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Chenzo is correct, install the SEO Ultimate plugin as this does wonders for deep editing of titles and descriptions for categories/tags and more. There is a setting that you can rewrite the URL from categories in the url to a specific post url.

I usually avoid having categories in the URL due to the issue you describe above of having multiple categories, I use a rewrite to just have a url such as /blog/post-name/ instead of /blog/category/tag/post-name/.

If I were you I would most probably nofollow those links in the footer. It also depends on how you link them, I would avoid any exact match anchor text that links the sites in the footer as this does not provide any value and Google is known to target this method.

If it were brand sites say on different cTLDs like .co.uk, .com, .ca etc. then it would be ok to not use the nofollow, however as you mention they are largely unrelated. Cross-linking within the footer (sitewide) without a nofollow may end up looking like a link wheel or network.

If there is relevance in having those links, keep them but nofollow them and avoid using exact match anchors.

Where are you getting the link data from? If you are looking at OSE it often does not show the whole link picture due to the index it takes, however it does show you the most important links and in my mind is reliable at telling you which links actually count. If you have millions of low quality links they will more often than not fail to pass any value to your site after the latest updates.

Also are you getting confused with total links and referring domains? You may have 500 unique referring domains but over a million links as some could be sitewide on thousands of pages?

You should really (well I do) take referring domains as a basis for number of inbound links as the way PR dissipates across multiple pages on the same domain. I assume you do not have 1.3 million unique referring domains as that number seems incredibly high.

You need to come up with highly unique and engaging content that will benefit users like in depth product reviews or writing about your industry, make it good and it will generate it's own links and social shares. Relevant business directories are still good, but will not get you ranking high on their own. Since you sell products try using product feeds to syndicate to other sites as well.

For the first month we have planned to do around 20 bookmarking, 3 articles each to 15 article directories, 30 directory submissions (priority to niche based), business page listing in hot frog etc, 3 articles each submitted to 10 web 2.0 properties, 1 press release to 15 pres release sites, some Q&A links and few blog comments, 10 video submission and 1 guest blogging.

Scrap all of this and use the time to learn seo. These tactics may have worked 5 years ago, but you will mostly be wasting your time doing this. I advise totally against 'submitting 1 article to 15 press sites' or the articles. Learn about duplicate content.

1 high-quality, engaging article submitted on a relevant industry website will be worth way more than spun articles on low quality article directories that probably do not pass any value. Sorry the above strategy just seems weak and ineffective, you need to spend your time learning about seo and content strategies and SEOmoz beginners guide is a good place to start.

Hi there,

I have a site that contains descriptions of accommodation and we also use this content to syndicate to our partner sites. They then use this content to fill their descriptions on the same accommodation locations.

I have looked at copyscape and Google and this does appear as duplicate content across these partnered sites.

I do understand as well that certain kinds of content will not impact Google's duplication issue such as locations, addresses, opening times those kind of things, but would actual descriptions of a location around 250 words long be seen and penalised as duplicate content?

Also is there a possible way to canonicalise this content so that Google can see it relates back to our original site?

The only other way I can think of getting round a duplicate content issue like this is ordering the external sites to use tags like blockquotes and cite tags around the content.

If you used seomoz to look at the links then you may notice that there are 200 fewer links because of the recent updates to the mozscape. It contained far fewer domains than the last index update so link profiles look naturally smaller because of this.

There is the other case though that these 200 links have been lost which means less juice flowing to your site and lower ranking as a result. You probably need to diversify your link strategy. What kind of links did you lose? Were these directory links, blogroll links?

Sitelinks are not a top level natural ranking for a domain they are part of the universal results and only appear on certain rankings some of the time (mainly rankings for brand that have a high CTR % or terms Google sees as having most relevance and CTR). So no, organic sitelinks do not show as a ranking and I don't think you should consider that subdomain as a ranking result because it may not show 100% of the time.

Sorry about your drop in rankings, it can be frustrating when this happens but I think you'll have to give us a bit more information to try and discover why your rankings dropped. Have you had a look at your backlinks? You may have had a drop off in the number of links pointing at your site, particularly low quality article/directory links that Google is devaluing.

Have you changed any content? Had a look at your robots.txt file and make sure nothing is no-indexed? You need to have a look at all these things before jumping to a conclusion.

Remove your adsense until you get traffic and rankings. Your link profile is horrible as well, massive amount of comment spam with exact anchor which isn't doing anything for your rankings. You also have a massive percentage of nofollow links because of this, this doesn't hurt your site but obviously it seems part of your marketing strategy. You should try building content that can be shared out on social platforms etc..

Thanks for the reply. I understand business implications and why it's not a good strategy as have been there many times.

The reason I ask is for gimmicky brand domain names that use the .in, .im extensions etc.. and even .net in that sense as well. I've always stuck with .com/.co.uk but have seen some good domains that could be used with other extensions.

I've been thinking about buying some domains recently with some different extensions. In particular domains with country specific TLD's such as .in and .be etc.. But my question is has anyone had experience ranking domains like these in the UK market.

Is there a correlation between ranking and a country specific domain to rank in the UK market? I know I can target these domains at the UK market in GWMT, but is there a negative factor in trying to rank say a .in the UK?

The risk is still there if Google manages to find a connection. You ideally need different C-Block IP hosts as mentioned to link sites together to gain benefit. Although I would avoid the whole 'Blog network' and 'link wheel' idea, don't try and only link your sites together in a wheel. I have seen sites do this - shoot up the rankings brag about it and then never to be seen again.

Even if a keyword has 1300 exact match search volume research shows that you will likely only get around 37% of that through click throughs in an ideal situation.

This also fluctuates based on your title and meta description. Think how many times you've searched for something and skipped the first result because it didn't seem relevant or appealing to your search.

Check your meta title and description, is it in line with what others are using in that SERP?

It wouldn't hurt to have a link going to that page from the same domain, this is called deep linking by linking to a page that is not your homepage. Although once you have a link from a domain you should find other domains to build links from. I only really measure the value of unique referring domains as I believe Google only values a certain number of incoming links from a domain before devaluing the rest (think blogroll links or footer links).

Having the link to your new page on the same site won't give you the biggest impact. Ideally you want to find new sites to build deep links too. Diversify your link profile!

You need to add a redirect preferably in the .htaccess file so that index.php automatically redirects to the root. This should fix the problem as Google will currently see www.yourdomain.com/index.php and www.yourdomain.com/ and www.yourdomain.com asa 3 separate pages thus why your page authority is different. Google will also think they are duplicate content which is obviously bad!

This fix will work if mod_rewrite is enabled, but is usually enabled on most apache servers. http://www.askapache.com/htaccess/redirect-index-blog-root.html

Are you using wordpress or some kind of blog CMS? I have seen my posts shoot up the SERPS almost immediately after I post and then slowly over a few days creep back down and unless they start getting socially shared or linked to fall off the front pages. It's to do with how Google counts fresh content.

Look at subdomain metrics on open site explorer. Although you should give it time to crawl and discover links.

You can simply use a bit of ajax or javascript to do this or even a dynamic php script.

Search engines will see all of the text within the html, as all you are doing is showing the user certain parts of the text. It is completely fine, search engines are ok with this.

You should however give the option so that the user can choose to view other testimonials.

I do the same, I have a personal account and just set up pages for clients under that. In my mind it is really not the best solution as I am unaware what will happen when it comes to transfer. Possibly there is a solution of adding an admin and then letting them control it.

The other problem I find is having many Google account and having to use your real name! There are probably quite a few Google+ profiles with my name

Data merging: No and I feel your pain as I once worked for a client that had 3 profiles I had to keep going back and forward to from 3 different time periods.

Email: Yes. In your main Google account screen (your Google account where you find googleproducts etc.) you can add more email addresses that enable you to login to your Google account. So you can add a corporate address that would enable you to login to your Google account where you can access Analytics.

You can also add a separate user in Analytics with a corporate address and delete the original primary email address.

I put a project up on a well known freelance website for a completely unrelated task to link building. I got a response which just made me laugh and i must share it!

Hi,
Sir i am providing a good services always,I have a serious person,so our Bid is not only to win a chance work with you but also maintain a long Term relationship with the bridge of this project.And if you have find Any error and any thing out of your criteria so you have full authority To ask us about that,i will correct that always.here i am attach our Link sample,please check.

Budget £50 GBP:-

1.Social bookmarks Links 100 Links ALL PR1 AND PR1+

2.Forum posting Do-FOLLOW 250 Links ALL PR1

3.web2.0 links 50 Approved Submission every Article contain
5
links
your site so total 50*5=250 links,

4.1 article writing for web2.0 submission.

5.Link wheel :- 100 link wheel links.

TOTAL 500 LINKS IN £50 GBP

ALL work done in manually Sir.

I hope you like this.

I am waiting your positive response Sir, do not waste my time.

He actually sent me an excel sheet with all of his link wheel domains... all PR 1/2. Is anyone really stupid enough to go for something like this? I hoped post-penguin would wipe out this kind of activity!

I would ignore the m.domain ranking. You've done it right by re-directing based on user agents, although you should be able to see the overlap of the two sites. If they have both similar content then there's your first problem. Your second is that there isn't really a mobile specific or desktop specific index (my opinion!) that is why your mobile domain is ranking in desktop version.

You ideally want to block your mobile site from being crawled. When a user clicks on your normal desktop site listing on a mobile they will be redirected automatically to your mobile site anyway.

You could use IP re-directs, but they are notoriously innacurate especially if people are using proxies.

Obviously showing a .co.uk in Australia is not the best, but it is ranking high. One idea if the domains are the same and have the same content is to only target UK in webmaster tools with the uk domain and .com.au for Australia. This may not solve it though and may impact rankings.

Your best bet would be to do the Geo redirects. I wouldn't think there would be that many issues as you don't have hundreds of different countries.

What do they rank for and what are their main keywords? Find out the main keywords for the site and business and then go from there. Find the main competitors within those searches and then scope them out using SEOmoz competitive analysis tool to find out how they stand against your client.

Sign up for Bing Webmaster Tools and submit it in the same way as Google Webmaster Tools, although I have never found a real need to do this as if you are ranking in Google you usually find that your ranking in Bing unless something is seriously wrong and you've blocked Bing bot!

I found that majesticSEO picked up most of the links from these sources, although you may not find all of them. Export all the data you can if you have majesticSEO, I think aHrefs will also pick this data up.

I've noticed a drop in external links for some clients too. I wouldn't worry about it, it is the fallout from Penguin/Panda where Google has devalued certain links. Those 30k links or so that came from 5 domains could have been sitewide blogroll links or footer links of low quality that Google has removed from their index.

I would assume your right about DA, but I wouldn't worry about it that much unless your rankings are seeing a massive shift.

Your probably only going to get around 37% of the total traffic for that term in the #1 spot, there could be many factors that are affecting the traffic though such as meta descriptions and title. Your call to actions may not be enticing people to click. Have a look what the competitors are doing around the listings and try and test them and see if it results in an increase.

If you've changed a significant amount of content then Google has obviously re crawled your site and to it may look like a different page.

You may have over-optimised your page with too many keywords.

You may have put in too many internal links.

You may have fundamentally altered the html code to become less seo friendly.

You may have built links to your pages from low quality sources that harmed your site.

You may have altered the meta titles/descriptions that were ideal in the first place.

Your competitors could have been enhancing their seo activity at the same time.

I could list hundreds more but that's for you to work out as you've not given much information other than your site has dropped one place.

Although keywords in domain name do have relevance in ranking it should not be the sole focus of a business. I would rather have a solid brand name with no keywords in the domain than some long domain with brand+KW for the sole purpose of ranking. I work in highly competitive verticals where none of the top 5 have KW's in the domain, and the ones that do tend to rank at the bottom. It's all about branding and authority.

Setup a subdomain blog. on your site and a /blog directory and then use SEOmoz competitive link analysis. You will see it shows different DA, Google sees these as completely separate entities.

I do believe there is some value passed on, but from my own experience /blog ALWAYS wins over blog. and I've done numerous tests on this.

I have never seen an example of a .co.uk ranking well in the US market. The logical approach is to use a .com TLD and use Google WMT to set the target to US. You can't set a .co.uk as far as I believe because it's main purpose is to serve the UK market anyway. I have been in situations where a .com and .co.uk have both targeted at the UK and they basically end up cannibalising each other until one wins and one disappears.

Your best bet is to create a US-separate site (with different content!).

In my personal opinion you will never reach #1 with a .co.uk on google.com, I could be mistaken though and having a US IP address, US links pointing in may help.

You need to have a look at your rankings and find out which keywords were driving that traffic. Once you find the keyword(s) that have fallen then you can make the assumption that it could be Penguin.

Although looking at your domain, it is an obvious keyword based domain which was cracked down on as well. Look into Analytics though before assuming Penguin.

These sites are generally just cover ups for paid link directories.

Yes, sorry did not see the second link, and yes some web servers notably windows iis shared servers are pretty tricky at setting up .htaccess. Both are valid solutions though, just depends on circumstances.

Matt is right, but you may also want to use a .htaccess solution. Add this or get your devs to add this to your .htaccess file

<code class="htaccess" title="in your .htaccess file">RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]</code>

If you use this method plus Matt's then you may find you end up with a redirect loop. I personally use the .htaccess rule, but each to their own.

Google obviously sees your homepage as a more relevant page for that particular keyword. The steps I would take to rank a sub-page are to de-optimise the homepage for that specific term:

1. remove all mentions of keyword from homepage including meta title/desc and h1-h3 etc.

2. create product or keyword specific page you want to rank

3. make sure keyword is in the page url/title/desc/h1

4. create contextual or nav link on homepage using keyword to product/keyword page

There is no guarantee Google will see the sub-page as more relevant and rank it for your keyword, but taking these steps has worked for me in the past. Also there is no guarantee you will swap out the two in the same position!

One Word: No

Google see the text anyway as it is hard coded into the html, the JS is only used on the front end to show the user so they can hide/show the text.

In general terms there is no significant benefit to hosting in country, it was thought that it mattered more ages ago.

You should though host on different IP's, if you have a hosting package hosting all of your multiple .tld domains on the same IP there will be little or no benefit to link building. So in essence it would be good practice to host on different servers and why not in country if you are hosting that domain?

If the site content is exactly the same Google will see them as duplicate content. If the site content is different Google will see them as separate sites, however you will now have two sites competing for ranking with one another. Google usually sees the m.domain as for mobile but not always. I tend to use a user agent redirect which detects if users are on mobile based browsers and redirects them to the m.domain. So you can keep your normal listing in Google, yet when users click on it on a mobile device they will be redirected to the mobile page.

I think I answered the same question you posted before, but did you try and use canonical tags? As I said using noindex and nofollow is probably not the best option if Google doesn't know that it should show http: instead of https.

Have you tried searching for http versions of your site listed? Are there any pages that are just http listed?

Hi these reports were a very good read. You need to sign up to get them though.

http://econsultancy.com/uk/reports/mobile-websites-and-apps-optimization-best-practice-guide

http://econsultancy.com/uk/reports/seo-best-practice-mobile-seo

You would ideally use one email address to give continuity and to monitor and manage all your locations under one account. In fact I don't understand why you would have two accounts for two Google Places unless they were separate businesses.

Hi, this was recently asked at http://www.seomoz.org/q/following-penguin-what-is-the-best-practice-for-a-web-design-agency-placing-a-footer-link-in-client-sites. I added in the conversation and there may be answers you are looking for there.

You can change your page file names to your keywords. Make sure they are relevant to the actual page and not overly spammy.

so for example your kitchen quote page could be renamed from:

http://www.enchantingquotes.com/kitchenbath.html

to

http://www.enchantingquotes.com/**kitchen-**and-bath-quotes.html

The way to do this is to rename the actual files, you will have to remember to change all links and also add 301 redirects to each new page from the old. You can learn more about how to do that at http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/url and http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection.

It would basically end up as reciprocal links though. Not really benefiting any party. Web design agencies use footer links for their own benefit, as a former web designer I used to do this as well, although I only linked on brand and not as many designers do just now on keywords like 'web design by' or 'website designed by' and not their brand.

Many designers do link back to their clients in the form of portfolios and case studies, but generally not in the footer.

I saw "look for a job in an industry that is not as developed", I agree totally with you point regarding attacking long tails on PPC. This is a good strategy, but to recommend looking for a new job in a less developed industry is almost like saying just give up and try something easy.

I don't think that is good advice at all, those that think that SEO is not worth doing or impossible in certain sectors either are too lazy or do not know how. Simply throwing money at PPC is an option, and does provide short term benefit, but it's not a long-term solution for continued ROI.