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Links are essential to ranking in competitive areas, yes.
If people do not want to link to your current content and you need links then you need to be thinking about what content you can add to your site that relevant sites will want to link to. A salary survey of Cisco engineers, maps of world-wide demand and the like could be really interesting and valuable.
It might be helpful to think more in terms of what a link actually offers rather than what format it takes. If there is a website that people use to find organisations like yours then it makes sense to be there whether that website is in directory format, blog format or any other format. If a website has no apparent value in itself move on.
The problems with directories really came about from two issues:
1. Directories that only existed in order to link to websites.
There are still thousands of sites with names like seolinksbymat.com that quite clearly are only ever used to get links. Why should being listed there demonstrate any authority/validation for a site?
2. People went a bit mad for it
People love shortcuts. When presented with the opportunity to either work hard to get valid links or just submit them to directories lots of people did the latter. Before long services appeared that submitted your site to thousands of them, which i turn caused more directories to be created. Big old mess and Google got bored of it.
Avoid those two things and actually there is nothing wrong with a link from a website that happens to be in directory format. If those links are just a small part of a bigger picture and come from sites that have inherent value then you shouldn't be scared of them.
The SEO industry loves to see things as black and white. It's easy, it's lazy and it is wrong. Everything is bad when it is done badly. Directories are very easy to do badly, but you should never be worried about getting a link from something like Yellow pages.
It isn't hard to fake this at all I am afraid. Spotting it will depend on how sophisticated the person doing it is.
My personal preference would be not to use analytics as the means of counting it. Doing that you are going to be slightly limited in the metrics you have available and will always be "correcting" data and looking for problems rather than measuring more correctly and having problems spotted.
I'd have a script on page that logs that checks for a referrer and it if matches the pattern for website B creates a log record instead.
You then have the ability to set your rules. For instance if you get 2 referrals from the same IP a second apart would you count them? What about 10 per hour 24 hours a day? You can also log the exact timestamp with whatever variables you want to collect, so each click from the referring site might be recorded as:
Analytics doesn't give you access to the data in quite the same way. I'd definitely want to be logging it myself if the money involved is reasonable.
They definitely crawl more than that, and it's easy to prove as well.
Pick a long page, such as the Wikipedia page about London. Choose a block of text from near the bottom of that page, I've selected this:
in the south-western suburb of Wimbledon.[252] Other key events are the annual mass-participation London Marathon which sees some 35,000 runners
If you search for that text you will see the Wikipedia page in the results. If they only crawled the first 200 words they wouldn't have been able to find that result.
Prioritising is harder to demonstrate (and probably also to define!). However it is generally believe that greater importance is given to text towards the top of the page. That is logical if you consider how the majority of documents are structured.
Another one I'd add to Egol's response is to consider some kind of tool if it is suitable for their market. Strictly it's still content, but online tools fall outside of what most people think of. A well thought out and useful one can generate quality links for the long term.
Remember to leave budget to get traction for whatever you build too.
It's still relatively early days for Penguin 2.1 so it is hard to give concrete advice. However, the best approach would seem to be a familiar pattern:
Personally I think that #4 is where most people should be focusing most energy. I think that a lot of what looks like penalty is actually just a "correction". Links that were previously passing value no longer do, leaving sites without the authority to compete. Removing more links doesn't fix that. Obtaining new ones will.
Good luck with it. It's not easy, but the rewards are there to be had.
Both are quite different, so it really depends on what you are after. I'm actually a big fan of majestiseo (just to confuse things further). OSE is good for understanding the big picture. However I find that its crawl isn't anywhere deep enough for the stuff I work on - particularly in terms of deep pages on large authority sites. Example: links from the bbc are almost the holy grail for some of the projects that I work on, but OSE often misses them.
Ahrefs is better, and majestic goes deeper still. The down-side of that is that you get a lot more low quality stuff to sort through.
In terms of majestic v ahrefs, ahrefs definitely wins in terms of interface / tools. I'm an excel guy though, so it is all about the data for me - hence majestic being my "weapon of choice".
As Adam suggests, responsive design seems to be the preferred route at the moment.
This is different in that you have a single URL for everything. Whatever platform the end-user users all content is sent to their browser and then it is rendered differently for different devices.
This requires a slightly different mindset as you are effectively building one version of a site, but changing the way it appears to different users. Therefore, if you want a "stripped down" version of the site then it is best done by serving up different navigation.
However - if you are committed to desktop/mobile versions of the site and they are utilising the same content then I would use a canonical from teh mobile to the desktop site. I think that the domain choice is pretty subjective. I'd prefer m.domain as it is less likely to get confused with your overall site structure.
However, if you are not yet committed down one path and the intention is to serve the same content - definitely look at the responsive option.
Run another report using something like ahrefs or majestic. OSE concentrates on the "better" links. A tool with a larger crawl might find more of the junk that can cause problems.
I'd particularly look for for sitewide keyword links. I've seen those causing quite a lot of problems. They are also easier to fix, which might be nice post-sale.
Check a few sites like alexa that estimate traffic volume as well. Whilst the numbers given them all are next to useless the trend data can be useful.
Easy - View the page source:
See how many times the string href appears in the text - those are the links. The quickest way is often to cut and paste the source in to something like word then do a search and replace. It'll tell you how many it removed.
However - don't focus too much on that "error". It is absolutely fine to have more than 100 links on a page - as long as they are all needed. Modern navigation often has more than this and does it in a way that is usable and search friendly. Personally I think that Moz.com tool should be updated to stop so many people worrying about this.
The problem used to be that Google would stop following them after 100, but that is no longer the case. It can sometimes be an issue in that it creates a lot of code that adds to download times, but that is a tenuous link really.
You do need to change the code in order to utilise open graph. This is because Open Graph uses meta data on your page. However there is good news for wordpress users - there are plugins that can help without you need to code at all.
I haven't used this plugin (not a wordpress guy), but this one looks appropriate, well adopted and have OK ratings:
There are others though
The links to sprint I am seeing are nofollowed. There is also a tag on them that suggests that they are being automatically inserted by software as part of an advertising program.
If that is correct then it is similar in nature to the way that programs like skimlinks work. They look for particular terms and place monetised links on them. If those links are no-followed then that would seem to be totally acceptable under Google guidelines. What they don't like is selling links that "pass page rank", which the nofollow prevents.
If you wanted to pursue that sort of approach then there are a number of programs and plugins that do this. Personally I prefer links styled in such a way to be styled differently, so that users can understand which links are paid and which are editorial.
That is quite easily dealt with. Set some minimum levels and add a meta noindex to those profiles that don't meet that standard.
If you combine that with encouragement to fill out profiles ("Your profile is only 10% complete. Add your education now for +3%" etc) then you can solve the duplicate issue and also the underlying cause. As they get completed they can start getting indexed again and you have a better website at the end of it.
One of the quickest ways to diagnose many sudden ranking changes is to check the Google Algorithm Change history that Dr Pete maintains here: http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change
If there have been not recent changes to the site and no external factors (big shifts in link patterns for instance) then a change in the algo is the likeliest cause of sudden change. These can be spotted by the dates when changes occur. Look at your traffic stats (or ranking reports if you check frequently) and try to pin down the date of the change. Compare that with the change history page and you have a good idea of whether it was an algo change impacting you.
Doing this also gives you some good insights in to how to then deal with the traffic change. With each algorithm update we get clues as to what is going on. Learn what you can about the update that impacted you and take lessons from that.
Profile links aren't generally great links. It is however quite natural to have some of them.
Like many things in SEO it is a good idea to try to look objectively at them and ask yourself why they exist. If the links exist because there is genuine involvement in a number of sites (includin niche relevant ones) and those sites are of an acceptable quality then there is no real reason to disavow them. If they existing because someone thought they would be a good way of getting links or they're in unnatural proportions or the sites are very poor quality then you might want to do somthing about them. If you have the logins removal might even be better than disavow.
_ but could you confirm thatbuilding long term acquisition of higher quality links will be back my ranking soon_
I think it is your best bet. I can't promise that it will work and neither can I promise that it will work quickly. However, without auditing your site, I would say that it very likely what you need.
There are really 3 possible causes.
Hopefully that will start you off in the right direction.
That is pretty high. However don't assume that all bounces are bad. A bounce can actually be an indication that your site has done it's job well - it's down to the intent of the user.
I prefer to look at bounce rates either by page or by term. If people are bouncing on terms that are likely to have commercial intent then that isn't great. However for informational searches it might mean that the site is answering their query. That strong content might be the cause - you're becoming a reference site. Not necessarily bad.
However, bounces rarely pay bills... Try separating out searches with commercial and informational intent and compare both the volume and bounce rate. That might give some indication as to how best to tackle the issue (and what issue you are tackling).
If you have a high bounce rate on terms with commercial intent then look at the quality of your product information, pricing, issues around trust etc. If you can get outside opinion on it, even a small sample, that can help.
Conversely, if the problem is that you have an overly large proportion of research only terms then if could be that you need to look at how to increase visibility on the more commercial terms, or possibly look at ways to turn those information seekers in to customers (check loyaly and visits to purchase... they might be already, but just taking their time).
Pretty big topic actually.
If I was starting out now I would opt for a branded domain every time and not worry about the keywords in domain. You don't get the initial advantage, but it';s the better long term approach both on and offline. The 801 could work well for that. However when I see "utahrealestate801.com" it just looks like a spam result to me. I'd rather see "801living.com - the Utah real estate specialists" or something similar that sounds more like a "real business".
(I'm not saying use that one - I only spent 10 seconds on it. However I wanted to include a real example that was available)
I love it when people proclaim the death of different factors. Every time someone believes it my job gets a little easier!
The author of that post said "I've added on-page bold tags with no effect. I've added or changed h1 elements with no effect. Not too long ago, those might well have done something, but that's not the game anymore."
It's pretty clear that what they mean by "on-page seo" is actually "cheap tricks to get a ranking boost". Definitely not the same thing. On-page SEO to me means making the meaning of a page as clear as possible to a search engine.
That means using language that is aligned with that of searchers who you want to connect with, clear structure, good indicators through titles etc and a meta description that talks to those searchers and makes them want to click.
Dead? I don't think so.
I'd change the priorities a bit from "My goal is to increase traffic, thereby sales" to "My goal is to increase sales". It's a semantic change but helps you avoid one of the big SEO traps and helps keep you focused.
So, with that new goal in mind what will people who are going to buy your product search for? Those are the terms I would hit first. Forget traffic only terms, brand building, product awareness and the rest for now unless you have a big budget and focus on the terms that are going to make the till ring!
Even if those phrases are not the ones you are ranking best for those high converting phrases are gong to be your bread and butter in money terms so the sooner you start focusing on them the better.
When researching those terms be careful to think of the intent of someone using them. For instanc, if you were selling tents the obviousl choice might be "camping", but the intention of someone doing that search could be almost anything. "3 berth tents" might be a much lower volume term, but might be used by people much closer to making that till ring!
Targeted traffic terms have an important part to play. However I tend to lean towards the money terms at the outset and start justifying my fees.
Wow - sounds like a fun project! Are people really going to share anything that dull though? Sounds like the content is the issue not the platform.
I'll assume you mean "niche" rather than "dull". If it is interesting to the target audience then you have a chance. If not then you're stuffed whatever platform you use. So - interesting, but only if you are the right type of geek.
You just need to find where those geeks are hanging out. I tend to find twitter is good for those smaller niche groups, but that is partly because they are easier to find thanks to tools like followerwonk. It is very dependent on the niche though.
Why do you say that the self hosting of video is better for SEO? I'd disagree.
I'd much rather host it with a specialised service that ensures fast streaming, widespread CDNs etc. Hosting elsewhere doesn't have to mean letting them compete against you with your own video like youtube. Vimeo is a good and affordable solution for video hosting that doesn't self publish all the videos.
The first, and easiest, thing to try would be to redirect from the old domain to the new one. You don't need to install the old site again to do that.
With most hosting set-ups you can "park" another domain over the main one. If you do that it will appear to work. However you also need to ensure that you have a 301 redirect in place. This is just one line added to an .htaccess file on the server. If your web guy doesn't know this stuff find someone who does to make sure it is in place and correct as it is vital (then start looking for a new web guy)
That will at least ensure that any link equity the old domain has is being passed to the new site. However it doesn't address whether the new site is as well optimised as the old one. The on page optimiser tools here on seomoz might be useful in checking that. It is quite simplistic though and it is only dealing with a page at a time rather than the overall site. However it might give you an indication as to whether you are likely to face problems with the on site stuff.
Hope that is some help.
If that is the sort of thing you are looking for then you will enjoy the following list of lists:
http://www.peterattia.com/a-list-of-link-building-lists/
Spotted that on twitter a few days ago, it's quite a list. There are social bookmarking sites on there, but all sorts of other things as well: Review sites, local listings, social profiles etc. One stop shop for easy low quality stuff
It depends on what you are trying to achieve. I'd agree that a lot of the time people are requesting likes without any real purpose, however they can be very useful too.
A like to your faceboook page is like joining your mailing list. It gives the page owner a way to contacting people with their message (albeit it through the filter of Facebooks edgerank algorythm). Very useful indeed.
A like of your page/site makes that visible to the connections of the person who likes the page (again, some - depending on edgerank). Useful as it gets your site seen.
The only thing I can think of is related to facebook not twitter. Posts made by 3rd party apps were beleived to have inherently lower edgerank. I don't think that was officially confirmed though.
Can't think of anything for twitter.
It is quite common to shorten URLs by taken common words out of them. Remember also that URLs appear in search results too, so having something that looks helpful and makes people want to click is an advantage in itself. Which looks more like a quality resource to you?
websitename.com/eat-you-way-to-beauty-with-superfoods
or
Looks like you are in the UK. If that is right I wouldn't be overly concerned. It's certainly better than it being the other way around. Contentious view, so let me elaborate.
Google marketshare in the UK is generally reported as be 90-92%. Whilst it would be nice to pick up more of the remaining 8-10% I think that there are 2 questions to ask yourself before putting much effort in to Bing, Yaho et al:.
1. Are you likely to get a better return from building rank on other search engines, or by working more on your Google results?
2. How much are you willing to risk your google results to rank in other engines?
Now for the good news: The results across engines to correspond more "at the top end". As your site becomes close to the obvious choice for a search it is more likely to appear across multiple engines.
OSE doesn't provide a definitive list of all backlinks. The internet is massive and any data provider only crawls a portion of it. Even Google doesn't have 100% coverage.
OSE focuses on what it sees as the more important links. I do find that it can miss links that are fairly buried on very large sites though. I know that it often fails to pick up links from the BBC which is irritating for us, as that is a "dream site" link for many projects that we work on.
Hi Pedram. Complex looking questions, but I think that the answers are fairly straight forward.
1. Short version, yes. As you say, this will allow your blog to benefit from the authority of your main site. I say short answer, as it is a little dependent on what you want to achieve, but presumably you want to rank the blog posts, so "Yes".
2. I'm not personally a bit wordpress fan. I am also a big fan of bespoke build. Despite those 2 facts I would struggle to find any justification of bespoke over wordpress other in some very specific circumstances.
Best practice would mostly revolve around updating inbound links and 301ing from the old address.
3. Yes. Possibly even easier, as there are plugins that will set it all up in the right places for you.
I don't think that it helps in the slightest myself.
I do think that the way it is used on some sites would be a good indication of manipulative practice though.
There is no penalty as such for having a single hyphen in a domain. There are some related considerations though:
Is the domain likely to cause any confusion? Depending on how you are marketing the site a hyphenated domain can be a pain. Trust me: The main domain I have used for the last 16 years has a hyphen. I get very bored of spelling it out and having the whole "Dash.. no dash - a hypen. Like a minus sign... no that's an underscore" conversation on the phone.
If the non hypenated version of the same is being used for anything similar that can present bigger issues.
Also, hyphenated domains can look more spammy or "low rent", although that isn't usually a big issue with a single hyphen in the name. However it could potentially have a small impact on click through rates in some sectors.
However, short answer is "not really".
As Peter says, it is best to use a business page for a business. Various features (including the friend limits) are geared for businesses. It is also worth noting that it is against TOS to create a person page for something that isn't a person. I don't believe that they enforce that much, but why risk your business page?
If the numbers are at that level I would completely agree with you.
Are they tracking conversions? How many conversions would they have got from those 5000 visits and what is the value? It might be a simpler argument to say "Here is the cost of new site + maintenance. This is what it earned. Here is how I could better use that same budget if we focused on one site". I find that those business cases type arguments are a lot easier to get across sometimes that explaining the SEO rational.
I wouldn't worry overly about chasing A grades on the on-page tool here. The goal isn't to please seomoz! I use some VERY short titles very effectively. The too short warning is really about possible missed opportunity. Go with what makes sense, but use the "too short" warning as a flag to look at whether it is the best title to use.
Don't be fooled in to thinking that it is about the number of links. It never has been and it is probably less so now than ever. You could build 8000 links very cheaply and very easily if that was the only thing that was important. However it probably wouldn't help.
Start looking at what the links are rather than how many of them there are. What are their 10 best links? What would it take to get links like or better than those? What about their top 50 links? At least assume that it is only authentic looking links that are going to help and then start thinking about what you can do to match or better those. The methods used will depend on the market and your website. The cost will depend on the methods and how well you do it.
I know that you were probably looking for an answer in $, but it's impossible to say and pointless to do so.
The section should be there anyway - even before you link (just without data). It is now called "publisher" and can be found under behaviour.
Where are these being flagged as duplicate? Just here in SEOmoz tools?
If so, I'd raise a ticket about that. domain/ and domain shouldn't flag as duplicate. Certainly Google doesn't treat those as separate resources otherwise everyone would have a problem.
Not sure that I follow the question. Where are these blogs posts being made? On your own blog?
If they are then you are over analysing. People do that loads in SEO : They are so worried about looking natural that they stop being natural. Do what makes sense. Push towards "SEO Stuff" but don't do stuff that feel like you are gaming the system. Do that and you are heading for long term wins. Worry about the tiny ins and outs of every thing you do and you'll end up going nuts.
Hmm... not sure that was a very "mozzy" answer.
I presume you mean switching to a friendlier URL structure. I'd only do it if there is a clear advantage to your site to change, not for the sake of it.
The key question is whether the site is getting properly crawled or indexed. If it isn't then you need to understand whether the URLs are the cause of that and then change if they are. However, if your site is getting crawled and indexed properly then you are doing it just for the possibility of some advantage in ranking for "nice" URLs. That's a riskier move in my eyes.
Depending on the size of the site it can take months for Google to update it's listings and remove all the old URLs. 301ing the pages can be fairly painless if your CMS understands both the old and new URL format, but you still lose a small proportion of value from each link (in practice I wouldn't be concerned about that too much). However it is still a big job to do if you are not clear about the benefit to be had.
You're welcome. I hope that the numbers are large!
Yes and No! (that was helpful, wasn't i??!)
Google is smarter than seomoz crawler when it comes to dealing with this issue. semoz seems to flag up home page variants quite often, but I haven't seen this cause a problem for a major search engine in years. Generally then it's pretty safe.
However - you do have some similar problems. To check the above I did a couple of searches for phrases that appear on your home page, limiting the results to pages off your domain. Whilst the domain.com vs domain.com/index issue doesn't seem to be a problem, you do have something weird going on with your home page.
The following pages do appear to be duplicates of your home page, and these ARE appearing in the index:
https://www.monteverdetours.com/~desafio/
https://www.monteverdetours.com/index.html?iframe=true&width=95%25&height=95%25
And your home page isn't being listed properly.
What you need to do ASAP:
I hope that is helpful.
This is totally down to a matter of personal preference. I'd be looking for something in the way of original text. A good way is to ask more question then total up the number of words in their answers. You can also flesh that out by introducing snippets from recent activity, connections etc. Do though try to include something in the way of original content in order to turn off the no-index.
I think your example isn't bad. Add a personal slogan, or line of introduction and it is probably enough.
The easiest way to fix this is to tell google to ignore the URL variable no_redirect . You can do this in webmaster tools under Configuration > URL parameters. find where no_redirect is listed, click edit and set it to "used for tracking".
Remember to do similar for bing.
You could also block these in robots.txt