Welcome to the Q&A Forum
Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.
Some answers on this before:
http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-many-keywords-max-can-i-optimize-each-page-for
Things you should definitely consider here:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/mapping-keywords-to-content-for-maximum-impact-whiteboard-friday
Hope this helps.
How many pages did you decide to leave and return a 404 page for? This will probably be your issue.
My recommendation would be to do something else with those old URLs as leaving them pointing to a 404 page is not the best idea IMO. If any of those old URLs have links pointing into them, you will be losing that value having them go to a 404. Other options are:
Send all those URLs to the homepage, this is generally a good place for a user to begin their journey if they need to search and find what they are looking for.
or.. create a specific page highlighting the fact that a new site was launched and that what they are looking for is no longer available, providing info on where to go from there. Similar to the 'Oops, that page seems to be missing' 404 page you have but without it being an actual 404.
Hope this helps.
Some good information already from Chad, but to answer your question directly, yes the amount of unique links (c-blocks) as well as the anchor text of those links could have a large impact on ranking positions.
Without knowing more about your site, the competitors and the phrases you want to rank for it is hard to know exactly what the issues could be, but other things to consider:
On page SEO - Are your optimised properly for the terms you think you should rank for and how do you compare to the competition?
http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/on-page-keyword-optimization/new
Above and beyond the general checks the tool above will run, do you have 'great' content in place on-page to match the search queries you want to rank for?
Penalties and Filters - 2012 was massive for Penguin and Panda, make sure you have not been over-linking or doing anything else Google doesn't like. It could be another reason why you are not doing so well for these terms.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/penguins-pandas-and-panic-at-the-zoo
Good Luck!
It definitely sounds like you should consider using HREFLANG as Matt already suggested. This can done via a sitemap and there is a nice tool from The Media Flow to help you with it:
http://www.themediaflow.com/resources/tools/href-lang-tool/
Based on your example above (using sub-folders for different countries) you should also consider the following if you are not doing it already:
Setting Geo-Location correctly in Google Web Master Tools for each country specific sub-folder.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.il/2008/04/where-in-world-is-your-site.html
Try and make your content unique and relevant for the different locations and those users. I understand you may have the same products available for these different markets, but if possible make sure country related elements are unique £ / $ etc. Shipping information might be different for example.
Wherever possible try and make it unique whilst trying to deliver the best experience for users from that country.
Good luck!
Hey Rick,
You should add this tag to your header in the html -
There is more info about this here -
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/
They write: og:image - An image URL which should represent your object within the graph. The image must be at least 50px by 50px and have a maximum aspect ratio of 3:1. We support PNG, JPEG and GIF formats. You may include multiple og:image tags to associate multiple images with your page.
Hope this helps - let me know if you have issues with implementation
Hi Rick,
We really think what you're doing here is tremendous - thanks for sharing this with the community and letting us try to help out.
After taking a quick look at the terms you're targeting, and reading some of the suggestions here in the responses, I looked at your backlink profile - downloading the data from Open Site Explorer, you get a very quick picture of what your backlink profile looks like.
You have 149 external followed links pointing at your domain. The vast majority of the anchor text is your site's name or some form of it. Very few of the links actually point to your site using the keywords you mentioned you would like to target. That's why building an awesome page all about downs syndrome, with great information, will also help you, so that you can go out and try to acquire some links with targeted anchor text for your terms you want to rank for. I'm attaching a word cloud (created by wordle.net) which gives you a very clear picture of the relative breakdown of your backlink anchor text profile. You can barely make out the word syndrome, and it's very small compared to your brand name. Keyword rich anchor text sends strong signals to Google that your site is relevant and authoritative for the various terms you are targeting and that it should rank for what you are trying to target.
The obvious caveat is that building up your backlink profile with targeted anchor text should go hand in hand with improving the content on your site and providing great resources for people looking for info about downs syndrome, which you already said you and your wife are working on.
I wish you guys the best of luck!
If this works, I have also learnt something new today. I always thought this just gave webmasters a chance to look at pages in the way Google would see them. Are you sure this actually sends the real Googlebot to crawl and cache a page?
I didn't see it mentioned here:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=158587
Or have you found that it just speeds up the process? i.e. Google have been given some form of indication of where to visit? Definitely interesting!
You can make links unreadable using certain techniques, but hiding those links will probably do you more harm than good.
I would re-consider what you list. Maybe everything does not need to be listed from the main nav on every page? I know it seems useful letting everyone get to where they want to go from one click, but it is not always 100% needed and can sometimes actually scare people off!
On your site, take 'Workers Compensation' under 'Practice Areas' - you don't have to list all the different types of workers compensation there, it could be that this information is displayed once getting to the 'Workers Compensation' page - in fact, I see it is already.
This is obviously a business decision you need to make, but something to think about.
My tools are showing almost 200 links on the page 193 internal and 6 followed external links. It isn't just about 'visible' links to users, but how many links are listed in the code. The majority of your links are from the drop down menus in the main navigation.
Hi Rick,
We really think what you're doing here is tremendous - thanks for sharing this with the community and letting us try to help out.
After taking a quick look at the terms you're targeting, and reading some of the suggestions here in the responses, I looked at your backlink profile - downloading the data from Open Site Explorer, you get a very quick picture of what your backlink profile looks like.
You have 149 external followed links pointing at your domain. The vast majority of the anchor text is your site's name or some form of it. Very few of the links actually point to your site using the keywords you mentioned you would like to target. That's why building an awesome page all about downs syndrome, with great information, will also help you, so that you can go out and try to acquire some links with targeted anchor text for your terms you want to rank for. I'm attaching a word cloud (created by wordle.net) which gives you a very clear picture of the relative breakdown of your backlink anchor text profile. You can barely make out the word syndrome, and it's very small compared to your brand name. Keyword rich anchor text sends strong signals to Google that your site is relevant and authoritative for the various terms you are targeting and that it should rank for what you are trying to target.
The obvious caveat is that building up your backlink profile with targeted anchor text should go hand in hand with improving the content on your site and providing great resources for people looking for info about downs syndrome, which you already said you and your wife are working on.
I wish you guys the best of luck!
I would definitely take carparts.com over car-parts.com and I would definitely take the .com over a .net (however a .com does not automatically trump a .net for rankings). If someone with a .net has a better site, better service and better inbound marketing then they will outrank you.
However .com is the most commonly used tld and having that automatically gives you an advantage. If your car parts business becomes popular and is spreading via word of mouth, it is way more likely that people will search or link to you using a .com rather than a .net.
However don't be put off completely by hyphens, then can still work. car-parts.com is still potentially an ok domain name. I think when Rand refers to spammy domain names he is talking about 2 hyphens plus! Like www.cheap-car-parts-boston.com. Again, please remember that people are more likely to search for and link to a domain without the hyphen, another advantage. It is always annoying to tell people about the hyphen when discussing a domain or website, so try and avoid if possible.
Some good information already from Chad, but to answer your question directly, yes the amount of unique links (c-blocks) as well as the anchor text of those links could have a large impact on ranking positions.
Without knowing more about your site, the competitors and the phrases you want to rank for it is hard to know exactly what the issues could be, but other things to consider:
On page SEO - Are your optimised properly for the terms you think you should rank for and how do you compare to the competition?
http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/on-page-keyword-optimization/new
Above and beyond the general checks the tool above will run, do you have 'great' content in place on-page to match the search queries you want to rank for?
Penalties and Filters - 2012 was massive for Penguin and Panda, make sure you have not been over-linking or doing anything else Google doesn't like. It could be another reason why you are not doing so well for these terms.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/penguins-pandas-and-panic-at-the-zoo
Good Luck!
You can make links unreadable using certain techniques, but hiding those links will probably do you more harm than good.
I would re-consider what you list. Maybe everything does not need to be listed from the main nav on every page? I know it seems useful letting everyone get to where they want to go from one click, but it is not always 100% needed and can sometimes actually scare people off!
On your site, take 'Workers Compensation' under 'Practice Areas' - you don't have to list all the different types of workers compensation there, it could be that this information is displayed once getting to the 'Workers Compensation' page - in fact, I see it is already.
This is obviously a business decision you need to make, but something to think about.
I do not have a definitive answer for you, just some thoughts.
In terms of SEO, having likes for your site and its individual pages probably makes more sense than fan page likes. Although how popular your FB page could tie into how popular Google thinks your brand is. In anycase, how much access Google has to FB is unknown and all these social signals are changing at a very fast pace, just recently Google stopped using Twitter in the same way and with the introduction of Google+ who knows what the future will hold.
Just to throw something else into the mix, Facebook shares is something else which I think is pretty important in all this. So that is potentially 3 things!
Some good reads, but be aware this stuff could have changed already:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/facebook-twitters-influence-google-search-rankings
http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/2011/06/yes-virginia-facebook-is-seo-smx-advanced/
This is actually a best practice IMO. If that page for whatever reason is duplicated somewhere else (could happen a year down the line) then you automatically eliminate the issue of dupe content and are already providing a directive to Google on which page is the original and which page to count.
This is actually a good question and there is lots you can do, obviously the higher quality your ebook, the bigger the opportunity.
A few ideas:
If you already have connections in your industry you can probably just go off and start doing a lot of this stuff. If you don't, it maybe worthwhile holding off a little with the real 'high quality ebook' and go out and build some industry relationships. Get in forums, leave comments on blogs, get on twitter or FB groups and engage and interact, help people out etc.. then go and do the above as you will have the right connections to help you make this a success.
My tools are showing almost 200 links on the page 193 internal and 6 followed external links. It isn't just about 'visible' links to users, but how many links are listed in the code. The majority of your links are from the drop down menus in the main navigation.
Hey Rick,
You should add this tag to your header in the html -
There is more info about this here -
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/
They write: og:image - An image URL which should represent your object within the graph. The image must be at least 50px by 50px and have a maximum aspect ratio of 3:1. We support PNG, JPEG and GIF formats. You may include multiple og:image tags to associate multiple images with your page.
Hope this helps - let me know if you have issues with implementation
Solid advice from Ryan from an on-site (internal linking) perspective.
In terms of off-site (link building) practices this is not a simple question and probably differs per industry and SERP. You should probably go off and do some competitor analysis. View the top 10 results for the keyword you are concerned about and run each result through OSE. Look through the 'anchor text distribution' tab for each result and see how often they use that particular anchor text, how much branded anchor text they use and other keyword variations. This should give you a good idea as to what your link landscape looks like in terms of anchor text usage.
A few things I would think about:
Is it possible for a site to be delisted for having to many links from the same keyword ?
Yes, you can definitely receive a penalty or filter via over-opitmization of anchor text and this is something very easy for search engines to spot. So be sure to vary your anchor text and keep it looking natural.
