results.

Good answer here from Irving. You want to make sure your server is set up correctly, and then also specify your preferred domain in Google Webmaster Tools.

You can crawl up to 3000 URLs on demand at http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/crawl-test, which should help you until the next regularly scheduled crawl.

Hi! Just wondering if these answers helped solve your question, or if you'd still like some more advice.

Hi Shay,

Did these answers solve your question, or do you still need some help?

Modesto has a great post about moving servers at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos that should help you out a bit.

Hi Linda,

The referral column is in the CSV export, not on the on-screen report. Does that help?

Keri

I'd also make sure your content was unique. I went to a page describing your social media services and discovered identical content on several other sites, including http://www.localnumberone.com/social_networking.aspx.

Edit: I would honestly suggest putting some quality time into this site. Many images (including on the home page) have a stock photo watermark on them. Content is duplicated across many sites. Images that are a call to action result in a 404 page. The reports section to show off reports requires a password. The Twitter account linked to from the site has a tweet asking if someone would like to take on a junior SEO worker, yet the website itself has a title tag of #1 SEO Consultant London.

The site is lacking many things that would help a customer develop trust in the company. Beyond SEO, take a look at how a customer might approach your site.

Hi John,

psinet would not be from SEOmoz. I've done a search on Google and seeing other people report that it is also messing with their traffic. Roger does occasionally trigger GA, but usually doesn't trigger javascript analytics.

Hi! Those are actually rel=canonical notices, not warnings. It's a note to let you know that they are there and to make sure everything looks OK, not that there's something wrong.

Hi Matthew,

Many in the field (including several on the SEOmoz blog) consider aiming for a specific number for keyword density to be a bit of an outdated tactic. Rand talks about it in this whiteboard friday at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/10-myths-that-scare-seos-but-shouldnt-whiteboard-friday. Matt Cutts also talks about it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rk4qgQdp2UA.

It can be helpful to include in answers (like you did in your other answers) "in my experience" or "on my sites" you've found the following to be true, or to reference where an authority has also said something is true.

Hi Ben,

Welcome to SEOmoz! We're glad to have you here. Have you check out this post by Dan Shure, an SEOmoz Associate who specializes in Wordpress? He talks about how to set it up Wordpress for SEO success, including how to work tags, categories, what to noindex, etc. It's at

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success

Hi Matthew,

You present some interesting figures. You do say that "even though this may not be correct, but has worked for me." -- does this mean that the following percentages are things you have based off of you own testing, or do you have some references you could give that would help back this up?

The crawling is only for PRO members (though that does include members on a free trial). If you want to crawl more than once a week, check out our crawl test tool at http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/crawl-test.

The best themes for page rank are the ones that are easy for you to install, so that you can spend your time writing quality content to help your visitors convert and to earn links. There's no magic theme that will tell Google "this site deserves a high PR".

Can you afford to choose different clients?

Is there a way you can convince them of the business case of more information? Modify five medium-traffic pages with more information, and see how those products perform? Make it a business case, not just an SEO case. Find out what the most common questions are to the sales or support team, and answer those questions on the product page. Tell the client you will help reduce their costs (of support), reduce their returns, increase customer satisfaction, etc.

If they just want increased rankings, take a ten-word phrase from the page and show them they are already ranking number 1, and that it's time to focus on sales.

Is your client OK with their URL being in a public Q&A question? If not, you may want to edit the post (or let me know and I can edit it for you) and replace the domain with dummy info.