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Jimmy, as Anthony says, you need to be careful about who you are targeting.

You want writers but you shouldn't be trying to attract them to the main news pages. Those are to attract readers. There should be a separate page to attract writers, otherwise you will attract writers but no readers.

My writers page does well, even though I've never really optimized it.

For stories, your keyword or theme will be in the headline and title. Make headlines short and snappy. Don't bury the lead, make sure the story covers the theme and wrap up at the end. Hints, in the form of subheads work well. So do relevant pictures (make sure you have rights to them)

One thing you could try is a section somewhere that has changing content, for example, tweets that make announcements about new things or other changes on your site, or relevant news. If you did have a separate blog, where you comment on site changes, trends or other relevant news, you could put some snippets of text over on the right side in a section of its own. That way, you would always have movement that is current.

Any domain that has been around for a long time will have some reciprocal links. Many sites will also have some multi-way links, even if they weren't sought out on purpose. I don't recall ever agreeing to a multiway link, but we have a lot of links, so there may be some that google will identify that way.

You can't control what other people do, only what you do. I don't recommend doing any of those, but if you have a few, I doubt they will hurt you.

Also, and this is where google has a problem, if you link out to another site, and they decided it would be a good thing to pump up the power of your page that links to them, they may have added multiple links or even link wheels to your page, and there is nothing you can do about it.

Hello Mac. Nice looking site Spelling error in sentence 3 You really have overdone your keywords on the front page On the interior pages you did the same and the content is thin. Get advice from people who are doing well in ecommerce Look at your competitors for ideas

Am I just unlucky or are others seeing this too?

I have several google alerts.

For the past 6 months, google keeps sending crap along with good stuff.

• its a bit like their search results.

There are three types of Alerts they send that I'm not impressed with.

1. Alerts that are from unintelligible splogs that take real news stories and rewrite them with unintelligible garbage that makes no sense at all. Sometimes, they serve up new alerts from the same splogs I saw several months ago, that I felt sure they would have zapped by now.

2. Old stories, that have been around for months. I just received one that was from January, from TechDirt, a big site that must get a huge amount of attention from google.

3. Irrelevant stories because they love to show how smart they are by splitting my alert keyword text into multiple words, but it gives useless results.

This is the kind of stuff that crappy search engines like AltaVista used to do. Is google reverting to the childhood of search with all these changes?

Hello Maarten

Those RewriteCond entries are cumulative and it looks like there are missing commands.

Who edited that file last, and what did they change?

The way conditionals work is you set a condition, Then you add a command, then a line break You can add more than one condition and it acts as AND

This page has what look like too many conditions and not enough commands -but it could be ok

Try adding a blank line between the rule entries and the Cond entries (but not between the Cond and the Rule entries)

Here is what to do to test anything like this: Save a copy of the .htaccess Then start editing it Delete everything below ##Start rewrites See if that fixes it. If not, the problem is above or if that fixes it, the problem is below Keep cutting the file in half or adding half until you discover the problem line

It is harder with all those conditionals, I suspect it is the lower block that is the problem

So remove those Cond entries from the bottom up

It's ok, I added a thumbs up for you

We started reasonably early on plus, and promote a lot of our stories there every day. From the very start, I thought the idea sucked, and I still do.

Our readership is generally older. Most have no idea what g+ is and they don't care. They also want to know why the hell I've put the g+ button at the top, above Facebook and twitter which A) get more than 10 times the attention B) seem to bring in 10 times the readers

I'm expecting google to limp along with g+ until they finally work out it is a waste of time. We have 250,000 readers per month. Since we added the g+ buttons, we've had maybe 2 million visitors, yet only 600 unique visitors have clicked the g+ buttons.

Google WMT says we have too little engagement to show stats So either this means our site is worthless and the 250,000 readers hate what we're doing, or g+ is only for geeks like Robert Scoble.

I have connected with some good people there, but getting interaction is hard. If you go look at what other people are posting, their g+ area is a wasteland, even if they have some god stuff. I do go and read and interact with others.

I'm not giving up on it yet, but then I didn't give up on gbuzz and they canned that.

I was really expecting to add 20-50% to our readership, so 0.0001% doesnt cut it.

The upside of google+ is the profile. I definitely think the rel author has value.

Google is definitely trying hard and putting big resources into g+ but it looks like a miserable failure to me, and that makes me happy, because if they can't get social working, with all of their money and resources, it tells me a couple of things. A) google really don't understand social B) the people who are making a success of social really do understand it C) people who have tried social and failed are no worse than google - it isn't easy D) when I said google doesn't understand my business yet they are telling me what to do, maybe I was right E) PhDs often have no common sense, no matter how brilliant they are in other areas

I wouldn't do that, because it might take traffic away from the affiliate, but the main site may not generate enough extra income to recover from the shortfall.

There is no point in ranking higher than the affiliate, if you destroy the affiliate's business, but do not recover it all yourself.

This is the age-old sales problem. Many companies, when they have a great salesman, who always exceeds his targets, change the quotas, to make it harder for the salesman to hit his number, so he works harder, the company makes more and he makes less. Eventually, the salesman will stop working so hard, and then look for another job.

Good salesmen and good affiliates are definitely not a dime-a-dozen. Look after them.

One more thing - separate to the other note. It is likely that google has already destroyed some of the sites that used to link to you, so that is another reason you could have less power.

Phil,

This is the $64,000 question.

without the URL, it is hard to tell.

Do you have a lot of pages?

Does SEOMoz say you have a lot of duplicates?

What does Google Webmaster Tools say about duplicates?

SEOMoz and GWT said my site did and I was fixing them, but nothing improved rankings.

So I wrote some programs and did my own tests.

I found 30,000 duplicates. (It is a big site)

I have fixed almost all of the duplicates and I'm working on preventing that happening again.

Also, we had a lot of pages that initially had value for readers, but now don't, so I have deleted them.

I can't tell you if this helps yet, because I haven't finished the work

• I've been working on this part for 200 hours, so I will be very glad when it is finished.

Also, if you have very old pages, as I have, you should check to see if there are links out to other sites that are no longer out there, or are not what they used to be - and remove them. I found 3500 of them, just from 2005, so I have quite a way to go, to clean them up.

Whatever you do, do not apply for a reinclusion until you discover the reason and fix the problem.

Did Webmaster Tools tell you there was a penalty?

Hello Robert.

There seems to be a lot of reshuffling going on right now.

The old 80-20 rules still seem to apply. - 20% of the things you can do, account for 80% of the reasons for ranking well - or not.

Take this with a pinch of salt, because I don't have proof. It is really a conversation starter.

While not wanting to have a spammy title is a laudable goal, it is possible it was not only OK, because of the domain name and the name of the site, and its theme - but also the main reason it was ranking so well.

One thing you could try is to add back the domain name in one or two of the previously best-performing pages and see what happens. See if you can get a couple of new links into them, from a couple of busy (relevant) sites, and maybe a couple of social signals, to prompt the crawler to revisit quickly.

Yes, as boomajoom says. I did that a year ago to a blog and it stopped google showing the front page in results rather than the individual pages. In addition, it gets you an extra pageview, lowers the bounce rate. It proves the reader really wanted to read the full page

Hello Norberto, Please check your link -that one is broken Here is what I do in our newspaper Within some stories, we have links to other relevant stories or to other pages, by linking internal text. For example, there is a page about Ban Kim Moon and we link to that. If a story refers to a previous story, for example it is a story about the fighting in Syria, we might link to the story about Kofi Annan making the announcement of the ceasefire agreement. After the story ends, there might be a few links to relevant stories, that we didn't link within the story. If you use Wordpress for your site, there are some really good plugins that can help. We don't use Wordpress, so I don't remember the name, but I think the best one is called Yet Another Related Page plugin

So you could list the other pages as though they are a threaded group of related items

Hello BJ.

The robots.txt file must be on your server, in the document root.

Here is information about how to configure robots.txt

Note that is does have a warning at the end, about how you could possibly lose some link juice, but that is probably a much smaller problem than the problem you are trying to fix.

Nothing is perfect, and with the rate that google changes its mind, who knows what is the right thing to do this month.

Once you have edited robots.txt, you don't need to do anything.

• except I just had a thought - how to get google to remove those items from your webmaster tools. I think you should be able to tell them to purge those entries from GWT. Set it so you can see 500 to a page and then just cycle through and mark them fixed.

Also, on one of them, add something completely different such as on the imap page, add a paragraph on the benefits of iMac, or about the port number or about the protocol. Be sure to add a screenshot and set the alt tags. There are plenty of small differences you could do.

Also, don't wait for google to tell you if you have duplicates.

That is what I was doing - silly me!

I did a comprehensive headline check and I discovered that there were more than a thousand duplicates in our system because back a few years, one of the editors was doubleclicking the mouse when publishing stories and that was before I put in a mechanism to prevent them. I thought there were only occasional ones and I'd fixed them, but it seems I didn't!

So check every page on your site for duplicate titles, duplicate descriptions and duplicate content.

Yes, only a few but, here are some things to think about

1. those social media buttons were only added 6 months ago and by now that release is suffering on my site from Panda, so when I recover, and if I didn't believe I could, I wouldn't be here, then I will again have better stats to show than I have today.

2. That press release is on 100 other websites. That means it can be search results and it can be seen when visitors to those sites are looking at other things.

If you don't want a link and possible traffic from 100 different websites, then maybe a press release is a bad idea.

Every press release is different. If you write an uninteresting press release, you will still get some links and activity. If you write a great press release, lots of different things can happen. I'm not saying press releases are everything, but if you are writing them off, and you are a business person, you are doing yourself a disservice. If you are an SEO and you have written off press releases, then you are also doing your clients a disservice.

As with everything we do, if you do it right, you can create a fountain of traffic.

Elias thinks they are short terms.

OK, they are short term, its only been six years since we did these:

Have you ever heard of "The Dead Body Guy" ?

Using press releases and a couple of stories at NewsBlaze, he got national attention, got on the TV, got movie parts. His stories and press releases sent him 3 million human visitors one year. Those stories and press releases are still sending him visitors, six years later.

What else can I say that shows press releases work?

If you only did reciprocal links, those are now dead. If you only did profile links, most of those are dead. ... If you do a range of things, you can reach more targeted or untargeted people.

A press release is one of the ways to get targeted traffic.

Thats my view. Feel free to discount it, but I have stats to prove it. Will every single release work wonders? No,  but can anyone tell me that every other thing they do hits a home run? Even heavy hitter SEOs have failures with things that usually work for them.

Thank you.

It seems to go in phases, sometimes.

A few days, both before and after I wrote that note, I had spent more than an hour researching and writing responses, trying to give good information. Although there seemed to be many page views of people reading, not a single thumbs-up (or even a thumbs down, not even from the person who asked the initial question.)

That is what makes it hard to run a forum. I always try to give a thumbs up to an answer someone gives, if either they gave a good answer, or they have obviously put in a lot of effort to research and address the question - and especially when I gained an insight into something that I didn't know before, or if they gave information about their site or their stats that showed me something useful.

It is the participation and small things that keep us all going. I haven't been around much this week, because I have a ton of deadlines. Thanks for contributing.

SirMax,

Domains don't rank. Only pages rank.

The front page of a site is not a domain, it is a page and it ranks on its merits..

If the domain is strong, (the combination of many strong pages), its pages will benefit from the domain strength, so if you add new pages, those pages will benefit, if if no other sites link to it. There are caveats - you could have a strong domain, but there could be problems that prevent the pages from ranking - panda and other duplication are such problems.

Thank you Dan (and Bill).

In SEO talk, everything seems to boil down to getting ranked, but the more important thing, I've always thought, is helping readers (and the search engines) to understand what the page is about - but almost nobody talks about that.

diane,

Nice site,

that is a forward slash.

/  is a forward slash because it leans forward.

\ is a backslash because it leans back.

(because we write left to right)

When I look at your URLs, it always shows without the trailing slash

• Also, I tried index.htm and default.htm and default.html and they all give a basic 404 page.

You could redirect those (not that I expect anyone to try them, but they might, and you definitely know what their intent would be, so you could redirect to the home page.

I don't know why SeOMoz does that duplicate thing. I think it is just doing its exact match check. It needs to be just a little bit smarter than it is. That report freaked me out too, the first time I saw it.

Also, you should consider making a nice 404 page, because it is a better experience for your visitors - I made mine into a funny page - you could do something great with musicians and instruments.

"Press releases have their role to play in digital marketing but not as a link building tool."

"My guess is that no one will read them"

Not a link building tool?

Nobody will read them?

I always think you have to split hearsay and measurement before you can say something as definitively as that. In the SEO world, there is a lot of BS. As a newspaper editor, I see a lot of BS - and don't worry, I am just as capable as anyone else of producing BS. So you have to do some real research and then you have a basis for what you say.

So check this 2009 press release:

http://shar.es/pRBBd

And look at the traffic this one press release has received since 2009. (attached image)

Check out the social sharing that it received over the past few months since that was added,

and if you believe in pagerank, look at that too.

So now we know - press releases do not drive traffic, have no link power, and nobody reads them.

I'm thinking about writing a YouMoz post.

wLqu5

There has been a lot of discussion about press releases.

You can't only do things that you consider give you pagerank power.

(well you can, but that's not the real world)

If press releases were dead, why do the big PR companies still charge $300+ for a press release and issue 1000 to 2000 of them every day?

Press releases work. They get your name out there, and if other sites pick them up and publish them, you get access to their readers. If a journalist or blogger picks it up, you get more coverage.

Yes, my site publishes press releases, but thats not why I'm  saying this. I'm telling you because it works. If it didn't work, I would stop. I have press releases that get hundreds of readers every day, so if you have a story to tell that is worth reading, you could get those readers.

Boodreaux

If you haven't already done this, consider doing my #5 in the answer below.

That should brand your ID into your text and photos

Here is what happens with google - which is not as smart as we (and they) think they are.

If you take a snippet of text that is keyword rich, and slap it on 10 other sites, they will almost always (in google search) outperform your whole unique story.

EGOL,

If you haven't already done this, consider my #5 in the answer below.

Robert,

EGOL and Robert are both right.

There are some things you can do to stop the drift, and possibly reverse it, but that is more effort

I'm out with my ipad, so the formatting of this may not be good.

First, look for content that is 100% yours and see if that is falling too.

• let me know what you find.

Fix the red group problems that SEOMoz tells you about

Then

1. go to your WMT account and see if there are any problems listed. - fix them

2. check to seee if you have any outgoing links that are boroken - fix them.

3. check for duplicate titles and descriptions and content. - fix them or delete and redirect.

4. rewrite posts that are not uniquely yours - this is the hard work, especially if you have a lot of pages

5. Get a G+ profile if you don't already have one and link your site to that and link that to your site.

I assume you are talking about a real post that was published on the other blog.

- donford, I don;t think they mean guestbook, they mean guest post.

The post you put on the other blog must be related to what your expertise is, otherwise you wouldn't have been invited to post there. You are probably linking back to your site, it not in the body of the post (for a specific, valid reason), or at the end, in your bio.

If that blog is really related to your site, then you could find some way of linking back to it, in a relevant way.

• Or you might consider promoting your guest post in some other way, either bookmarking it or adding it on one or more of the social media sites, where it makes sense to do so.

Maybe you could get some of your contacts there to comment on it.

You could also tweet about it, put it on your facebook and tell your friends.

It might be better not to link to it from your site, but if you had a page where you tell people about the guest posts you have done, that would be valid too. Don't just make it a page full of links - write a story about it, why you wrote for that blog, how it was related, and about the good work they do.

Of course, if it is a bad site, then don't even think about guest posting there.

SEOMoz is not google.

I suspect that SEOMoz is an exact match system, so it will not pick up the nuances that google does, unless they recode that. I have seen the same with a few things I tested too.

You will only get a perfect answer here from someone who has thoroughly tested it - and you have that opeion too.

My view is that you just do one of them and let google do its thing to find relevance.

You can't possibly tie up every keyword by trying to match for them all. If you do try, you will turn your site into a mess that people will look at and wonder what the heck you are trying to do. It will probably be confusing and you will undo any good work you do. Look in your analytics to see what is working for you already. Then reinforce those things. I wouldn't try to go after things that confuse other pages that already do well.

Using what you think is a keyword on multiple pages isn't going to hurt you, unless you overdo it.

You should be thinking about how readers will accept and use the information you write. Don't overengineer it.

If you want your front page to rank for a specific keyword, and not a deeper page, then that is where the content that emphasizes that keyword should go.

The other pages that mention the keyword will not be "about" that topic, but related topics, so it isn't going to hurt. It will help because your site is about the main topic (that you say you want the home page to rank for) and those pages will reinforce that.

So I think your answer is #1, not #2, unless you purposely try to make every page rank for the one keyword.

Remember, you are writing your pages for the readers. Keep them informed and not confused and you will be doing OK.

Hello James It is getting harder. Certainly, speed isn't easy in a competitive market If your site is local there are many options If national or global it is harder. Try finding a few related blogs and offer a guest post that has a single relevant link to your site. Also do one press release each week, about something you are doing. Try to write something groundbreaking on your blog and then write a press release about it, then go to twitter and Facebook and other bookmarking sites and do a good post there. Find related blogs that allow comments, with a related post and comment on the story. Find strong related blogs that you can find contact details for, and email or (gasp)phone them to see if they are interested in collaborating and might link to your great story. Also ask them what floats their boat, so you can write other stories they will link to. That's a little bit more than being stuck with reciprocal links This should work for any site, if you have great content

Three good answers.

As you know, it is hard to get quality links, so they have experienced the same problem as everyone else. If the directory links are relevant, and there are no egregious ones, it isn't likely to do you harm.

In addition, you can't see all of the links the site has, so you don't know if there are better links or worse links also.

With a DA of 49, it can't be too bad, so if it is in your industry and you already checked out the other content and you didn't find any bad outgoing links, then it looks like a good opportunity.

This is what we do, to try to make sure we get credit for our own stories, and it seems to be working:

Connect your G+ profile to your articles.

Add your own profile page to your site.

Link the G+ profile to your own profile page.

google will know that you are real and you are claiming ownership of the content.

It is too soon to tell if this is the answer, but it is what google says and it is what we are doing.

Here is a short video I made for our writers, to explain how to do it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccVX2q_nbGo

hello Ian.

Here is my DMCA

http://bit.ly/HpEVTA

To do this, you need to pay the Copyright office to register your choice.

My DMCA agent is a lawyer, but you can do it yourself, if you want,

as long as there is correct address information that can be served with letters or papers.

What this does is give you a small amount of protection. If you are allowing third party submissions of stories or comments or photo uploads or you outsource content creation, you need this. It gives anyone with a complaint against you, a guaranteed way to contact you - but they have to comply with the rules too, so it can't be a frivolous complaint.

Thank you Bryan.

These are links on my site in old stories.

Some aren't links, as in the example above, they are just plain text - no anchor tag.

Some are anchor links, to website are now defunct

Some are anchor links to websites that have now been parked

Some are anchor links to websites that have now been taken over by unrelated people.

So my aim is to clean them all up, but I'll do the most damaging ones first, because there are a lot of pages.

Thank you.

I am fixing both types now.

Melissa,

Brent tells you exactly what is happening on your site.

The only thing I have to add is that you also are causing yourself some problems.

Your HOME link points to this:

http://vamospaella.com/index.php

So that means you are telling all the search engines and visitors that http://vamospaella.com/ is not your home page, but http://vamospaella.com/index.php is.

So you need to stop doing that. Make sure your internal links only point to one URL.

(as well as doing the 301 redirects that ensure your site only responds one consistent way.)

I don't believe it will do you any good at all.

The google link is better for them because they are linking to google, not to you.

Google News uses a 302 redirect

But there is good news and bad news too.

The good news is that the link should always work

The bad news is that eventually, it redirects to an internal google page with a link on it, that tells the reader you are an external site and they have to click that link to get to your story, introducing an extra click

The page says:

Redirect Notice

The previous page is sending you to  (your link is here)

If you do not want to visit that page, you can return to the previous page. <- this is a link to google

(if the readers put the URL directly into their browser, it is a link to that redirect page)

If you have some pages that contain plain text URLs (not anchored links) that used to be good URLs, but are now bad, either because the website shut down or because it has been acquired by someone else and is now parked (or worse) - are those URLs enough to cause quality problems?

For example:

This information was brought to you by Waymaker http://www.waymaker.net

These aren't the only ones.

And yes, I know I should fix them, but there are probably 10,000 pages like it.

I will fix them, but its not something I can do in a few minutes.

(this one is easy to fix programmatically, but others are a lot more complex)

So my question is: do you have actual experience that these are bad enough to cause ranking problems (making them low quality)

This issue has been reported to google, many times in the past 3-4 weeks, but they have not responded, as far as I know.

I also have to ask the obvious question

Is that hard linebreak after http: in the real file or is that only for displaying it here?

Hello Jason,

Scrapers can always remove your G+ profile image and link, but if you add it to all of your articles and your site has your own profile page and you link the G+ profile to your own profile page, at least google will know that you are real and you are claiming ownership of the content.

It is too soon to tell if this is the answer, but it is what google says and it is what we are doing.

Here is a short video I made to explain how to do it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccVX2q_nbGo

I tried this a few years ago.

The strategy was to find good writers and help promote them and get them into news writing and reporting.

It wasn't about links, other than linking to stories in the newspaper, to get more readers.

It was a miserable failure.

It is a lot of work and you have to find people who are interested, get them fired up and keep them interested.

We got a couple of writers and we have one lone blogger left. I shut down the rest of the network.

We probably went about it the wrong way, but I had someone managing it, who we paid, but it just never worked out. If you consider this, you really need a lot of things in place, a great plan, a fired-up evangelist, and ways to build and increase interest.

You could go out and find people who have done this and seek their opinion and advice.

Ian,

The site looks good.

This isn't the problem, but you should redirect index.html and .htm to the home page, as you do with .php

Your home page author and description are both empty

• actually, you have two descriptions - the first one is empty, the second is OK

If you have blogs, remember to set up a DMCA page.

Ian,

what happens if you search for your keyword, go to the very end of the SERPS and click the link that searches again, but this time allowing the hidden results?

Does your main page appear then, and is it about the same position it used to be?

well, I'm sorry I wasted your time, like you, I'm looking for answers, and  thats all. Don't worry, I won't respond to any of your threads again, I did the best I could.

If you look back through the things I said, you may find something useful. Don't underestimate your own powers of investigation and testing.

I can almost guarantee you this - there is no simple answer. Nobody has it, other than google. The only way to work out what it is - is to ask, listen, experiment and test. There are a lot of smart people in SEOMoz, and if they haven't responded, it is because they don't have "the answer" you want.

And just remember, nobody responding to you here, if they do respond, is making any money from giving you suggestions, nor are they trying to wind you up. This is a voluntary thing of people helping people. The only possible reward is a thumbs up on a post, but I see I didn't give you anything that was even remotely useful.

I hope you figure it out.

it was the only number I could find - and you seemed to be pretty well freaked out about the situation.

I am in Australia right now, and I didn't know you were on the east coast.

Since the timezone changed, I messed up the time calculation, sorry.