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Ye, working on better backlinks is a definite for the client - they have none for that particular page/album - but if I compare backlinks for the client's page and the filesharing page using OSE, the filesharing page has 1 backlink over no backlinks for the client page.

I don't think it's simply a case of backlinks. I suspect it's more related to who has more traffic - more people want to download music illegally than buy the CD, right?  The client has decent on-page optimisation. What else could it be?

Of course linking is important (as we're so often told) but...

Hi all,

A new client of mine is an online music retailer (CD, vinyls, DVD etc) who is struggling against file sharing sites that are taking precedence over the client's results for searches like "tropic of cancer end of things cd"

If a site a legal retailer trying to make an honest living who's then having to go up against the death knell of the music industry - torrents etc. If you think about it, with all the penalties Google is fond of dealing out, we shouldn't even be getting a whiff of file sharing sites in SERPs, right?  How is it that file sharing sites are still dominating? Is it simply because of the enormous amounts of traffic they receive? Does traffic determine ranking?

How can you go up against torrents and download sites in this case. You can work on the onsite stuff, get bloggers to mention the client's pages for particular album reviews, artist profiles etc, but what else could you suggest I do?

Thanks,

So you have a decent blog on the other side of the world ready and willing to work with you. Their content relates to your industry, and you're going to be allocated a lovely page of content, once a week, with a link or two back to your site.

Do you think anchor text is still as important in May 2012 as everyone said it was three years ago?

How do you determine what anchor text to have based on your answer to the question above?

Ye, I've made the plea but when resources are limited there's only so much you can you I suppose. I'm also going to see what the useless PPC man is up to - perhaps throw more of my 2¢ into the fray.

Being selective as at which industry I go into next has become more and more apparent. Probably good advice for any SEO with enough experience who can afford to be selective.

So, you've recently begun as a SEO manager for a new company who's just launched a lovely, gleaming corporate site to boot. The onsite stuff is taken care of and your attention turns to link building.

Now you've been in the game for a few years. You've seen things change in that time. Directories are out. Link networks are done. You're not going to embark on reciprocal linking either because it's bad and looks horribly tacky. Black Hat, White Hat - you know the score.

You're lucky that the company produces a page or two of news a day - it's original, informative, is great for keeping your clients informed and you punt this on Twitter and FB. A bit of link bait, eh?

But there's a rub: your competitors, with their bigger budgets, and industry clout, have been around for a some time longer than your company has been. They've snapped up all the good (industry-related) sites to get links from. You've approached all potential targets with the offer of good, relevant content and affiliate partnerships but they aren't having any of it. You're simply out-sized by the big boys next door - you can't compete. They're rich kids.

There just seems nowhere to get links from. Do you just go the route of press releases and articles? Do you use paid blogging services? Grovel at doorsteps. The industry you're in is incredibly commercial - no meek altruist is going to take pity and give you  a couple backlinks out of kindness.

What do you do? What indeed...?

So it's for the affiliate to implement the canonical as we're the originating source?

When dealing with affiliate websites, whereby you send them a stock standard bio or info on your company for them to use on their sites, what is best practice?

Is is OK to have multiple websites all linking to you with pages that contain the same content? Should I ask them to implement canonical or no-index tags for those particular pages? Should I ask them to rewrite the content (which may be impractical or they're unwilling to do)?

Thanks

Thanks mate,

They dropped substantially for most of their terms except for one or two which only dropped buy one or two positions. Does that narrow down the possibilities?

I arrived at work this morning to find my weekly SEOmoz ranking report for a main competitor waiting in my inbox. 90% of the their rankings have tanked in the last day or so by an average of 3 pages - most down from page 1 or 2 where they had been sitting pretty for ages.

I'm not in a state of (total) euphoria about this because a) you should be humble enough not to gloat at your enemy's demise, and b) I need to find out what they did wrong so that I don't make the same mistake, too.

**What is your first suggested port of call to determine where my (vanquished) foe has gone wrong? How much can I find out? **

I do know one thing - with OSE I can see they've used dodgy blogging services but this, to my mind, would have been jumped upon by Google last year. No?

Thanks guys

That's a great help. Thanks Doug for being so thorough.

Hi Mozland,

We are going to have a new Nav Bar for our site built from the horror that we currently have to up with. We want to make it a simple affair, similar to The Guardian two-tier Nav Bar - main menu which will drop down to the 2nd tier according to what you clicked on in tier one. Regular stuff, I think.

Any suggestions, from your experience, about how best to implement this, what to include, what not to do, what can be included and done to make it as best it can be to get people to peruse our site as easily as possible?

Thanks

Ok, so I'm not tech savy, and as I mentioned, I don't think my developers know about this either.

So, if I want a .mobi site built, this'll be completely separate to the .co.uk full site, right? How do the redirects work to a .mobi site when viewed on a smart phone or tablet, how is it that this'll be the site that's returned in searches to be viewed in those platforms as opposed to the full site?

Thanks Alan,

I will pass this on to the developers (who don't seem to have built a .mobi site before).

Hello Mozland,

I'm looking to have a mobile site built. We have a fair amount of traffic coming from smart phones, tablets etc and want to capture this traffic better.

Do you have any advice on how to have it built properly, if/how it can be optimised, what good features to include, or anything else you think might be of help?

Many thanks

Martin

Thanks,

That's the tool I've been using and it is very handy. I can now show the company that I know exactly what's going on.

After reading this SEOmoz post though - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/weed-out-your-lowest-performing-pages - I am considering removing the old news articles from 4/5/6 years ago. They have no page authority, and they receive no traffic. My developer thinks it's a bad idea.

Any thoughts on doing so?

Mornin'

In your experience, how much constitutes duplicate content? A sentence, a paragraph, half a page, etc? What about quotes - are they considered duplications, too, if there aren't quotation marks?

Over the years, the client has been a bit bad in taking a paragraph from here, a sentence from there, and coupling it all together as daily news on their site. I'm now in the middle of a purge. Oh boy!

All hail originality.

Thanks, Ryan

One less thing to worry (too much) about.

Morning,

We're moving our site to a new server today and having never done so before in an SEO capacity, are there any SEO implications, pitfalls, things to watch out for?

Advice and comments appreciated.

Thanks.

So checking out the backlinks on a competitor’s page for a term I’m looking to work on, a page they rank pretty well for, I can’t but happen to note the kinds of sites that grant this company – who are well known in their field – its successes.

Many of the links to this page I’m interested in appear within short articles on blogs, really bad Wordpress blogs that are certainly just for SEO use. My questions are:

• Where do people usually source these blogs which typically contain material on a range of different topics? Are these probably paid links?

• How do they get so much content out there, albeit similar content, to so many of the hastily cobbled efforts? Would that be an agency with connections or a blogging community site?

• How can any search engine lend credibility to my competitor’s links when the article below has nonsense for penis enlargement stuff. Seriously?!?

• How are they not being penalised?

It’s frustrating because these aren’t the tactics I want to employ but they seems to offer success, but also, if your link is in an article that followed by another on penis pills, how I can take Google seriously in its stated aim of making things this prone to manipulation.

Since relaunch earlier this year, we've had patches where our site has failed to load. It's happened every so often, but, until I receive the server logs from the company who hosts the site, I won't know exactly when this issue has occurred. Until now, we've only noticed it when someone in the company has tried, and failed, to access the site.

Again, it happened today. After hassling our developers/hosting firm for a conclusive answer as to why, it emerged that their server (perhaps our site in particular because of the nature of our business) had been the target of an attempted hacking. We've now concluded that every time our site has messed around like this, it's because of a possible hack.

Would anyone in SEOmoz Land be able to tell me if this is going to have a negative impact for our SEO and site performance? Would search engines be able to tell if a potential hack is, or was, occurring? Would we then be penalised? Please feel free to elaborate on the hacking process in general, too, if you can because this is the first time I've encountered it.

Thanks

A bit of a related question: How often should you be pinging on sites like Ping-O-Matic if your content is being updated everyday, Mon-Fri?

Thanks mate,

We are going to set up a blog with the main site, so thanks for reassuring me on doing so as well. The Wordpress was, honestly, intended to garner links (within carefully considered content/blogs, though) from other relevant sites. Perhaps a tactic to have a think on then for me.

Your advice on being cautious with contributors has rung true already - pushy people, who, having had a look at what they produce, are pretty rubbish.

Hi guys,

I have, for the first time, set up a Wordpress blog. I'm moulding the overall theme of it to relate to the industry we operate in. I'm new to this, so looking for any advice, help and info etc on how best to utilise it that you can offer.

My initial plan is to write articles as often as possible on what's happening in the markets, and link back to our site where applicable. I'll also do content exchanges with other relevant sites (using My Blog Guest as one means to find relevant bloggers), and give access to contributors as well (felt a bit weird about doing it initially).

Sound like a decent blogging strategy?

Any and all ideas welcome.

Thanks

Thanks, Heather. Getting a clearer picture now.

Thanks, Ryan.

Great link, too.

Afternoon Mozzers,

We run a basic affiliate program whereby we distribute banners and tools to affiliate sites who then link back to our homepage via these, often through a tool that incorporates an HTML link with our primary keyword term embedded. This banner/tool/link heads to our homepage, and will then incorporate that particular affiliate's unique code in the URL, eg. www.example.com/1A-265-GNH

Seems pretty standard practice so far?

So, considering this, that we include our primary keyword term in HTML in some banners, some also link to our homepage via an embedded image (and others then just work off cookies as per usual), can anyone hazard a guess, or know for certain, the beneficence of this as a link building means?

I ask in terms of trying to determine whether to continue punting our tools and banners as a decent link building opportunity, or concentrate more on other link building means.

Hope I've been clear enough, but am happy to elaborate if need be.

Cheers

As I painfully learnt this past weekend, you may want to get going pretty slowly on it. I went a bit nuts, within 80 - 100 of our archived articles pages (only inserting one link per page), with about 7-8 different terms to the appropriate pages and got heavily punished for those terms.

Long story short, be very wary of what you read on the matter.

The developer now claims that including a mon_page attribute (1&mon_page=1) within the URL will let Google know how our archiving system works and, thus, prevent us from being penalised for duplications. Any help is greatly appreciated. Trouble finding info on this.

We have a pagination issue, which the developers seem reluctant (or incapable) to fix whereby we have 3 of the same page (slightly differing URLs) coming up in different pages in the archived article index. The indexing convention was very poorly thought up by the developers and has left us with the same article on, for example, page 1, 2 and 3 of the article index, hence the duplications.

Is this a clear cut case of using a canonical tag? Quite concerned this is going to have a negative impact on ranking, of course.

Cheers

Martin