Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Here are some interesting insights from Duane Forrester, who is a senior product manager at Bing.

http://www.stonetemple.com/search-algorithms-and-bing-webmaster-tools-with-duane-forrester/

Two of the biggest things of interest are:

1. The huge weight placed by Bing on user interaction with the search results as a ranking factor. This was amazing stuff. Basically, Bing is willing to test any page by indexing it. In fact you can pretty much directly inject any URL you want into their search results using the Submit URL feature of Bing Webmaster Tools. Then they will test it, and if the click interaction data is bad, out (or down) you go.
2. The ranking of the priorities for publishers in Duane’s eyes. #1 Content #2 Social Media #3 Links. Links were rated as the third most important area. Third.

The article is very easy to read, with the highlights put in front. This is recent information from a couple of months ago.

Hi Cisaz,

Can you elaborate on what you mean by "duplicate one for in each country", and give some background about why you suggest submitting to a search engine monthly?

Hi Ary,

Can you let us know if email notifications aren't working for you? Rand, the CEO of SEOmoz, has responded to your question on the other thread, as well as Cyrus, an SEOmoz associate who used to be an SEOmoz employee.

Have you contacted help@seomoz.org yet and asked the help desk to look into it? That might be the best place at the moment, since nobody in Q&A can see your reports. Thanks!

It's a known bug that's in the queue, as is the quirk that for you (Garry) and a few others you're not automatically getting a thumb point when you post a question.

A couple of weeks back we rolled out 50+ upgrades/changes to Q&A and have found a couple of new bugs in the process. So sorry you're seeing these, but they are in the works for the next bug fix.

If you look at the bottom of the original question, to the right there should be an email icon and a flag icon. Select the email icon to subscribe by email to the thread even if you don't comment.

Sorry, no experience here with implementing schema. We did make a post on it at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/schema-examples in case you missed that.

Keri

Though I doubt your customers are going to be searching for you with an underscore.

We are having some problems with them right now, and the team is troubleshooting as I write this. Keep an eye on Twitter for updates, and I'll also come and update this page when we know more. So sorry for the inconvenience!

Hi Todd,

That was actually just updated in September (you can read a blog post about the update at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-link-directory-best-practices). If you want to send me an email with any corrections (keri at seomoz dot org) I'll find the right person to send the updates. Thanks!

Keri

Email me the ticket information and I can also look into it for you. You should have gotten an automated email right after you submitted your ticket with a reference number you can use to check on the web, and a reminder that the help desk runs Monday-Friday so you can't always count on an answer on the weekends (not sure when you submitted your ticket).

Here's what Bing has to say about the meta keywords tag (hint: it's just one of about a thousand signals they look at), and why Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land feels only spammers should use it.

http://searchengineland.com/the-meta-keywords-tag-lives-at-bing-why-only-spammers-should-use-it-96874

Hi Adam,

The URLs in Open Site Explorer get updated about once a month, and the data can be up to two months behind. November 2nd was the last update, and the next update is scheduled for November 30th. You can see the schedule at http://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/345964-linkscape-update-schedule. Hope this helps!

Hi Diane,

Like Highland said, the help desk is the best place for this type of question. This is the Q&A forum, which is more appropriate for general SEO questions.

Have you checked your spam filter for a response, or looked on the for your ticket? I remember you mentioning problems with the help desk in Q&A this summer yet we looked at the ticket and saw the help desk did respond, so I'm wondering if part of the problem could be email notifications.  If you send me an email at keri at seomoz dot org with your ticket number, I'll look into it from this side.

You might also add your two cents into this survey in the blog post about what is your idea of a perfect rank tracker. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-does-your-ideal-rank-tracker-look-like-we-want-to-know

Google really frowns on the PO boxes these days. I believe there are ways to indicate service areas. I'm flagging this question for one of our local experts to come in and comment.

Barry Schwartz also has a post about this on Search Engine Roundtable at http://www.seroundtable.com/google-title-tag-13704.html.

I wouldn't worry about a reinclusion request just yet. Has one of your competitors done something with their site that caused it to rank above you perhaps? Have you identified if it's just one page that's no longer ranking? What kind of additional information can you find to help pinpoint the traffic decline?

As for Google rewriting title tags, they've been doing that for quite some time now, even to sites like apple.com, depending on your search query.

Gentlemen, please stay on the original thread about the site review for this particular site and back off a bit from the arguing. Thanks!

I'd also ping Marty (@aimclear) on Twitter, as he could probably point you towards some information.

This post from Rand about the "wrong page" ranking may also help.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/wrong-page-ranking-in-the-results-6-common-causes-5-solutions

Hi Daniel,

So sorry that this isn't working right for you. Could you send an email to help@seomoz.org and let the help team know about this? They don't hang out here unless we flag a message, and sending them an email is the best way for them to easily get this on their radar.

Thanks!

Hi John,

Dr. Pete made a very comprehensive post to the SEOmoz blog this week about duplicate content that should help give you a better understanding of the problems you are facing and options for solutions.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world

Rank tracker was down this morning. I have had today off, so I don't know the current status, but there was an earlier problem. I'll post an update as soon as I have it.

Yes, it is hurting the SEO. For more information than you might ever wanted to know about this, see the comprehensive blog post that Dr. Pete (an SEOmoz associate) posted last night at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world. That should be a good starting point to understand why you don't want this happening, and how to start to fix it. The comments touch on case sensitivity as well, even though he didn't include that in the post itself.

Nofollow doesn't conserve any juice anymore, any juice just evaporates through a nofollow. So if you have five links and four are nofollow, you don't get 100% of juice going through the one link, you still only have 20%. Does that help?

For more background on how many links is too many, check out this post from earlier this year by Dr. Pete. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many

That area is a warning area, but not an error area. It's saying "hey, double check to make sure you really do want to exclude these pages." If the pages are things like your admin directory, you certainly do want them excluded from being indexed.

The license for creative commons talks about attribution in the manner specified by the person that owns the work, so while it is phrased nicely, you should do what they ask as part of the license.

Michael Gray (graywolf) often uses images from Flickr with creative commons licenses, as well as contributes images. You might browse through his posts on image optimization at http://www.wolf-howl.com/tag/image-optimization/ to get some ideas of how you could use/provide images.

Phil from Distilled weighed in on this question today in a different thread at www.seomoz.org/q/best-way-to-host-video; his answer might help you as well.

Phil from Distilled just weighed in on how to choose a platform for hosting video, and when you'd want YouTube versus some other options in the thread at www.seomoz.org/q/best-way-to-host-video.

Thanks for the great answer Phil! It'll serve as a great reference answer. We've had several questions come through along these lines over the past few months.

To be completely honest, I'd focus on the content on your site before building links to your site. I looked at a page about virtual gastric bands and the content did not appear natural or written for the user.The page I reviewed was quite long with the same phrases repeated over and over.

It doesn't matter how many links you have to a site or how many visitors you get if the visitor gets to your site and leaves right away because the content just doesn't meet their needs.

Focus your time and energy on just one main site for your practice, and make that site the best it can be. I fear you may be losing focus and trying to do too much, and letting some things slide (such as looking at the links page, you link out to sites that are hacked or no longer in existence or are under development; I don't know if they are all your sites, but I know at least some are).

This doesn't quite answer the question that's being asked. I'm thinking this would be fairly obvious to Google and wouldn't quite look natural to boot.

If you think about this question in more general terms, you'd never see CNN or New York Times link anywhere, since most sites have a lower PR than they do. And on the flip side, if I have a site with very little PR about pinball games, I'm not going to link to a site with a higher PR that's about buying pills that's full of spam.I don't have enough personal experience for your particular situation to offer an expert opinion for this case, however.

The content on the blogspot site appears to be identical to content on several other sites, so it's really not doing you any good. The search engines don't want to show users the page on five different URLs, so they're going to try to just pick the one best article.

My advice is to not spend your time creating duplicate articles on a blogspot domain, but instead spend that time making sure that your main domain has quality content that is written for the user, not for the search engine.

Bing and Yahoo have a partnership where Yahoo will use Bing's algorithm for ranking, but can still affect how things are displayed to the user. Covario has a post on this last year at http://actionableinsights.covario.com/1650/bing-and-yahoo-%E2%80%93-same-algorithm-different-results/ that should provide some more background information.

What country is the target for this website? Your profile looks like you're from the UK. If you're targeting people in the UK, you might want to specify that, so we can help give you recommendations that better suit your area. If possible, you generally want hosting in the country you're targeting.

Usually, if you're going to the trouble of creating quality content, you want to do so on your site and on a folder on your site (rather than a subdomain) if possible.

Which has more value to your site:

A page on a brand-new blogpost page that has no initial ranking, sending a link and maybe a visitor or two to your website

or

A page on your own site that already has some ranking, which will attract the visitor to your own site.

You want to build up the ranking on the site that you own and control, not stash little bits of it everywhere with free hosting plans.

Hi Dan,

I can't speak to sabotage, but I can confirm that the newspapers are all owned by the same group (MediaNews Group http://www.medianewsgroup.com/consumers/Pages/OurBrands.aspx ). I happen to be in the Bay Area and knew that at least three of them were related.

Like Ryan, I'd ask around to see if someone thought they were being helpful and signed up for those without letting you know. I've seen it happen on here before.

Subdomains can be verified as their own site in GWT. Verify the subdomain in GWT, then put a robots.txt on that subdomain excluding the entire subdomain, then request removal in GWT of that entire subdomain. I've had to remove staging and dev sites a couple of times myself.

A couple of things I've found useful in this situation is to make the robots.txt files for both the dev and live sites read only, so you don't accidentally overwrite one with the other when pushing a site live. You can also sign up for a free tool like Pole Position's Code Monitor that will look at the code of a page (including your robots.txt url) once a day and email you if there are any changes so you can fix the file then go hunt down whoever changed the file.

Hi Diane,

I'd check out some of the responses you got to a similar question about paid tools that may help you, in case you weren't subscribed to the answers when they came through. http://www.seomoz.org/q/has-anyone-used-paid-services-to-help-improve-their-site

That may be at least part of the problem. If you're not able to share the URL with us in Q&A, I'd drop a note to the help desk at help@seomoz.org and ask them.

It can take up to two months for your links to show in OSE, and OSE only indexes the top 25% or so of the web. If you're still not seeing the links by the end of December, post another thread and we can take a closer look at it.

If you could send help@seomoz.org a note about going from a to f, that would be great, as it sounds like that could be a bug.

Here's a YouMoz post that was promoted to the main blog about what someone else did in this situation that may help.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/accidental-noindexation-recovery-strategy-amp-results

A couple of preventative steps would have been to make the robots.txt file on the live site read-only so it couldn't have been as easily overwritten, and to use a free service like Pole Position's Code Monitor (https://polepositionweb.com/roi/codemonitor/index.php) to monitor the contents of your robots.txt file once a day and email you if there are changes. I'd also monitor your dev robots.txt, just to make sure the live site robots.txt doesn't get copied over to dev one day and your dev site gets indexed (I've had that happen!).