Seiyav-

If you are looking for a simple and easy solution to start taking advantage of AB testing and getting landing pages created quickly without waiting for a developer, it is a very cost effective model. You can generate landing pages quickly and easily without developers.....you can set up testing easily and the system will provide you metrics to measure the results without a lot of in-depth thought.

There really are no downsides other than the cost.....

We have found with larger clients as they generate some expertise and some clarity regarding which landing pages are working better, then they start to bring it inside to generate more control, save money and become more knowledgable about AB testing and development of landing pages.  But unbounce is a great step in that process.

Good luck. Hope it helps..

Mark

Ask the thousands of sites that were content aggregating that got hammered with Pandas content updates. Aggregated content is duplicate content inherently . It isn't unique and original and creates a negative impact to a sites SEO. Now if the value is to not generate SEO but generate traffic that can be monetized in another way, go for it........but if you want to create solid SEO, STAY AWAY.

Hope this helps.

Mark

Not sure if you are missing the point but I think its worth revisiting the basics related to keyword research and what is important to understand.

First, when you talk about the Google Panda "abyss", I dont think that is the issue. The issue is kayak fishing is a highly competitive keyword ranked at 52% (using the keyword difficulty tool on seomoz). So you are competing with alot of other people to rank with that keyword. When I am building a basic keyword strategy for a company that is trying to generate some momentum, with a limited budget, then the first thing I do is focus on battles that we can win. Battles you can win are typically related to lower traffic and lower competitive keywords. Once you identify thos keywords you can rank them based on the value of traffic coming from those keyword searches and the competitive ranking (lowest is better than highest), then you start to build solid content around those keywords that will increase your keyword relevance and ranking.

I would guess that you would be analyzing 500-1000 keywords to come up with your master list. A couple of tools you might use are googles keyword tool...but instead of just entering a few of your primary words, take a different approach and find some sites that you think are doing a great job of seo for kayak and kayak fishing and enter their url in the keyword tool and see what types of keywords come up. Pull all of these words out into excel and rank them by level of competitiveness (lowest to highest ) and then go through and lookmat the corresponding search volume. Byu focusing on 20 keywords that have 50-100 monthly search volume, but are low competitive , where you can be ranked top 3 in all of them, will be easier than going after kayak fishing with 8,100 exact match traffic and a highly competitive 52% difficulty.

Finally, I would tell you to make sure you measure everyhting. "What you cant measure you cant manage."  SEOMOZ is a perfect tool to track weekly activity on your keyword rankings. As you publish new content, focus on one keyword and see what type of effect a couple of posts, blogs or articles have on your ranking.

Good luck. Hope this helps.

Mark

James- Great question.....let me provide a little guidance.....we have a bunch of ecommerce sites we help manage for SEO.I am going to lump together several of googles "focus areas" into one. They are duplicate content, shallow content and copied duplicate content. Because with an ecommerce site, all 3 of these items can be the same or interchangeable thing.   Here are the major issues/things to focus on:Alot of ecommerce sites, in the past, have been able to generate substantial SEO value by listing products in variations of sizes and colors and with brief descriptions , and then create 1,000's of pages of what used to be considered unique content; (Shallow content). THOSE DAYS ARE GONE.  Assuming you still have the standard information copied and pasted on every page, that you mention above, ideally you want 250 unique words of description of a product.  Bare minimum you should have 100 words.....and in addition to the on-page content, you should make sure your meta descriptions are unique. Remember, Unique means relevant content that is different.  With duplicate content issues, google isn't penalizing you to hurt your ranking but they will only give you SEO value for the page they think is unique...for example if you have 40 pages of the same product but small variations in color or size or sku, and little to differentiate the pages, then they will count those 40 pages as 1 page....you lose the opportunity to build 39 pages of unique content value. The last thing to be careful of is if you have product that other companies have.....(you are a distributor or supplier or wholesaler and not the manufacturer). Then the manufacturer posts standard info and a bunch of people copy it and use it. YOU WILL BE PENALIZED BY GOOGLE FOR THIS BECAUSE IT IS COPIED DUPLICATE CONTENT. Most important point to remphasis----you know you are going to have some duplicate content on a website......you know that it it likely that if you are selling different variations of the same product, that you will have alot of the same stuff.....again, make sure you have unique and different content focused on your keywords. Target at least 50% different or unique content on each page as a MINIMUM.....Hope this helps.Mark

Guys. Here is some definitive stuff from Matt Cutts from Google (if you can say he really ever gives us anything definitive)  about "above the fold"

"…sites that don’t have much content “above-the-fold” can be affected by this change. If you click on a website and the part of the website you see first either doesn’t have a lot of visible content above-the-fold or dedicates a large fraction of the site’s initial screen real estate to ads, that’s not a very good user experience. Such sites may not rank as highly going forward."

If you want to read the entire post, here is the link......

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/01/page-layout-algorithm-improvement.html

Time and effort to improve the numbers. That is why we do what we do.

Asking whether your rank and trust scores are good or average depends on what your competitors are doing and where you want to be. If the numbers are better than all of your competitors, then it is a great score. If it is lower than all your competitors than it isn't a good score. Ultimately, you will have a higher likelihood of ranking well with search engines the higher your scores are.

In a nutshell, MozRank means your link popularity score which is measured by the number of quality of links. MozTrust doesn't measure the number of links but the "trust" of the links-which means the higher quality sites that are linking , the higher your trust score is.

Here are more technical details regarding what the specific terms mean and how they are measured if you want more detailed information. I have given you the link for more information and some excerpts that should be helpful:

**http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/moztrustMozRank **

"How is MozRank Scored?We calculate this score on a logarithmic scale between 1 and 10. Thus, it's much easier to improve from a MozRank of 3 to 4 than it is to improve from 8 to 9. An "average" MozRank of what most people think of a normal page on the Internet is around 3."

"How can MozRank be improved?A web page's mozRank can be improved by getting lots of links from semi-popular pages or a few links from very popular pages."

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/moztrust

"MozTrust is SEOmoz's global link trust score. It is similar to MozRank but rather than measuring link popularity, it measures link trust. Receiving links from sources which have inherent trust, such as the homepages of major university websites or certain governmental web pages, is a strong trust endorsement."

Bottom line is don't focus on the numbers so much as the activity to help you increase the numbers. With activity and focus comes results. Good luck...

UNANIMOUS.  Dont do it. We had several sites we were working on, from an acquisition, that had it hidden and did some extensive research last month and got consistent feedback that it will be picked up by google.

This guys name is john doherty. He is an active contributor to seomoz and I have read some great seo articles from him.....in this one he gives an example of an seo audit and what to make sure you look for.....

http://www.johnfdoherty.com/seo-facepalms-dont-hide-content-behind-javascript/

Without any lack of clarity he tells you not to do it.....we got the same feedback from several other folks in seo at the agency level.

Good luck.

Slash all the way......read this article below that explains why it makes sense to do it. She does a better job than I would..... Authors name is Jennifer Kyrnin. Cutts and Kyrnin are in. make it happen.

Traditionally, URLs that pointed to files did not include the trailing slash, while URLs that pointed to directories do include the trailing slash. This means that:

http://webdesign.about.com/example/ is a directory, while
http://webdesign.about.com/example is a file

This helps speed up page loading because the trailing slash immediately tells the web server to go to thatexample/ directory and look for the [index.html](http://webdesign.about.com/od/beginningtutorials/f/index_html.htm) or other default file.

When you go to a URL without the trailing slash, theweb server looks for a file with that name. If it doesn’t find a file with that name, then it looks for a directory and looks for the default file in that directory.

Leaving Off the Slash Results in a Redirect – Redirects Slow Down Web Pages

When you leave off the slash on a URL that is pointing to a directory, you are forcing the server to do a 301 Redirect - HTTP Redirects - 301 Redirect Better than Meta Refreshredirect. While it may seem instantaneous to you, it does take slightly longer for a page to load from a redirect than from the direct URL. And every little bit adds up.

Don’t Include the Slash After Filenames

The only time you shouldn’t include a slash is after a file name in the URL. For example:

Type:
http://webdesign.about.com/example.html
Not:
http://webdesign.about.com/example.html/

If you add the slash, the web server will look for a directory named example.html, and most servers do not then try to find a file name of that name. So your customers would get a 404 error in that situation.

Always Include the Slash When Linking to Your Domain with No File Name

You can speed up access to your home page by including the trailing slash on your domain name URL. For example:

http://webdesign.about.com_/_

While you can’t control what your readers type into their location bar for your URL, you can control what you link them to. Always include the trailing slash in your URL links. If you include it in your marketing materials as well, you can help keep your pages loading quickly for your readers, as most people type whatever is printed without adding or removing characters.

Article link is here....http://webdesign.about.com/od/beginningtutorials/f/why-urls-end-in-slash.htm

Jason-

Unless you are King Tut, pyramids by nature are bad. The most common black hat SEO techniques all center around link building schemes, from pyramids to paying for thousands of links.

Here are some basic Google no-no's

• Buying backlinks, or otherwise providing monetary compensation for backlinks (including offering discounts for links, as we saw when Google punished overstock.com)
• Creating many sites just to provide backlinks to other sites — also known as link pyramids.
• Putting hidden text on your website, including very small text stuffed with keywords, or text that is the same color as the background or otherwise invisible.
• Creating doorway pages — pages that are designed solely to attract search engine attention that then redirect users to a different website. It’s important to note that this is different from landing pages, which exist on your website and are perfectly okay.
• Using proxy servers or generating dozens or hundreds of IP addresses to make sites look like many sites, for the purposes of increasing backlinks.
• Having duplicate content stolen, or “scraped” from other sites just to make your site look like it has lots of content and updates.

Backlinking that you should be focused on.

It sounds like you are making it out to be the holy grail. Backlinking is one important part of SEO but don’t get so wrapped up in your backlinking that you neglect other vital aspects of your SEO. Having said that these are the best places to initially focus for backlinks:

• Blog Commenting
• Forum Comments & Footer Links
• Article Syndication w/ link(s)
• Directory Submissions (Paid & Free)

Your linking portfolio should probably contain a combination of all of the ones listed above and then some. Search engines can identify where a link is from and easily enough what type of link it is and if all of your link building is focused on one type of link then it won't look as natural.

Backlinking IS important – but it’s not everything. Use your head when creating your SEO backlink strategy and you’ll have a manageable program that can produce great results.

Goog luck.

Base link is a normal submission with a link. Back link has more value with guest blogging.

HOW DOES THE BACKLINK MONITORING TOOL WORK?

This is the cheapest and simplest alternative I am aware of:

• Receive instant emails if any of your links were removed or nofollowed;
• Track your guest post social popularity (Likes and Tweets)
• Measure traffic from each of your guest posts (for that you’ll need to install a tracking code)
• Identify most efficient backlink sources (for example, to find places where you canguest post again).

To start tracking your guest posts or links, you’ll need to create a new project and specify your base URL. For all pages you add within one project, this very base URL will be monitored automatically (even if you don’t specify which link within a given page you want to track).

You can add / remove columns from the table (to adjust a clearer view) and sort by each column. You will also receive weekly summaries of your missing links and most popular link sources.

Handy url for more info.....   http://www.seosmarty.com/meet-mbg-tracker-the-simplest-and-cheapest-way-to-monitor-your-backlinks/

Time and effort to improve the numbers. That is why we do what we do.

Asking whether your rank and trust scores are good or average depends on what your competitors are doing and where you want to be. If the numbers are better than all of your competitors, then it is a great score. If it is lower than all your competitors than it isn't a good score. Ultimately, you will have a higher likelihood of ranking well with search engines the higher your scores are.

In a nutshell, MozRank means your link popularity score which is measured by the number of quality of links. MozTrust doesn't measure the number of links but the "trust" of the links-which means the higher quality sites that are linking , the higher your trust score is.

Here are more technical details regarding what the specific terms mean and how they are measured if you want more detailed information. I have given you the link for more information and some excerpts that should be helpful:

**http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/moztrustMozRank **

"How is MozRank Scored?We calculate this score on a logarithmic scale between 1 and 10. Thus, it's much easier to improve from a MozRank of 3 to 4 than it is to improve from 8 to 9. An "average" MozRank of what most people think of a normal page on the Internet is around 3."

"How can MozRank be improved?A web page's mozRank can be improved by getting lots of links from semi-popular pages or a few links from very popular pages."

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/moztrust

"MozTrust is SEOmoz's global link trust score. It is similar to MozRank but rather than measuring link popularity, it measures link trust. Receiving links from sources which have inherent trust, such as the homepages of major university websites or certain governmental web pages, is a strong trust endorsement."

Bottom line is don't focus on the numbers so much as the activity to help you increase the numbers. With activity and focus comes results. Good luck...

James- Great question.....let me provide a little guidance.....we have a bunch of ecommerce sites we help manage for SEO.I am going to lump together several of googles "focus areas" into one. They are duplicate content, shallow content and copied duplicate content. Because with an ecommerce site, all 3 of these items can be the same or interchangeable thing.   Here are the major issues/things to focus on:Alot of ecommerce sites, in the past, have been able to generate substantial SEO value by listing products in variations of sizes and colors and with brief descriptions , and then create 1,000's of pages of what used to be considered unique content; (Shallow content). THOSE DAYS ARE GONE.  Assuming you still have the standard information copied and pasted on every page, that you mention above, ideally you want 250 unique words of description of a product.  Bare minimum you should have 100 words.....and in addition to the on-page content, you should make sure your meta descriptions are unique. Remember, Unique means relevant content that is different.  With duplicate content issues, google isn't penalizing you to hurt your ranking but they will only give you SEO value for the page they think is unique...for example if you have 40 pages of the same product but small variations in color or size or sku, and little to differentiate the pages, then they will count those 40 pages as 1 page....you lose the opportunity to build 39 pages of unique content value. The last thing to be careful of is if you have product that other companies have.....(you are a distributor or supplier or wholesaler and not the manufacturer). Then the manufacturer posts standard info and a bunch of people copy it and use it. YOU WILL BE PENALIZED BY GOOGLE FOR THIS BECAUSE IT IS COPIED DUPLICATE CONTENT. Most important point to remphasis----you know you are going to have some duplicate content on a website......you know that it it likely that if you are selling different variations of the same product, that you will have alot of the same stuff.....again, make sure you have unique and different content focused on your keywords. Target at least 50% different or unique content on each page as a MINIMUM.....Hope this helps.Mark

You are going to have a problem with this.....Unfortunately, the combination of duplicate looking content and a directory/subdirectory structure causes sites to be stuck in Googles Panda filter.  Google pulled out a "large roll of duct tape" to fix the problem with multiple language version websites, writing “hreflang” on one strip and writing“canonical” on the other strip.

Basically, Google is telling us that we should use a regional subtag in our head tag on each URL to help Google’s spider figure out what kind of content is on each page and where it is intended. Once this is done, Google will consider that the content is intended for that region. Here are the rules for hreflang and canonical....make sure you are sitting down......

Hreflang

The hreflang attribute (hreflang: rel="alternate" hreflang="x") rules in a nutshell:

• Applies to any users from different parts of the world, with content translated in the native language to target that region.
• Used for multilingual websites using substantially the same content on all web pages (e.g., English pages for Australia, Canada, and the U.S.)
• Can specify the language, country, and URLs of content translated for multiple countries.
• Used when:
  • You translate only the template of your page (navigation and footer) and main content is still in a single language.
  • Pages have broadly similar content within a single language, but are targeted at different regions (e.g., English-language content targeted in U.S., UK, and Australia).
  • Content on the web page is fully translated (e.g., have Spanish, French, and English versions of each page).
• How to use rel="alternate" hreflang ="x"
  • If there are multiple language versions of the website, each language must use rel="alternate" hreflang="x" (e.g., a page in Spanish must have a rel="alternate" hreflang="x" link to the English and French version and the English and French version must include a link pointing to the Spanish site.

(For more information: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077)

Canonical

The multilingual canonical tag (rel="canonical") tells Google that x URL is the preferred location and the most important translated version of the content of the URL.

Multilingual canonical is:

• Used in conjunction with hreflang.
• Can be used when web pages have the same content in the same language targeting multiple countries.
• Sometimes users are directed to the wrong language.
• The canonical designates the version of content that gets indexed and returned to users.
• Use rel="canonical" tag on other versions of the webpage.
• When users enter content into search results, users will likely see the URL that corresponds to their language preference.

Putting hreflang and canonical together:

Spanish site is the canonical and contains the following tags: 
link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http://en.example.com/" /

English site contains the following tags: 
link rel="canonical" href="http://es.example.com/" /

French site contains the following tags: 
link rel="canonical" href="http://es.example.com/" /

(**CAN ONLY BE USED WHEN SPANISH IS THE MAIN LANGUAGE AND ONLY THE TEMPLATE IS TRANSLATED TO ENLISH AND FRENCH)

Hope this is helpful......All of this information can be found in the original author at this link:

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2137882/Newest-International-SEO-Challenge-Hreflang-Canonical-Tags

Jason-

Unless you are King Tut, pyramids by nature are bad. The most common black hat SEO techniques all center around link building schemes, from pyramids to paying for thousands of links.

Here are some basic Google no-no's

• Buying backlinks, or otherwise providing monetary compensation for backlinks (including offering discounts for links, as we saw when Google punished overstock.com)
• Creating many sites just to provide backlinks to other sites — also known as link pyramids.
• Putting hidden text on your website, including very small text stuffed with keywords, or text that is the same color as the background or otherwise invisible.
• Creating doorway pages — pages that are designed solely to attract search engine attention that then redirect users to a different website. It’s important to note that this is different from landing pages, which exist on your website and are perfectly okay.
• Using proxy servers or generating dozens or hundreds of IP addresses to make sites look like many sites, for the purposes of increasing backlinks.
• Having duplicate content stolen, or “scraped” from other sites just to make your site look like it has lots of content and updates.

Backlinking that you should be focused on.

It sounds like you are making it out to be the holy grail. Backlinking is one important part of SEO but don’t get so wrapped up in your backlinking that you neglect other vital aspects of your SEO. Having said that these are the best places to initially focus for backlinks:

• Blog Commenting
• Forum Comments & Footer Links
• Article Syndication w/ link(s)
• Directory Submissions (Paid & Free)

Your linking portfolio should probably contain a combination of all of the ones listed above and then some. Search engines can identify where a link is from and easily enough what type of link it is and if all of your link building is focused on one type of link then it won't look as natural.

Backlinking IS important – but it’s not everything. Use your head when creating your SEO backlink strategy and you’ll have a manageable program that can produce great results.

Goog luck.

Guys. Here is some definitive stuff from Matt Cutts from Google (if you can say he really ever gives us anything definitive)  about "above the fold"

"…sites that don’t have much content “above-the-fold” can be affected by this change. If you click on a website and the part of the website you see first either doesn’t have a lot of visible content above-the-fold or dedicates a large fraction of the site’s initial screen real estate to ads, that’s not a very good user experience. Such sites may not rank as highly going forward."

If you want to read the entire post, here is the link......

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/01/page-layout-algorithm-improvement.html

Base link is a normal submission with a link. Back link has more value with guest blogging.

HOW DOES THE BACKLINK MONITORING TOOL WORK?

This is the cheapest and simplest alternative I am aware of:

• Receive instant emails if any of your links were removed or nofollowed;
• Track your guest post social popularity (Likes and Tweets)
• Measure traffic from each of your guest posts (for that you’ll need to install a tracking code)
• Identify most efficient backlink sources (for example, to find places where you canguest post again).

To start tracking your guest posts or links, you’ll need to create a new project and specify your base URL. For all pages you add within one project, this very base URL will be monitored automatically (even if you don’t specify which link within a given page you want to track).

You can add / remove columns from the table (to adjust a clearer view) and sort by each column. You will also receive weekly summaries of your missing links and most popular link sources.

Handy url for more info.....   http://www.seosmarty.com/meet-mbg-tracker-the-simplest-and-cheapest-way-to-monitor-your-backlinks/

Ask the thousands of sites that were content aggregating that got hammered with Pandas content updates. Aggregated content is duplicate content inherently . It isn't unique and original and creates a negative impact to a sites SEO. Now if the value is to not generate SEO but generate traffic that can be monetized in another way, go for it........but if you want to create solid SEO, STAY AWAY.

Hope this helps.

Mark

Slash all the way......read this article below that explains why it makes sense to do it. She does a better job than I would..... Authors name is Jennifer Kyrnin. Cutts and Kyrnin are in. make it happen.

Traditionally, URLs that pointed to files did not include the trailing slash, while URLs that pointed to directories do include the trailing slash. This means that:

http://webdesign.about.com/example/ is a directory, while
http://webdesign.about.com/example is a file

This helps speed up page loading because the trailing slash immediately tells the web server to go to thatexample/ directory and look for the [index.html](http://webdesign.about.com/od/beginningtutorials/f/index_html.htm) or other default file.

When you go to a URL without the trailing slash, theweb server looks for a file with that name. If it doesn’t find a file with that name, then it looks for a directory and looks for the default file in that directory.

Leaving Off the Slash Results in a Redirect – Redirects Slow Down Web Pages

When you leave off the slash on a URL that is pointing to a directory, you are forcing the server to do a 301 Redirect - HTTP Redirects - 301 Redirect Better than Meta Refreshredirect. While it may seem instantaneous to you, it does take slightly longer for a page to load from a redirect than from the direct URL. And every little bit adds up.

Don’t Include the Slash After Filenames

The only time you shouldn’t include a slash is after a file name in the URL. For example:

Type:
http://webdesign.about.com/example.html
Not:
http://webdesign.about.com/example.html/

If you add the slash, the web server will look for a directory named example.html, and most servers do not then try to find a file name of that name. So your customers would get a 404 error in that situation.

Always Include the Slash When Linking to Your Domain with No File Name

You can speed up access to your home page by including the trailing slash on your domain name URL. For example:

http://webdesign.about.com_/_

While you can’t control what your readers type into their location bar for your URL, you can control what you link them to. Always include the trailing slash in your URL links. If you include it in your marketing materials as well, you can help keep your pages loading quickly for your readers, as most people type whatever is printed without adding or removing characters.

Article link is here....http://webdesign.about.com/od/beginningtutorials/f/why-urls-end-in-slash.htm

Not sure if you are missing the point but I think its worth revisiting the basics related to keyword research and what is important to understand.

First, when you talk about the Google Panda "abyss", I dont think that is the issue. The issue is kayak fishing is a highly competitive keyword ranked at 52% (using the keyword difficulty tool on seomoz). So you are competing with alot of other people to rank with that keyword. When I am building a basic keyword strategy for a company that is trying to generate some momentum, with a limited budget, then the first thing I do is focus on battles that we can win. Battles you can win are typically related to lower traffic and lower competitive keywords. Once you identify thos keywords you can rank them based on the value of traffic coming from those keyword searches and the competitive ranking (lowest is better than highest), then you start to build solid content around those keywords that will increase your keyword relevance and ranking.

I would guess that you would be analyzing 500-1000 keywords to come up with your master list. A couple of tools you might use are googles keyword tool...but instead of just entering a few of your primary words, take a different approach and find some sites that you think are doing a great job of seo for kayak and kayak fishing and enter their url in the keyword tool and see what types of keywords come up. Pull all of these words out into excel and rank them by level of competitiveness (lowest to highest ) and then go through and lookmat the corresponding search volume. Byu focusing on 20 keywords that have 50-100 monthly search volume, but are low competitive , where you can be ranked top 3 in all of them, will be easier than going after kayak fishing with 8,100 exact match traffic and a highly competitive 52% difficulty.

Finally, I would tell you to make sure you measure everyhting. "What you cant measure you cant manage."  SEOMOZ is a perfect tool to track weekly activity on your keyword rankings. As you publish new content, focus on one keyword and see what type of effect a couple of posts, blogs or articles have on your ranking.

Good luck. Hope this helps.

Mark

are you tracking the actual data entered or that they completed it? If its just whether they completed it, then analytics can track it. if its the data, then you need a crm or other system to pull the data or you can use a contact form widget that has the ability to pull the data for you.