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What I have done on my wordpress site is to make sure I'm linking directly to the image and not to the attachment page. If someone clicks on the image, they get a nice large (2000 pixel wide) image by itself, no attachment page or anything. I don't know if that will work for you, but it does work in my case.
Hi Loïc,
If you download the CSV for this report, you'll be able to see the source page for the 404s. We realize this isn't obvious, and it's on our list to make more clear at our next opportunity to change that part of the tools.
Keri Morgret
Hi Brian,
In a nutshell, what you'll hear most here is to build content that people want to link to, build content that is valuable to your readers/customers, do natural outreach, etc. We have a good article on linkbuilding on SEOmoz, I just don't have it at my fingertips at the moment and am on my way out for the day. In the meantime, you can check out the beginner's guide to SEO section on linkbuilding at http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links to get an idea of what I'm talking about.
Hi Atul,
Here's Google's comprehensive explanation about Fetch as Googlebot, and what it can do for you.
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=158587
Hi Atul,
Did this answer your question, or do you still have questions about this topic?
I have multiple links from content in the blog posts in SEOmoz to my model warship combat site, and it hasn't hurt me a bit. The latest link has helped my rankings. I also never turn down the link to my site when I do a liveblog over at Search Engine Roundtable. I wouldn't want them as my only links, that would look unnatural, but I'm happy to have more than one link from the same domain.
Have you read the Beginner's Guide to SEO at http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo? That will give you a real good starting place.
Hi Brian,
BuildMyRank has been discussed on the SEOmoz Q&A before, and usually not in the most positive manner, mainly because of the way people lean here, but some have had success. I personally have reservations about using this type of service. Here's a few links to other Q&A threads that can show you the discussion that's already taken place to help you out a little. a search on google for [site:seomoz.org buildmyrank] will show several threads.
http://www.seomoz.org/q/build-my-rank
http://www.seomoz.org/q/good-link-networks
In looking at the FAQ for BMR, I see that they randomly put your article on a site and you can have one link per 150 words, with the minimum article being 150 words. I envision sites with a bunch of very short (or very link-stuffed) posts on all kinds of subjects. That's not the type of backlink strategy I would want for my own site, I know that much.
Maybe also look at the visitors by location in your Google Analytics, and show increases in visitors who are from the areas where you have physical stores?
I'm betting with some searching you can find some more ideas of how to help tie in the website to in-store sales, like promotion codes from the website if you order in store.
What about even a customer service initiative where you could order online and have it ready for pickup at the store?
I'm looking forward to seeing the answers on this one. There's not going to be a simple answer that will cover everything, that's for sure.
This summer I went on a vacation with my parents, and used the "simple" purchase of a pair of hiking boots to show him some of the complexities of measurement. In Montana and North Dakota I saw billboards for a sporting goods chain (that I hadn't heard of before). In the campground in South Dakota we picked up a "welcome to Sioux City" brochure that mentioned this same chain. When we were at breakfast, I looked up the chain on my mobile phone to see what the hours were and the store location. I found out that it opened early and was only a couple of miles away, so we went there and got hiking boots for my dad from the brick and mortar store after he tried them on. So, which channel gets the credit for that sale, and how much credit should each channel get?
Things I can think of that can lead to correlations that may help your cause. Look at sales volume and look at visits to your site, and see if there's a correlation. What about visits to the store locator page? Searches that include intent regarding address, hours, etc?
Are there any products where someone would likely search for them online then buy them in person, because of the cost of shipping or needing them right away or the fact that you don't ship them? Look at visits to those pages and look at any corresponding increase in B&M sales for those products.
You might try for some edu links too, if the product is something that is used by university labs. For an example local to me, if I was someone who sold surplus parts or metals or was targeting engineering students, I'd look at contacting some of the following following pages at Stanford from this query http://www.google.com/search?q=%22alan+steel%22+site%3Astanford.edu. This query is for Alan Steel, which is a local supply place. It gives me a lot of other pages where my hypothetical business might get a link
John, having a ton of URLs indexed for the same page will actually dilute things, not help your rankings. Dr. Pete wrote a great post at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world explaining duplicate content that should help give you a better understanding of things.
And for the rest, give that advice to your competitor, right EGOL?
Right now I can't get to that site, I'm getting the following error:
Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated 17825792) (tried to allocate 30720 bytes) in /nfs/c09/h03/mnt/134176/domains/davincidrivers.com/html/wp-includes/nav-menu.php on line 297
It is something Google is doing, and I've seen other complaints about it here as well. As far as I know, there's nothing you can do about it.
What about searching for articles about care homes on BBC then seeing if any of those have missing links on an article-by-article basis? If you're lucky, they may also have a tag or a section that fits closely enough with your topic that you can find a listing of all of the articles that are withing that tag/category and just review those.
I was just contacted by such an agency that offers free link building. They just want me to link from my nice, original, human-built site about RC boats to a site about a casino, and in return I'd get a link from an auto-generated site with little content that's about military robots that also links out to a casino.
I would rather have no link at all than that link.
Here's a recent post about best practices for link building with directories that might help you.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-link-directory-best-practices
I've only found one other question in Q&A that mentions Treepodia, from someone who has used it before. You might contact the author of http://www.seomoz.org/q/video-seo-youtube-vs-3rd-party-hosting-with-video-sitemap to see how it worked for them.
Here's some more advice about what to do if bad links are pointing at your site, from some SEOmoz blog posts.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/6-ways-to-recover-from-bad-links
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-if-my-competitors-point-spammy-links-to-my-site
Hi Leslie,
Did Stephen's answer help you, or are you still looking for more information?
Here's a video from Matt Cutts about how the site: operator works and how the results are ordered. Does this help at all?
This is a kind of hard one to figure out without any more hint of what things look like. If you're not able to share the URL in public Q&A (which I can certainly understand) and still want some advice, feel free to open a private Q&A question where you can share that type of information.
Hi! I'm following up on some older questions. Have the rankings recovered? Did you figure out if the template change was the cause?
Hi! I can't say that I've heard of the "URL Enforce Writer" before, and a quick search in Google shows your question as the first result. Is this something that is an option in a content management system perhaps? And why do you not want to use a 301 redirect?
We don't have too many Magento people in here, and I myself don't have any experience with it. However, a couple of things to look at. First, can you do a spot check of those records and see if they are all product records, or if some of them are transaction records? Are some of them maybe expired products? Or options on products such as color or size?
Also remember that links that are bought for the purposes of passing pagerank are quite frowned upon by Google.
Keep in mind that the links themselves do not have pagerank. Also, are the links from a page itself that has a toolbar pagerank of 8, or from a site whose homepage has a toolbar pagerank of 8? Sure, I have a link to my business website (which ranks on the first page of Google if I choose the right keywords) from a stanford.edu address. It's a subdomain on stanford's site that got fewer than 100 visits in the last year. Doesn't mean that the link does me a bit of good, but I can make it sound great when I say I have a link from Stanford an a .edu link.
I'd much rather spend the money on someone who knows correct grammar in the first place, rather than rely on a computer program to tell me if the grammar is correct or not. They're likely to have a much better writing style, and write copy that better appeals to your customers.
I am not a lawyer, nor am I Google, but these statements would cause me to think twice if I were in your shoes regarding that +1 overlay.
"Publishers may not direct users to click a Google+ Button for purposes of misleading users"
You're also not to use Google's tools for ranking manipulation.
Honestly, as a user, this totally turns me off. It makes it look like Google thinks I'm a spammer at first glance, then I realize what you're doing and do not agree with the impression that you are giving users.
If you are only trying to get rid of spammers trying to get links for selling pills, there are much better ways to do that.
Woah..that overlay saying that you need to +1 the site in Google to prove you're not a spammer or robot looks a bit fishy.
I can't speak for the search engines, but users take the value of good grammar seriously. If you're writing about a subject, proper spelling and grammar make a huge difference in having people trust you and be willing to buy from you or sign up for your services.
You need to make up your mind if you want high quality and relevant, or if you want a bundle of over 1000 links at once. It just doesn't work that way.
Hi! If you don't get an answer from the community by Monday, send an email to help@seomoz.org and they'll look at it to see what might be the problem (they're not in on the weekends, otherwise I'd have you send them an email right away).
Thanks!
Keri
Francisco, you've probably thought about this, but be sure to look at all of the banking rules about privacy and sharing of information as you build this. When I worked at an agency, I remember how it would take weeks of turnaround to get a simple banner ad approved, as all of the wording had to go through legal, and how resistant another bank was to even install Google Analytics on some of their https pages.
I'm taking my experiences there and thinking there must be a lot of rules regarding how a site is to be secured so that type of information isn't hacked, how to ensure proper information displays for each level of person accessing the system, etc. Cost of compliance may be something to consider, and I don't know if WP would be quite compliant enough out of the box.
I totally agree with James here. This looks like it'd be a really helpful post for YouMoz! I would include some screenshots to grab the attention of readers and let them know what kind of results they'll see after they do this and why it's worth their while. Feel free to submit, we'd love to see it!
Keri
Hi everyone,
Check out the post on Search Engine Roundtable about this at http://www.seroundtable.com/google-untitled-14665.html. JohnMu from Google commented on the Google+ link to this at https://plus.google.com/u/0/107945426404682361496/posts/ASCFeBZitHj.
Could you send an email to our help team at help@seomoz.org? We're not aware of a problem, so if you could send in details about what browser you're using and the error message you're seeing that would help us figure out what's happening. Thanks!
We just had a great YouMoz post on this (that was promoted to the main blog) that might help for your next maintenance window. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-handle-downtime-during-site-maintenance
This post lists several bookmarklets, some of which may meet your needs. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/some-nifty-seo-bookmarklets-to-make-you-more-efficient
I just want to verify that you're talking about a sitemap for the users, and not the xml sitemap for the search engines to crawl. The sitemap for the search engines can have 50,000 entries in a sitemap, per the specifications at http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html.
One example Ryan Kent likes to use is Verizon's sitemap at http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/sitemap.jsp. They don't have every one of their pages listed, but you can easily find what you are looking for via their sitemap.
Hi sever3d,
This sounds like something you should email the help desk about directly. Send them an email at help@seomoz.org and include your SEOmoz username/email and the campaign that's having issues and the help team will get back to you right away.
Keri
Hi David,
Do you mean how robots.txt is configured and if the robots file is blocking a certain page from being indexed? If so, yes. If the file is complex and you're not sure if it's blocking a particular page, you can go into Google Webmaster Tool and they have a robots.txt utility where you can input a particular URL and it will tell you if the robots.txt file you are using (or proposing) blocks that URL.
If you mean whether the page is quality enough for a search engine to choose to index it? No, that's part of the algorithm and none of the major engines are that nice and open.
There's one other post in Q&A that is having this same problem too. You might want to look at http://www.seomoz.org/q/search-snippet-ignors-title-tag
Edit: I can't get "untitled" to display when I do either a site search on your domain or search for the brand name.
For what it's worth, there's another thread about someone having "untitled" show up in the Google SERPs at http://www.seomoz.org/q/google-is-showing-website-as-untitled.