Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Bob-

You probably already know this but Panda is about content quality and penguin is about link profile quality. Here is what we have done recently for some of our ecommerce clients that have come to us because they had panda or penguin update issues.

1.) Definitely need to look at your product descriptions to make them unique. We had a large client with 4 ecommerce stores and a large number of similar products that got hammered by Panda. We ended up rewriting 80% of their content related to similar products and got them back on track to almost the same exact position before the panda update.  If you are in a situation where you need to prove the concept or it seems insurmountable, then just focus on rewriting descriptions for your top 100-150 products to do a mini test with the content strategy. You will see positive results or will avoid the penalty.

2.) We have worked with several ecommerce companies that have told us they dont have a large amount of "inter-linking" going on but when we did some analysis we found thousands of links between the sites they owned. Their issue was related to the fact they had several seo people that kept adding additional links between the sites without really knowing what the guy before them had done.   Just make sure your interlinking doesnt look forced and it makes sense. To link a category page to a product page to a video page can make sense. To have 100 links between 2 pages on 2 different sites looks forced.  Not good.

Obviously if you are creating a new site and it isnt linked to your other site, you will be avoiding any issues related to the penguin update. But if there are vaible opportunities to link between sites that isnt overdone, then dont lose that opportunity altogether.

Hope this helps. Good luck.

Mark

David-

Ian is right on the money. Dont build two sites....waste of time.

Create additional content related to the southafrican market for the core site and make sure you properly identify it in the URL and sitemap so there is a distinction.

Definitely use markup for mutilingual.  You can provide people a south african content tool/link  on the home page that takes them to the south african content within your site.

Ther is absolutely no way you can duplicate 100% of the content....In fact, absed on several companies we have worked with that have done something very similar, we were forced to write 80% new content for all of the associated pages...made a huge difference in the SEO and the localization.

Make sure you are utilizing google + in africa so that you can localize the address and the applicable SEO.

Good luck.

Mark

Bristolweb-

Nice job on the site. Here are some things you can do to help your ranking:

For local search, if you don't have a physical address, then you can use one of the owners home addresses. verifying and posting the address is a two stage process. The address can be verified by postcard at the owners home, then when you go to add content on the listing that is confirmed, you can hide the address....and remember, you might not even have to hide the address if the product being sold is a non-retail product and people willbe doing eveyrthing online. First things first...get the business verified by postcard.

Second, once it is verified, make sure you utilize the SEO opportunity online. Make sure you put as much keyword rich content on the listing and make sure you have pictures and phone number and the website linked........

Third, do some research on the competitors and find out where they have generated links; (use the opensite explorer tool to identify those links). Then generate some solid content (or have them generate it) and then start doing some link building. There are a bunch of super solid artricles on link building in SEO MOZ and if you want the basic outline, go to their zSEO guide. here is the link        http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links

Wordpress isn't limiting their SEO value but instead is probably improving their value as it is one of the better CMS's to use for SEO. Make sure you have an SEO plug in installed that will help you generate better SEO (SEO by Yoast is super solid). Make sure you have the XML sitemap correctly created for google and other search engines to use when they crawl the site. Make sure the site has been indexed by all the major search engines.

Good luck.

Mark

Julia-

Good problem to have. I can provide you with some overall suggestions related to what you need to focus on as we have brought over 20+ wordpress sites this year that are in a similar situation.  Good content; good ranking; need to clean it up but dont want to lose any seo value.....

Here are some of the most important items:

• Make sure you do an upfront XML sitemap audit so you know exactly what you have. This is your opportunity to reformat it if it needs it and make sure the site is set up correctly.
• Make sure you do a crawl of the site immediately prior to making any changes so you can use it as the benchmark for what you have today and to make sure you are improving in all areas. Make sure you understand everything that is being indexed and everything that isnt being indexed.
• You care the most about content that is being indexed. So make sure you focus on that content and conversion first.
• Make sure you back up the site in its entirety. If something weird happens, you want to be able to reinstall and start back at step 1.
• You want to make sure that as you move over pages that are currently ranked that you make as few changes as possible.....Keepng the url the same with the preceding blog is a good strategy......another option might be to leave the url structure exactly the same and doing a 301 redirect from the new url might be a solid solution if there is any impact to page ranking when you change the url by adding a preceding /blog/ in the url. (IMPORTANT NOTE: You will lose a small amount of linkjuice if you do a 301 redirect. It never transfers 100% of the linkjuice.)
• Make sure you challenge some of your wordpress plugins you are using. Many of the older plugins I have been using over the last 9 months, even though i continue to install updates, have been outdone by new plugins. This is your chance to make sure you have the best. (For example I use to use an old google analytics plug-in that was solid. The new google analyticator is much easier and has more functionality and provides me a dashboard view that is handy.)
• Make sure if you have pages that have backlinks that you bring them over with the same url structure or that you do redirects from the old to the new, so that you still get the link juice.

Hope this helps.

Mark

Also please identify which keywords were the original keywords and which keywords are the new keywords.

Clotaire-

Within Google Webmaster tools you should always focus on the services offered for keywords because there is another section that allows you to focus on the geo-targeting of your local area.

But also, depending on how competitive your local situation is in photography,  don't forget to combine keywords together to create additional value. "Colorado Springs Photography" can be more powerful for you that just plain "photography".

Also, make sure you are registered on google places and have some of your customers provide some citations and reviews. This can deliver short and long term SEO value for you.

Good luck. Hope this helps.

Mark

Great question.

Get rid of smugmug.com and use a simple plug in for your site to keep the photo gallery on the site. You are sending all the value over to them......or create a plug in that allows them to view the site but they have to stay on your site.....

Another option is with some photo gallery sites you can embed the technology and make it part of your site structure.....so it would be at www.yoursite.com/photo gallery

Once you do that the ability to get people to share your site becomes a no brainer because all they need to do is send them to your core photo gallery to look at pictures...and when they click the link they are on your site.

Onc eother thing you missed.....if you can figure out how to upload the photos with met descriptions and seo value you will generate seo value for each picture. For example: the picture should be uploaded as:

persons name_wedding_name of your company_possibly a keyword

Then you will start to get seo value from each picture related to the core keyword (wedding) and your other keywords.

If you want to see some of our stuff in action go to smallpetselect.com. All those animal photos are driving huge social media likes and shares and huge seo value.....

Hope this helps.

Mark

Nathan-

I like the site. You did a nice job......Lots of content and some calls to action....solid job.

You seem to be a little off track with your question.Your landing page doesn't need to be somewhere on the home page for google to crawl it. It needs to be properly indexed in the XML sitemap.

Take 2 steps back and make sure you understand whats important. The landing page is to provide the client or potential client with an opportunity to decide if they are interesting in your company after they do a search and end up on your landing page from organic or paid listing. In that process, Google and other search engines will create a quality and relevance score for their search terms that they entered. That is based on your landing page content and keywords first and then your overall site. The higher the quality score and relevance for those keywords the lower your cost per click will be with PPC and the better you will show up in organic search. So first make sure your landing page has quality content that is keyword rich.

Second, make sure it is indexed properly in the overall site....if you are focused on commercial real estate listings, you might have it as a listing for commercial real estate offer under the sitemap. Make sure it is lumped together with other similar content so you will get the seo value from it for the overall site as well as the landing page value.....

Hope this makes sense. Good luck.

Mark

Insite-

Sucks but that is the limitation. You can post your request to increase this to more words at this link....

https://seomoz.zendesk.com/forums/293194-seomoz-pro-feature-requests

Not sure if you knwo this, but seomoz just raised some vc money. Now that rand raised some big dough I have to believe that they are working on a bunch of revisions to the tools.  SEOMOZ is already worth every penny, so anything they add will be gravy.....good luck....

Mark

Force7-

Send me your email address and I will have zach spend 30 minutes with you. If there is still an issue, I will get involved. May the force be with you...

Mark

Gareth-

Facebook share is gone...this is from the facebook site....

The Share button has been deprecated in favor of the Like button and Feed Dialog, and will no longer be supported. Please use the Like button or Feed Dialog whenever possible to drive maximum traffic to your apps.

You get facebook likes from havign someone facebook "like" thumbs up your site or account.

Mark

Mark-

Need more info.  Are you linking between the sites? Do you have truly unique content on each site for a majority of the content?

Here are some reasons why you could have the issue:

You are linking between the sites and passing link juice from the Uk sites to the other sites.

You have duplicate content issues on the UK site ( you dont have entirely unique content on the UK site). For example, you might have 60-70% of the same verbiage on the NY site as the UK site. Assuming that the NY site is being seen by Google as the original site with this content, then the UK site content will be seen as duplicate content and will be discounted in  SEO value.

If you run an opensite explorer report on each site, you will be able to see what type of authority the pages have for specific keywords and then this will help you determine if you have the above issue.....

Hope this helps.

Mark

are you looking for www.homepage.com or homepage.com.

Mark

Brian-

Negative SEO does work. It is real.....you can do it. I can give you a number of examples where we have had clients come to us because they have had competitors do negative seo and they have been hurt by it....temporarily.

So where does that leave you? There are always going to be ways to beat the system.  Even today you could back over your neighbors mailbox and drive away and not get caught. You still have to ask yourself is that what you want to be doing with your time and energy. Just like everything else, the search engines will eventually figure out how to identify when it has happened and the strategy will go away.

Without giving too much detail, I will also tell you that on several of our new clients that had a negative seo issue related to their competitors hammering them, we were able to identify who was doing the negative seo and we ended up passing their information along to google and others. It was not pretty for them.....

Good luck. Please show me the thumbs up.

Mark

You are losing the big picture......the content on the site is the content. New content can continue to focus on "eye  care" or "eye center" regardless what the core name is.......  Make sure if they change the name and change the url you redirect from the old url to the new. Remember, you also have the ability to generate additional "defensive urls' on the same subjects that support either term.

Good luck. Please show me the thumbs up.

Mark

Adam-

It seems to have moved up to 30 in page authority.  Make sure you have the 301 redirect set up with "follow".

Are you still splitting seo value between www.smallhope.com..... and smallhope.com.... or is everyhting redirected to one or the other?

Mark

YESdesign-  Simple and easy. Just update your sitemap and remove the page.

Hope this helps.

Mark

Nick-       I love simple and easy.  301 redirects or rel canonicals....you will lose a little link juice...but not a lot....

Hope this helps.

Mark

Gerardo-

If you are using wordpress...yes. There is a google analytics plugin you can use to verify.

The better question is "Why don't you install it in the header or footer so it is on every page?"

Hope this helps.

Mark

Joel-  Good question....There is no simple page or post answer...depends on what you do.... The only real quantitative difference between them is that posts are built to be social media instruments and pages are built to be static.

This guys does a long example of differences between posts versus pages in seo and comes to no real conclusion...but this section is interesting and I have used it in our seo wordpress playbook I created........read below:

Author is HESHAM ZEBIDA

• WordPress posts and pages both pings other sites when they created or updated (both should be indexed well).
• Both has same SEO options.
• Pages do not cycle through by date, but this doesn’t mean it has no publishing date. (I wonder how Google will deal with it regarding microdata)
• Pages are not included in RSS feed, but this plugin can include Wordpress pages in RSS feed.
• Pages has nothing to do with the blog, it’s not hanged to anything (only sub pages) It’s an awesome flying piece of content!
• Use pages to for content you want people to see every time they visit your blog.

Here is the link to the whole article if you want to spend the time....

http://www.famousbloggers.net/posts-vs-pages.html

Bottomline is if you are building content to use RSS feed and social media-make it a blog. if you are building content to be static, build a page.

One more thing, there are some wordpress themes that it is better to use a blog versus a post because they build in category or taxonomy functionality into one r the other that can provide value.

Hope this helps.

Mark

Cindy-

Need more info.....when did the drop happen? How dramatic a drop? Over how long a period of time?

Duplicate listings under another category are an issue if they used the exact same address and phone number, Not good......but it doesnt sound like that would be the only reason.

One other thing I would mention is that onpage optimization could be the reason if their competition has done a strong job. remember, Google is generating a relevancy/quality score for the keyword. If the competition isnt doing anything locally with the keyword, then they might have gotten an artificially good result with the keyword. Then if several of their competitors add some basic keyword content, they could get bumped significantly in ranking.

Again, I need the date of when it happened.

Mark

Kevin-     You are in a  pickle....I have to make a couple of assumptions based on the information you gave:

Assumption #1: He kept the same url's and the new site is one of them.

Assumption#2: He had to have had some basic seo done on the first site.

Assumption #3: You must have changed some of his content/ removed old content when you upgraded his site.....

Question #1 answer:  It is "reasonable for a site to rank well for a localized non competitive term based on A scores" but it certainly isnt a guarnatee and you seem to be missing the real poinrt. An A score of a page analysis only means the foundation is built well.....to get local search results you need hyper-geotargeted localized keyword focus and content. If you rewrote his content to make it sound better and chnaged the density and use of localized keywords, you basically fed yourself poison. Good news is you need to go back and add in localized keywords and build back up the content.

Question #2 answer: Doing a 301 redirect is a perfectly viable solution to pass link juice from one site to the other. Understand when you pass the link juice the other URl will drop in relevancy and quality score and you wont be able to pass 100% of the link juice.

Hope this helps.

Mark

Rochelle-

Not asking for too much if you find the right person.  People that have been doing running an internal digital marketing department for 7 years or more have been forced to have experience in both on-page and off-page optimization as well as PPC/SEM.  Remarketing and display marketing is just another extension of PPC because converting leads and follow up "drip marketing" are a natural extension of lead generation and conversion.

Should be a Digital Marketing Director or with the assumption that the position is internally focused on supporting all of your company "lead generation" initiatives probably makes sense as Director Business Development-Digital Marketing.

Feel free to Private Message me to discuss what you are looking for and what the position entails. I might be able to help you and I am based out of Michigan.

Hope this helps.

Thanks- Mark

Pashmina-

We have been testing close to ten different PPC software solutions over the last 3 months and I will probably be releasing my findings in another month that hopefully will be useful to people. There is no one size fits all approach, so depending on what you specifically what you need and what you want to do, will determine what software makes the most sense.  I am managing over $150k a month in PPC spend so what I need might be different then you....

Googles tools are solid tools that work. But there is a reason that all of these other companies are in business and selling software and collecting money from companies.....googles tools are free and if they were as good these other companies would be out of business.  Googles tools are a little cumbersome and arent really user friendly but they get the job done. But there is one HUGE fundamental difference that no one seems to want to talk about.  If you go to a car dealer and you want to negotiate the best deal on a car and you will spend up to $40,000, do you walk in and write them a check for $40k and tell them use your system to get me the best possible deal?  NO WAY.  But that is what you do with google. We cut them a check and load our ad accounts and then allow them to tell us how to optimize our bids. Fundamentally that is also enough to make you a little nervous and look for other tools......

Having said that we have tested the "wordwatch" system. (The fact that they raised $1.5 million is better than if they were broke but doesn't guarantee their success).  This is what we have found so far:

• They have made some PPC changes related to normal analysis that has saved us some time. On average I am saving 2-3 hours of analysis a week because of the data and recommendations.
• Typically systems will make recommendations and require you to go in and make changes. Their system will actually go in and make them directly. (Good and bad news)
• Their negative keyword recommendations and long tail keywords have been helpful.
• Their GUI isn't great.
• Their dashboard is ok but the fact that it doesn't have an audit/change report is a weakness.

This system is a light system. If you are managing fairly simple campaigns in a business that is fairly stable and you didn't want to do any PPC work then this is a solid value for the cost....and there really is no risk with a month to month contract/pay as you go.

Let me give you another recommendation that is more expensive but more robust. wordstream.  They also have a freemium trial. There are some things I dont like about the system but overall it is a powerful system and provides more tools and functionality than wordwatch and has worked well with our MCC system importing the data directly.....Worth comparing for you.......

Hope this helps.

Mark

Punam-

If you use the download csv feature and it drops it into excel you will need to look for column "M" and "O". This will tell you "URLs with duplicate content" and "URL's with duplicate title tags". Just sort by these columns first...then sort by the URL in column A and you will know which pages you need to make a change on.

Hope this helps.

Mark

Luka-

You need google places citations and reviews.

You need to make sure that your google places listing is SEO optimized; pictures; seo keywords; description; etc.

You need to do some offpage seo to counteract the old link building issues. Focus on geotargeted keywords in your specific area.

If you have multiple locations, make sure every location is listed correctly in google places.

Make sure your wordpress site is seo optimized.....are you using an seo plugin?

If you don't have the time and need some quick results I can refer you to a small firm we use that has fixed pricing and doesn't get paid until they get you ranked in google places....no brainer....

Hope this helps.

Mark

Adam-  Could be a couple of things...

Option #1: there should be a drop down chat box or exclamation point that you can click on to get further information on why it is ineligible. You need to make sure that the ad is following all the requirements.

Option #2: for google voice enabled campaigns there is a click threshold minimum for the adgroups-(I think it is 25 clicks for a month)-that will allow you to show a google voice number extension....

The last thing is make sure you have set up the phone extension correctly....might be an issue there.....(have you enabled the phone impression column in the setup?) here is a solid link that you cna use to make sure you have set it up correctly....its entitled what are phone extensions and how do i implement them?

http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en-GB&answer=173346

Good luck.Hope this helps...

Mark

Bridgeline Digital-   My man.....its Duplicate content. You cant just take the same page and change a few things and then expect you are going to generate SEO value....Google is seeing all these duplicate pages and giving you credit for only one (the one they think is original). It doesnt matter if you have 10,000 dealers....they see one page....

So the next question is "what do you do?"

Answer is you need to figure out how to create original content on each dealer page.  Let me give you some basic parameters based on several national dealer programs we had to role out for SEO:

• More than 50% of the content should be original. 70% will assure success. 50% will generate success a majority of the time.
• Make sure that 50% is at least 100 words in length. Should be closer to 300 words.
• Make sure you come up with a way to change the Alt tag/meta tag descriptions for photos and overall page content.....(Doesnt do you any good to change the written content and then leave all the meta tags and alt tags the same or blank.)

One thing we did that saved us time and energy is we gave every dealer in the country (over 1000 dealers ) a chance to write a small blurb about their business (we required 300 words) through an email form we sent them that automatically updated their dealer page...... We told them if they updated it in less than 7 days, they got entered into a drawing for a kindle....We got over 950 dealers to add the content...BINGO!!!!!!...we then used the content to update the alt tags and meta tags to generate additional differentiation.....

Hope this helps. Thanks

Mark

Gary,

Both tactics have their advantages and disadvantages. You do get inbound links from your external blog, but you also need to consider the benefits of using the blog on your site. When a  reader goes to you can get the traffic on page. When a reader goes to your site, they can potentially become a customer.

I think the response by Jeffery Tull here http://www.seomoz.org/q/which-is-better-for-linkbuilding-internal-or-external-blog really sums up the pros and cons of your practices.

Best of luck

ZeeGirl-    If you are properly using a no index there is no issue. And remember, if you are doing PPC, the content on the page will determine your quality score/relkevance and PPC...so make sure it is super strong related to the PPC ad and keywords.

You can avoid the no index altogether if you change most of the content to be unique (then witha  little extra effort you kill two birds with one stone). You get ALL the extra SEO value attached to the main site and you get he QS and relevancy score high for the landing page. The standard is at least 50% unique verbiage...shoot for 75% plus and you will have no issues.....

Hope this helps. Please show me the love and give me the thumbs up. Thanks.

Mark

Alex-      Great question. Nice website. You guys did a nice job on the design and the structure and the content. Lots of solid content in the sitemap....... The answer is yes. It can be indexed correctly. You will want to test it. When I am using wordpress, I actually test the slide panel content to make sure it is getting indexed correctly with the seo plug in. You should do the same to make sure it isnt hiding behind the code.

We have had some sliders not work correctly to show text and show up as images.......so in that case for a short term solution, we have enhanced the meta tag description and alt tags to make sure it maximizes seo value.

We have also found that some sliders don't index on the home page but we can get them to show up on other secondary pages.....but make sure that you don't have the same content on every page , as it will show up as duplicate content.

One other thing.....don't plan on alot of people clicking on the slider....from our testing with over 30 websites that use a slider like that, on the right hand side, less than 7% of the visitors actually clicked on them....we found that most users didn't know there was hidden text....

Hope this helps.

Mark

Quilbur-     You always want to categorize by the most specific heading......this will always help you in both paid and organic search results.......

Airplane, helicopter and rocket are much more specific search headings....then your subheadings of engines, fuels and accessories make more sense as secondary keywords........

Hope this helps.

Mark

Chris-        Hoping I can help you avoid the sack!!!

I will divide my feedback into four areas:

• Website layout
• CMS
• Analytics
• Creating unique content focused on your keywords

Website layout is average....the fact that you have used so much of your home page real estate for navigation doesnt make sense. you have multiple options for home, about us, custom cable and links.....the red is overhwleming....the choices are overwhelming. Way too busy.....

Take a step back and think about why is someone coming to the page? what are the top three things they might want to accomplish?  then get rid of everything else and focus on those three things....you cna remove all of your other headings and subheadings that are not call to action items, down to the footer or condensed into one heading.....

• If your goal is to get them to order cable now then there should be a box "Order cable now" or "check out our prices now"...
• If your goal is to get their email information to follow up market to them, then there should be a call to action box that says"save money with our cable now" or "Sign up for special weekly deals" and then you would have an email box they could fill in and submit.
• If your goal is to get them to see why your cable is unique....then post that information with a call to action.

CMS.  Im not sure what CMS you are using, but hopefully you are being indexed correctly and the sitemap is being generated that is solid and provides guidance to the search engines. We recommend wordpress because we have seen that when we convert the same exact content from another site to wordpress, we not only upgrade the user experience but it gets better SEO value instantly because of the architecture and ease of use with plugins. Whatever you are using, make sure you have a solid foundation.

Analytics. You need to install google analytics on your pages so you can track the activity on your site. You need to find out where people are going on the site, how long they are spending on each page and where they are abansdoining. Just install the code on every page in the footer and then set up some basic reporting to get you vital information related to what you are talking about above. You dont know what you dont know....get the data and you then will have some clarity on what is happening.

Creating unique content with keywords. Let me offer you a few suggestions....

• Pick one primary or money keyword on each page. And then pick 2-3 sub keywords that are important and relevant. Just focus on those....don't pick 10 keywords a page....
• When writing content make sure you include the main keyword in the title, in the first sentence and the last sentence.
• Make sure you mention the other sub keywords at least 2-3 times in the main article/content.
• Make sure you use bold, italics and underlines at least once in the content.

Don't stuff the keywords in the content......use the keywords only if it makes sense in the context of what you are writing about.....

Lastly, it sounds like you might not be maximizing your seo value for alt tags and meta tags.....make sure your meta descriptions and picture alt tags are seo optimized with your keywords for that page.  Again, with wordpress this is a simple process of filling in the required fields for one of the wordpress plugins.

Good luck. Hope this helps. Please show me the three thumbs up!

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

Diane-     Simple solution. Dont confuse what your customers see with what google will index......Build solid content in the footer that is about us, lifestyle magazine "sections", etc.......

Then make sure the sitemap includes the information in the footer in a logical way...so start off with your major headings and then branch out into the sub headings......

Then make sure your titles and meta tag descriptions re-emphasis that it is a lifestyle magazine.....

here is an example from the new york times(see link below-scroll to the bottom of the page)....you will see the major headings at the top of the page are only 2-3 ......then they have all of their other informative and content rich headings listed at the bottom (12-15+)

http://www.nytimes.com/?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1336497757-5zKeD4ddSZ0i9EQC0JDDZg

Hope this helps.

Doug-      Its kind of like getting dressed up for a big party. Someone could ask you how important is it to wear a nice shirt? The answer is it is important; but so is fixing your hair; your shoes; brushing your teeth etc...Optimized online press releases are an effective part of your overall strategy if you have interesting stuff to release.

If you do online releases, to optimize make sure that you do several important things:

• Anchor text links (3 are recommended). Make sure they link back to your product or solution page, to your blog post which will mention the release and of course your home page.
• Make sure you have images. Pictures and videos can DRAMATICALLY INCREASE your CTR. In the images make sure you have alt-tags....
• Make sure your title of the release is keyword optimized. And make sure you have your money keywords in your descrioption tag (meta tag).
• URL string-make sure your keyword is in there. All of the online PR companies do something different, so make sure you include it.

Good luck. Hope this helps.

Mark

Reubenb-   Google doesn't ignore the question mark or prepositions...

Here is a related post from a fellow moz'r who is big time.......Dr. Peter Myers. See below for his explanation:

"There was a time when Google simply ignored so-called "stop words", for processing efficiency, and so they two queries in your example were essentially the same. It looks like that has changed over time, though. See this post from 2008 by Bill Slawski (an expert on Google patents and technology):

http://www.seobythesea.com/2008/0...

...and a quick experiment someone did in 2010 that seems to confirm that:

http://www.dougwilliams.com/blog/...

In my experience, it's a bit specific to the query and competition. In many cases, the addition or subtractions of a stop word may not make much of a difference, but in your case it probably does. If the term you want to target is "Holidays in Ireland" and the Top 10 for that term seems different from the shorter term, I'd say to use "in". I'm seeing some differences between those two sets of Top 10 results (not huge, but some)."

*End of Dr. Peter Myers big time explanation.

I hope this information helps you. I find that all things being equal,  you are better off writing complete sentences and putting emphasis on your "money keywords" and "secondary keywords" throughout your content = Better SEO results

Bob-   Probably redirects......make sure you set up separate sitemaps for each site and then view the sitemap to make sure that you dont have overlap.

Hope this helps.

David-  The US site could be creating the problem but there are alot of sites in europe that are starting to see the effects from penguin over the last few weeks. Depending on which specific day they saw the drop would tell you if it is the US site as oposed to the UK site.

Hope this helps.

Mark

Garen-    Kind of a vague question....but if you are looking purely for seo value, why don't you offer to give the wordpress templates away with the requirement that the core site will provide a backlink to your site? You should be able to code that into the core template either with a link at the bottom of the site or code installed in the footer or header.

Hope this helps...

Good question. Lets make sure you have the right information and you understand what is happening before you come up with a strategy to fix it.........there isnt an easy way to work with traditional third party review sites because of the issue google had with yelp and others....so it has created a small void in the marketplace. You have to build the history back up with google places and hotpot and google maps reviews....THAT IS YOUR BEST OPTION. Don't forget about the other third party review sites, because everyone believes that google is still using that info for relevancy and quality score....

Here is feedback from Google on why they were removed and some additional thoughts on why no third party reviews can really make a huge impact on building the seo value back up.........

The official reason the changes were made is that Google has said it wanted to remove the "spammy reviews". Here is googles official response. There is a detailed technical response posting on googles site. here is the link....

http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2445832

Here is what they said:

"You may have seen reviews suddenly disappear from your listing. A few reasons why that may be the case:

• Reviews from third-party websites are no longer displayed on Google Places listings. Below the reviews by Google users, we may link “Reviews around the web” on third-party sites.
• Reviews are removed from Google Maps because they exhibit spammy behavior. We can't share specifics about what signals we use, but our goal is to provide end-users with high-quality information they can trust and use that info to make informed decisions. We also remove reviews that violate our content policy guidelines. We know that sometimes our algorithms may flag and remove legitimate reviews in our effort to combat abuse, but believe that overall, these measures are helping to ensure that the reviews appearing on Place pages are authentic, relevant and useful. Here's our reviews posting guidelines and policy: http://goo.gl/LtFCS
• We have data spread across multiple databases, and we bring all that information together to create your local listing. Reviews can sometimes be dropped from Place pages when we’re trying to reconcile all that information. As we mentioned at the beginning of this note: This is a known issue, and we are working to make it better.
• Occasionally, there is a technical issue that causes Place page reviews to drop from Google Maps for a short period of time (a few days) and then reappear on your listing. This happens every several weeks, when we push out a giant housecleaning update to our listings database. Again, this is a known issue, and we are working to make it better."

That is what google posted. Now the unofficial explanation is they had disagreements with several review sites like Yelp where they wanted free access to all the review content and then would basically undermine yelps positioning in search by posting yelps and other review sites info....yelp said no way. They decided to stop taking the info from third party sites.

To solve your problem you have to make sure you have solid google places, hotpot and maps reviews and citations.....

Hope this helps.

Not worth tracking it down and enforcing because google knows its duplicate content and if it is your oriiginal content then they know you created it first. KUDOS to you.

This is like selling life insurance and they are trying to scare you that you are going to die.......Here is a company that is promoting a service to track down the copy....notice how they never talk about how it will hurt your seo....they just make the blanket statement that you should enforce it and the steps you should take......if it isn't effecting your SEO value then stay away....

http://www.yourseotoday.com/blog/bid/84012/Don-t-Let-Your-Copy-Get-Copied

Don't waste your time if it isn't effecting your seo. If you are getting back links then ride the wave....more link juice for you.

Hope this helps create some clarity.

Kyle-  Its all about what you can budget and how pressing the needs are. We have used a couple different systems......here is what I know:

We are currently using brands eye.com. it has been the most affordable solution. They allow you a 2 week trial and I think we are paying $200 a month and searching on 10-20 search phrases........we change the phrases mid month to get more options.  No cost to get it set up. Solid program but doesn't have all the bells and whistles.

Fo just social media, sprout.com was a great solution. We are still using it to manage all of our clients social accounts and it has reputation management functionality we use.....but it doesn't help in the normal search engine analysis and posting.

We tried reputation.com for a couple of clients and it works well. They have a personal and business service that is powerful. In certain circumstances I would recommend them....but they were nickel and dining us for all the services.. Nothing is bundled...everything is extra. they charged us a base of $99 and then added fees for everything else.....

We also demos media vantage and it was powerful software. But it is set up for big brands......big monthly and set up fees but as a large company it would be a no brainer if it was important. had every tool and feature you could imagine. Automated updates and emails. All kinds of analysis......it was the ferrarri, but we didn't need the ferrarri.

Hope this helps......

Mark

Diane-

If you aren't as interested in your user experience, and mostly focused on the adsense results, you need to do visual ads. All of these ads are lost in the layout......

In addition, you should figure out how to add a sidebar on the right hand side rather than extending in a horizontal across the top......think about how google displays its paid ads.....at the top and then on the right side bar.......the right side bar would clearly show they are paid ads and would add value to the user experience.

Hope this helps.

Mark

Totally get it. we had the same issue with 1,000's of furniture listings that were slightly different with color or small style differences...but the core ski's and descriptions were exactly the same....

Delete the duplicate products or figure out a way to make some substantial unique content for the other products.

Hope this helps.

Imnotsure I understand what you are asking. I think you are creating an issue with www.yoursite.com and your site.com y the virtue of the fact that it is diving your SERP value by having two places where SEo/Link juice is attached to it. You should only have one "home page" url....redirect the other one to your home page and then sod the analysis.....

Does this help. If so show me the thumbs up!!!!!!!

Kandice,

I appreciate the simplicity of your question. Are you sitting down? This is one of the key fundamentals of basic SEO.  Here are the answers.....

Every link you build for your site will be "graded" on the PA of the site you are linking to.

PA is a nebulous term. Thats why its so fun.....its like asking how much does your boyfriend or husband love you. You think its a lot and they might tell you a lot but they only love you as much as they love you.....google and other search engines won't tell you exactly what their algorithm does...so everyone guesses....seomoz domain authority is their guess at what the PA is. (SEOMOZ is kick ass and smarter than you and I and it is probably close to what Googles algorithm is).

If you want to increase your PA on specific pages, build links to your pages from high PA sites. The no brainers are .edu sites......if yu want to identify specific ones that are worth targeting, then use the open site explorer to identify the highest page authority sites your competition is using and then copy them......nothing wrong with that.

An even easier method of increasing your PA that most people forget about is on page optimization. google will look to your site for relevance and quality score for your keywords. if the on page optimization is sold, you will have a higher page authority for your keywords.

Hope this helps. if

I do..........here are the best tools for you to use......

semrush.com has a solid tool that looks at competitors data.

marketsamurai.com is solid. requires sign up.

wordtracker.comis solid from wordstreema. requires sign up.

keywordcountry.com requires some dough.

googleinsights.com is good for keyword forecasting. free.

opensiteexplorer.com from seomoz is solid if you want look at one keyword and competitive info.

ubersuggest.org is solid

keywordspy.com is solid

Each tool does the same basic things but each one has several advantages..........some of them allow free rails so you can get some value before you pay.

If you have the dough, then word stream.com is s solid solution. $300-500 a month but it is probably one of the best enterprise low cost solutions.

Not sure I understand the question. Must have had too much to drink tonight.

Yext is the easiest an the most relaible. All three are worth working with? Did I miss something?

show me the love on the thumbs up....been a long day.

Matt-

Redirects or rel canonical can solve the issue. pick one url and stick withj it. Ideaaly you would choose the one that has the highest SEO/link juice value today. redirect the others to that one.

Hope this helps. If it does, please give me the thumbs up!! Thanks