Welcome to the Q&A Forum

There seem to be other post floating around to the same effect.

I predicted its death a year or two ago. It's always been intrusive, hard to use, and just looks plain terrible.

Thanks for the great reply.

Mobile conversions account for about 20% - which translates to some significant business for us.

Might it be worth building a mobile site in Word Press (a stripped down version of the desktop site) to utilise in the meantime?  Would it be negative to indexing/rankings if we were to have an interim Mobile site live until the responsive site is ready.

We've been caught a bit off guard with the upcoming Google mobile compliance issue and received the warnings in webmasters about fixing mobile usability issues.

It will still be some time before we can have the site re-coded as responsive. I have stumbled upon a converter tool (which turns any site into one that's mobile friendly) called bMobilized, which essentially turns your site into one that's mobile friendly.

Have you used bMobilized? Is it a safe idea to use this service temporarily until our new responsive site is ready in a few months? Do you have any suggestions for temporarily getting around the mobile compliance issue while our new responsive site is being built?

Thanks

Hello,

My client has just opened up two new smaller offices which I now need to have listed on Google Places as the primary office is. How is this done (using best practice)?

Thanks

Hi mate,

From what I remember (and done myself) it's a case of continually topping up the original list. Don't remove anything, just keep adding new ones and re-submitting.

thanks Egol and David,

Any suggestions as to how to get promoting the blog/s off the ground?

My company wants to set up two or three blogs (on previously unused domains) with the idea being to disseminate good content that gets picked up in SERPs and acts as a lead generator, shows us to be authorities in our market, creates brand (or individual employee who's doing the blogging) awareness etc...

From scratch, what are all the boxes that should be ticked to make this work from the outset? What are the must haves?With all the ideals in place, how long could it realistically take to make this work? What are some pitfalls to look out for? Any advice in general will be appreciated.

Thanks, M

What are some of the black hat things you guys would do if you were to set up an independent site that's completely separate of your main one? Some of the things aside from those mentioned above that seem to be working for competitors?

Some years ago I went for a job interview at a leading London content provider/online marketing agency. The conversation turned to how I'd learnt about SEO etc, I mentioned the sites/blogs I read regularly and the guy doing the interviewing, who was in quite a senior position, reckoned that a certain, highly-regarded SEO 'authority' site purposefully disseminated nonsense now and again to throw people off the scent. I have read everything SEO-related since then with a handful of salt.

How the black-on-black linking in the footer is working for this bunch is incredible - http://www.websitedesign-bristol.co.uk/

I suppose now that the legitimate tactics aren't working for you (and others, like me), you'll have to fork out more on Google's AdWords service.

I like your frankness and feel your pain.

Question: how do you determine 'cloaked' links?

Hi all,

Does anyone have any concise info on how to extract long-tail (or any) terms in Google Analytics that have converted for me as I am having a hard time finding out how to do this?

Many thanks

Thanks Paddy,

Yeah, it's always Analytics which is more generous with it's conversion numbers. Never seen a day when AdWords shows more.

Hi all,

Any ideas as to why AdWords and Analytics are showing different Paid Search conversion numbers for me when I check on a daily basis? Both accounts are linked, they share the same destination URLs to trigger a conversion, some days each reflects the same amount of conversions, then some days it's anything from 1-5 conversions different (Analytics is always the one to show more).

Thanks

M

Hi MOZland,

With a new (our first e-commerce) client, we're going through a massive learning curve in handling a site of substantial size and complexity for the first time.

While we've weeded out most of the on-page stuff that needed sorting, and we're in the process of dumping poor links implemented by previous SEO/online marketing efforts, do you have any suggestions about how to take a big e-commerce site forward in 2014, especially concerning technical pitfalls and link building efforts (and given that guest blogging has become something of a faux pas).

Cheers,

M

That's great Adam,

Thanks so much for taking the time elaborate like this.

Hi Gregory,

We're talking thousands (mostly clothing/accessories within a sport-specific field) of products, and they're using magento I believe.

Thanks!

Any advice on the SEO technicalities of working with an E-commerce site? That's probably where we need to most help and advice...

Happy new year, Mozzers

We are about to take on our first E-commerce client which will be something new for us as we expand in 2014. Being a small outfit, we've never taken on a type of site like this before, which is great for new experiences and challenges.

Do you have any advice, recommendations, suggestions, things to look out for etc, etc when working with E-commerce sites for the first time ever?

thanks

M

If you were to offer up some quick wins to a client to get a project off with an immediate bang, what would you recommend as quick wins to get the conversions ticking over from the outset?

Thanks in advance.

• What are you or your SEO agency doing for your client's link building efforts?
• What are you (or the agency) doing yourself, or out-sourcing, or having the client do for link building?
• If a new client needs some serious link building done, what do you prescribe and implement straight off the bat?
• What are your go-to link building tactics for clients?
• What are the link building challenges faced by your agency in 2013/2014?
• What's working for your agency and what's not?
• Does your agency work closely with the client's marketing department to gain link traction? If so, what are collaborating on?
• What else might you be willing to share about your agencies link building practices?

Thanks

yeah, I think it's best to suggest they rewrite their blogs before re-distributing now.

Thanks,

I think you've answered this in that it's best just not to use duplicate content all together.

Hello,

A client is having one of their daily blogs published on a industry news site along with on their own site. This is a clear-cut case of having a canonical tag implemented on the client's site on each blog page, right?

Thanks

Hi all,

Of those who've done it or have valuable advice to impart, what are the things to look out for when re-designing a homepage?

In the same breath, what are vital considerations and elements to include/features to bear in mind when 'prettying up' a primary landing page as a homepage essentially serves as? UX fundamentals?

Thanks folks

Did you see much movement with your SERPs after submitting the disavow?

Anyone out their actually used the disavow tool? A lot of SEO's on Moz recommend it as a (last resort) solution but don't seem to have actually submitted a disavow and documented what happened next.

Anyone?

Good day,

I'm really struggling to get a client to appear in the Google Local map snapshot (on the right of the SERPs), even when their company name is Googled. I've tried everything including getting the main Google Local account verified, had some reviews put up, all the required and relevant info has been completed, yet their location and the map never appear.

Any help out there as to how I can remedy this?

Thanks

Thanks Carla and Marie,

Morning guys,

I've the unenviable task of having to rectify poor link building (a previous company's work, not mine) which inevitably means emailing tons and tons of horrible directories with links to the client from as far back as 5/6 years ago.

I'm sure many of you are in the same boat so it begs the question:

What have you said to these types of sites that is effective in getting them to remove the links?

This could even be a two/three-parter:

If you've had little joy in requesting removals, have you dis-avowed the links, and what (if any) effect did it have?

Thanks,

M.

Morning peeps,

A client wants to clone their website for a foreign language market, obviously swapping all English content for whichever language/market they're looking to target.

Any advice on how to research a foreign market (when I only speak English), or perhaps any pitfalls to look out for or advice you might have with a launch like this?

thanks

I have parts of an online portal displaying in SERPs which it definitely shouldn't be. It's due to thoughtless developers but I need to have the whole portal's domain de-indexed and prevented from future indexing.

I'm not too tech savvy but how is this achieved? No index? Robots?

thanks

Anyone else find that there are, almost continually, links added to the 'Links To Your Site' list from years ago that weren't previously reflected?

I'm seeing links that were added to directories in 2008 (by whoever was doing the SEO then) only showing in the last week or so when these links weren't in the list a few months ago.

I don't suppose there's much I can do - it's just annoying in that it adds to more people to contact to have nonsense removed.

Thanks Takeshi.

It was suggested in Quick Sprout's Advanced SEO guide that it's good form to place your Feedburner RSS link into the header tag of your blog.

Anyone know if this needs to be done for every page header of the blog, or just the home/main/index page?

Thanks

Mornin'

Anyone have any guests blogging resources to find guest bloggers and blogs to guest post on?

I've been using My Guest Blog but it runs dry after a while.

Thanks

I've received a Webmasters notification about an 'increase in soft 404 errors'.

When we had the new site launched three months ago we did away with some old pages, which we either 301 to new equivalents, or, we return a 'Oops, that page seems to be missing' 404 page which has some links to important parts on the site that might be of use to the visitor.

Any ideas why Webmasters is issuing the warning? Any suggestions as to what to do?

Thanks

I'm looking for decent hosting services in France? Any recommendations?

Thanks

thanks mate, that's certainly useful.

We're about to re-launch our site but to think of everything before going live in a week is pretty tough going.

Any suggestions or reminders as to what to remember and take care of before going live?

What have you found or forgotten in your experience with re-launches?

Thanks,

Dave

Thank you, Irving

From my initial look at things,  there is one particular term that links to one particular old URL across numerous directories that all seem to be connected, which I never sanctioned at all.

I'm starting to suspect part of this problem is related to someone purposefully trying to hinder our rankings, and I'm having the 404 for the affected page (old URL) implemented.

Is having the 404 something legitimate to include in the reconsideration request?

Hi all,

A client has been penalised, having received the message in Google Webmasters last week, along with two more yesterday.

It seems the penalty is for something specific: “As a result, for this specific incident we are taking very targeted action on the unnatural links instead of your site as a whole“.

This is the first time I've had to deal with this so I'll be a bit layman about it

The penalty, firstly, seems to be for the old domain, from which there is a re-direct to the current one. This redirect has been in place since Feb 2012 (no link building has been done for the old domain since then). In Webmasters, I have the old and new domains set up separately and the messages are only coming for the old (but affecting the new, obviously).  I need to determine if it’s the old or new URL I’m being hit for, or would that even matter?

Some questionable links I can see in WM:

There is an affiliate for whom WM is showing 154,000 links (all followed) from their individual products listings to the client’s site (as a related product) but they’re linking to the new domain if that matters. Could this affiliate be an issue?

There is also Updowner, which has added 2000+ links unbeknownst to me but apparently they are discounted by Google.

I see a ton of recent directory submissions - right up until last week - that I am not responsible for. Could that be intentional spam targeting?

I did also use a 3^rd party link building company for Feb, March and April who ‘manually’ submitted the new domain to directories and social bookmarking sites. Could this be issue?

For what kind of time-scale are penalties usually imposed - how far back (or how recently) are they penalising for?  Ranking were going really well until this happened last Thursday.

Will directories with non-followed links effect us negatively - one such one has over 2000 links.

What is the most conclusive way to determine which are the poor, penalty-incurring links pointing to us?

I know I now have to contact all the dodgy directories the site is now listed on to get links removed, but any and all advice on how to rectify this, along with determining what had gone wrong, will be most appreciated.

Cheers,

David

Hi all,

We are launching a new site soon and I’d like your opinion on best practice related to its content.

We will be retaining some pages and content (although the URLs might change a bit as I intend to replace under-scores with hyphens and remove .asp from some extensions in order to standardise a currently uneven URL structuring). I will also be adding a lot of new pages with new content, along with amend some pages and their content (and amend URLs again if need be), and a few pages are going to be done away with all together.

Any advice from those who’ve done the same in the past as to how best to proceed? Does the URL rewriting sound OK to do in conjunction with adding and amending content?

Cheers,

Dave

After a steady drop in rankings (which I suspect to have been because of the link building company I used for 3 months - Feb/Mar/Apr - then sacked them off) I poked around for bloggers that are semi-related to my industry. In the last month, I've been using about 5/6 different ones, probably getting 10-15 links in the process. PR for these are 1-3 (but hey, who believes in PR, right?), and the domains are in 3/4 different countries I think so I'm getting spread around too.

Perhaps it's a mix of ceasing the use of the crappy link building company and then using these new blogs, it's impossible to tell. Pretty sure that the directories, article submission and 'social bookmarking' (*laughs) were bad for me because it's when that stuff starting going up that I had that horrible feeling when checking my poor rankings on Monday mornings.

And yeah, I'm still targeting the same keywords - in fact, highly-competitive ones, and seeing some encouraging results for which.

I feel your pain, Neil.

My niche is quite a hard field to work with in terms of getting backlinks - our competitors have bigger budgets and have dominated almost every site out there we could possibly work with. When I do approach sites we can't compete in terms of offering the same incentives to feature our blog fodder as our competitors can.

In a bid to help with rankings, I hired a third party company to help with 'manuel' link building with the intention of using them for a few months. They got us on some terrible directories, distributed terrible press releases to equally terrible PR/Article/Whatever sites, and after a month or two I'm pretty sure their crappy methods dented our decent rankings.

Then I started offering one-off content to better blogs and things seem to be on the up.

A huge frustration is looking at one of my competitors, who rank pretty well, and seeing that they have links from the worst 'blogs'. Clearly, some dude has bought an expired domain that has a bit of historical weight and now publishes half-arsed nonsense posts (including rubbish for my competitors) and now the competition  is winning off this highly-questionable technique that Google isn't picking up on. What can I do? Slightly heart-breaking, but then again, another competitor has been doing this kind of thing - they're pretty big in the industry - and they've been nailed so, so hard. I'd hate to have been their SEO for the last few months.

Yup, I feel your pain, brother.

My advice, find some better blogs related to your field, get some rapport going with the blog owner, and get regular blogs off of that iff possible. It's seems to be working for me a bit - I supply them with the content, they publish it with a link or two, everyone wins. Steer clear of shitty directories, social bookmarking (whatever that is), and horrible Article sites.

Relevancy seems to be core - so find bloggers who're related to you and make some new friends.

Other than that, start saving and open a burger joint.

Dave