Welcome to the Q&A Forum

You're welcome.  I hope that the numbers are large!

The section should be there anyway - even before you link (just without data).   It is now called "publisher" and can be found under behaviour.

Hi again!

Despite how much people say SEO is changing, I'm not sure I would change my answer much from the one I gave just under 3 years ago. Let me update one statement at a time:

I don't think that there are many categories where the traffic sent warrants $299/year any more. In fact I would say that in most cases the referral traffic from a Yahoo directory listing is close to zero.

The above is still true, but even more so now.  Do you get any traffic from it?

As you say though, it has a lot of authority. It is also well established, tightly curated and is certainly known by those building engines. Therefore inclusion could at least been seen as a check that the site is not utter tripe. However, logically at least, a link in their directory shouldn't lend much more weight than that.

Any value on this front has probably diminished even further.  If it was seen as a special case that highlighted quality sites, I don't think that would be the case any more.  The overall quality has diminished, great sites don't bother listing any more and Google has had another 3 years to work that out.

I have not seen a measurable result from either adding or removing a site from the directory in recent years. It may well bring benefit as part of a bigger picture, who other than Google can really say?

No change there.  I probably haven't added a site to Yahoo directory since then though.

However I wouldn't expect to see an increase from adding your site - even factoring in the additional links from directories who use it as a seed.

People aren't really creating directories like that any more, and if they did then links from them would likely be more damaging than helpful.  I can't imagine that anyone would use the Yahoo directory as a seed for a quality site any more anyway.

It's worth mentioning that it is technically a different directory now, but I still don't think it is worth it.  Wouldn't you have rather spent that last $900 on something more tangible?

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.

I think that there is a slightly bigger question here. Rather than "How can I stop Moz flagging these up as duplicate?" you might want to ask "Are these duplicate pages harming me".

Thin pages, particularly those ranking on desirable terms, are something I try hard to avoid.  They send pretty poor quality signals to Google and create poor user experience signals as well.  If there is a term that I want to rank for I would ensure that pages are strong enough to deserve ranking before letting them get indexed.

It can be painful to deindex a page that ranks. However if those pages are giving off bad signals that could be your best chance of long term ranking success.

A compromise might be to fill them out in the mean time.  How effective this might be will really depend on your niche and your website.  Lots of stores do this by just adding a load of low value text to the page, but a better approach is to try to put something useful there until the products arrive.  Do this right and you could even be building links into those pages before the products arrive.

One example of this that I have done in the past is to build out a great coming soon page that featured a competition to win the item when it launched,  As well as ensuring that there was a page worthy of ranking (particularly against the competition who were using stub pages!), it brought some other key advantages:

• The competition was used to build links from related sites
• User experience was great. People hung about, watched the video and filled in the entry form
• It got shared (bonus prize draw entries for sharing!)
• When the product hit the shelves we already had a mailing list of interested customers

That's fairly involved, so won't work for everything, but the principals are sound.  If you were Google which would you want to rank? That or an empty page?

I think this is different:

offering customers discounts for adding links to their site to Overstock.com.

That is straight forward link buying.  "I'll give you X if you link to me" isn't the same as "I see you have a page about X. We do that!".   It's a good example of what to be cautious of though.

Offering student discounts is a great thing to do. From experience I can say that many of them come with nice links attached  .

This is definitely one of those "open to interpretation" areas.  A few years ago I would have said that Google wouldn't expect links on a discounts page to be no-followed. It's harder to tell these days though.  On the flip side I don't that they would be too impressed by student discounts being used as a way to game links.  Student discounts bring referrals, raise profile and bring business.  Do it for those reasons and enjoy any nice authoritative followed links that come with it.  (no harm in targeting those with the best links first though!)

If you have set them up for removal and no longer want them in the index then go for it. That is what the tool is for.

There was some suggestion from John Mueller some time ago that lots of removals could be seen as an issue, but it seems that is an exception.

I think that John Mueller confirmed that they are not using social signals as a factor as well.

I believe personally believe that to be strictly true. That doesn't mean that at good social presence can't help you rank though.  A successful social presence will create other positive signals.  For instance if Google considered repeat visits to be a positive signal then this is a signal that comes as a by-product of a strong social presence.

That all said, it probably isn't a brilliant use of resources to "do social" just for rankings.  Social media can bring targeted traffic and conversions, build brand loyalty, increase your reach etc. These are all good reasons to use social media.  If you are using it for those reasons then any benefit to rankings is a free extra.

It took me a while to come back, but I made it.

Link building is all about leveraging your assets.  You have a great blog with great images, so this opens up a number of strategies that you can follow to maximise the links that come back your way.  The ones that interest me in your case do involve giving a little something away, and that can be uncomfortable at first as it can feel like devaluing your work. However quality links have value, so there is a return to be had.

I'd be tempted to start by thinking about what you might be prepared to give away for the right credit.  For instance would you be happy for people to use smaller versions of your images on their website if they linked back to you?  How about if that only applied to some images?  Would you let "the right website" use a full sized image in exchange for a credit?

Consider what you are comfortable with and then communicate that.  Having a link to "use this image on your website" that explained the rules would encourage more to do it. You could even upload specific images to Flickr as creative commons with the required attribution being a credit link.

On a smaller scale you could target high quality sites that have poor imagery and just offer them the use of a relevant image in exchange for a credit.  That can be a very effective way of getting some very high quality links.  My photos are rubbish, but I've done this successfully for even related things in the past.

If you are not doing so already I'd also look at something like imageraider.  Imageraider will monitor the web for places where your images are used and alert you.  This can be equally useful for protecting your IP as it is for link building.

No time to answer properly now (mostly because I just got really sucked into your blog!).  Great site and amazing photos though.  Acquiring links shouldn't be too hard to a site like that.

I'm sure you'll get some great answers, but I'll check back later and post some thoughts if you haven't.  I just wanted to pass on the appreciation of a great site first.

1.  This should be fine.  As long as the whole page doesn't become boilerplate with just the keyword changing you should be OK doing it with the titles.

2. Again, as long as other parts of the page change this should be fine.  It's quite a common thing and google is pretty good at understanding the difference.

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.

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.

Good guest blogging is still good. Bad guest blogging is still bad.

Sorry if that sounds a bit glib, but it is true.  If you are prepared to guest blog anywhere for a link then it is not good.  If you are going to write a good article on a quality site that your audience uses then that can be good for many reasons.

Just really to add to what Ray-pp said:

It is a different approach to monitor how a site ranks for certain terms than it is to see what terms a site ranks for.  To do the latter a system needs to run millions of searches and list who appears for them all.  As far as I am aware the Moz toolset doesn't do (and never has done) that.

As Ra-pp said Spyfu does.  SEMrush does as well and I find theirs to give a bit more details.  However for a full list you could use both.  If they both do a free trial that could be a good way to get pretty in depth results for a competitor.

Having them won't wreck your listings, but it might lessen their impact.  Who says those other firms are getting away with it?  It might be that they would have more visibility if they took a different approach (or at least not have to work so hard for the visibility they have).

No site is perfect. All we can do is improve what we are able to on our own.

If your direct traffic is down as well, this could be demand issue.

A couple of years ago we did some work on a website centred around a technology that was going our of fashion fast. We got great results in terms of rankings and additional exposure, but the overall traffic barely stayed level. The issue there was simply falling demand.

Changes in demand are often most noticeable as part of seasonal cycles.  Comparing to the same period last year is often useful. Tools like Google trends can indicate whether there is an underlying trend.

I'd avoid having two sets of pages targeting town names if you can.  The exception would be if you are targeting very different terms for each page type.

If the old pages don't bring organic traffic and it would be hard to merge them you could considering de-indexing those.  Otherwise the preference would probably be to combine the pages and 301 the old ones to the new URLs.  If you take that approach remember to also update internal and external links that point to those pages.

A page per service area is likely to be better from a pure SEO perspective, particularly if these relate to phrases that potential customers are likely to serve.  A page per service is going to give you the opportunity to really expand on the information on offer and probably rank for more related terms further down the tail as well. It also makes is easier to focus your one page optimisation more at the theme for each page.

From a user experience / conversion perspective it could help too.  That additional information, some focus and the chance to sell the benefits more should funnel more people towards conversion if it is done well.

One potential pitfall is if you are in an area where potential customers might not know exactly which product areas are right for them.  The "everything on one page" approach can work well when people want to scan their eye down what is on offer and find what is relevant to them.   Many sites now take a best-of-both approach: Have one page per service, but still have a services page that gives a shorter overview of each aimed at directing people towards the right choice for them, as you suggest in your last paragraph.

Hi Alan.

I've had a quick look over this from both my phone and my laptop.  My first impression is that it is a great looking website (lovely part of the world too).  Text is clear, it's obvious what the site is, it's inviting and easy to navigate.  Responsive handling works well on my devices too.

A couple of thoughts though:

The first is an interim one: You might want to stop the development site from getting indexed.  Either get it blocked in robots.txt or add a noindex,nofollow tag.  You don't want that to get indexed whilst you are still working on it.

My initial thoughts were that I'd prefer to see the cottages before having a "book now" prompt.  I get the logic though (hoping to be booked out a lot!).

The date checker is actually very intuitive.  I use a lot of pretty big accommodation sites and they often do a worse job - particularly when fixed length stays are being used.

I'm not usually a fan at all of modal windows/lightboxes on mobile, but these actually work OK on the new site.  The thumbnails could do with being much bigger for me though.  They are way too small for my ageing eyes.

I hope that is a useful start.  I'll try to have a longer look later.

_ 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.

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:

1. Identify bad / low quality backlinks
2. Remove those that you can
3. Disavow those that you can't
4. Come up (and execute!) strategies for long term acquisition of higher quality links

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.

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.

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?

agh - that's a pain.  Too late for them to be specified?  I like to build this stuff in from the start for these very reasons.

I'm not convinced that 301s are as useful as they used to be.  With that in mind, how about doing the opposite:

1. Create the landing page

2. put a the 301 in place NOW pointing from the eventual final URL to the blog

3. link build to the final URL

4. When it goes live remove the redirect

That is a rather horrible hack! It'll probably work, but in terms of data structure it's not good - which generally leads to long term headaches.

We've built a number of systems that function as the back-end to multiple sites. Likewise content served in different languages presents similar challenges (or for ultimate fun: several sites in several languages leading to 12 pages per item!).  I would always have this data served in separate fields.

The easiest way to imagine this is that you had either a separate copy of that form for each domain, or 2 columns in the form with domain A on the left and domain B on the right.

Presumably in your example, the details are separated out at the point when the page is rendered. It's messy, it suggests to me a developer who is constrained by their understanding of the platform that they are working on. However, it should work.

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".

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.

Why not check for yourself?  Same logic.  Put image URL in to image search, but this time add site:pinterest.com to the end.

http://goo.gl/OGgeb8

Not thousands, but there are some.  You can now check the source of those page to see whether there are followed links or not.

No problem.  This isn't the clearest example of what I am talking about, but it was the one that I had open in a tab when I got the email notification of your question!

http://www.backcountry.com/3-season-tents

The top of that page has three guides.  There are three more at the bottom.  Those guides are in a place where customers are more likely to see/use them. That makes sense as they are also great sales tools. Those that open in a modal window for that page also mean that the category page becomes the page that attracts links rather than the blog page.

If you put the URL of that image in to Google's search by image you get this list of results of where else that has been us3ed http://goo.gl/mkAdJW

If you go down that list you will find that the majority of those sites then link back to the originating site by way of a credit.  Voila - links!

So the process there was most likely to produce a list of sites that might use the infographic and contact them all to offer it (requesting a link by way of credit).  It's an effective method in terms of the number of links that can be generated from it, but it doesn't create the best overall link profile.  A lot of the links can be from pages that drop off quickly or from sites that link out to almost anything.  It also creates a very definite pattern.  Not to be overdone, but it does still seem to work.

You are not alone - lots of people are reporting this problem.  Good news though - the data is not gone for good.

Google John Mu reported that they are working on this issue.  See there product forum thread here:  http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/xyUiZrhypsI

Your structure is probably the most common.  As you say though, you do risk cannibalising your own results.  You could no-index the blog categories.

My preferred approach is to have blog and store more closely integrated.  This can allow you to do away with blog category pages entirely, and have those as part of the e-commerce category. Bringing the content closer to the products brings a number of benefits in terms of both SEO and Conversions.  It also results in much richer category pages which can be another big win.

"If it aint broke...."  Hard to argue against that!    I'd test removing it on a category though... I'm like that

I'm off to do some window shopping then.

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.

I think you are very right to look ahead.  That is why I try to look at things in terms of "does this add value / make sense if search was out of the equation".  I can't see that the text you point out currently does.

I suspect that your existing rankings for that term are down to a lot more than the repetition of that phrase on page.  Let's face it, Trespass gives off pretty convincing brand signals*. However it would be pretty easy to test the removal of that label on a couple of less critical categories to see if there was any impact before making any site-wide decisions.

Uhm, how to say this here... I'm not overly convinced by the Moz on page / on-site tools (Ready for a barrage of thumbs down for criticising he holy Moz).  I think they are a little dated in places and can put undue emphasis on some minor issues whilst overlooking bigger ones.  They're a really good starting point for smaller sites, those new to the web and those in less competitive niches.  I do though think that they have quite limited use for a site like Trespass.  Just add a pinch of salt to everything and that'll probably be about right.

*Google secretly uses the number of times a business appears on my credit card bill as a brand indicator

I've always been nervous about this on e-commerce sites.  I personally believe that it can be enough to tip the balance in to being seen as manipulative, although my experience is that by itself it isn't a problem.  The issue there is you never know what else is already counting against you.

It could be argued that such labels are useful to the user.  If that was a "Ski outerwear" category or similar then having labels such as "Women's ski jacket" would be good clarification.  Pushing the boundary a little you could even argue the case if it were just "Ski Jackets".  However it adds nothing for the user to have it when they are all the same.

Considering that keyword stuffing doesn't work any more the possible benefits of doing this then would seem to be close to zero.  The potential for triggering an alarm in a dark corner of Google is there though.  Weighing it up I would drop them when they match the category.

A smart approach might be to replace the "women's ski jacket" label with another useful piece of info when they all just match the category name. Hard to see what common fields you do have available.  Sizes would be useful, outer material (in the case of jackets) - not sure how easy it would be to change that based on category.  Looks like Magento.

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.

You can't really expect to get any SEO benefit from embedding someone else's video.  What does that bring to the table that is original and unique?

There is nothing with embedding someone else's video in your site (with permission, of course).  However by itself it won't add anything.

If that video was embedded as part of making the most useful page around on the topic, which happened to include embedded versions of a curated list of the best videos on the topic, then yes.  Likewise if adding the video is the "cherry on the cake" of an already good page, then brilliant.  In those cases the method you use to embed will make no difference.

If you have a full list of URLs you could check for cache date on each at Google.  Unless you were doing that manually it would be technically against google TOS, but so is SERP checking.  More to the point I don't think it would be foolproof as indexed pages will sometimes return no cache date.

It's a bit of a convoluted method, but I think that might be your only option.

I'm waving!   Beautiful here on Hayling Island too.  I wish I could see a window from here!

If they allowed crawling, but 404d everything it would de-index anyway. If it was large this could be slow though.

Removal in the manner you suggest shoudn't cause any harm to the main domain though.  I'll say upfront that I haven't tried this (My dev team learned a long time ago that I get more than a little grumpy if staging content is allowed to get indexed!), but the theory is sound.

I've been eyeing them too. My only experience so far in in having their re-targeting follow me around the web. Just chiming in to keep an eye on what responses you get.

The answer to this depends on what you are trying to achieve with the video.  Video can serve numerous purposes in online marketing and the best methods to employ differ a bit depending on what you are trying to achieve.

If the aim is for as many people as possible to see the video then you want to include it (or a version of it) on YouTube. YouTube is in itself the second biggest search engine on the internet, so a properly optimised video there has the potential to be seen by a huge audience.  This is perfect for video that, for instance, introduce your product or service as a solution to a common problem.

One use of video that we employ is to obtain rich snippets.  A video rich snippet can leapfrog your page above others in the SERPs and also bring an improved click through rate. Win!  If your video is hosted on YouTube and embedded on your site then this is not going to help you.  The reason for that is that the rich snippet will lead to a youtube page, not yours so you want to host it privately.

Privately doesn't have to mean on your own server. In fact, in most cases we avoid that.  Services like Wistia and Vimeo have paid options that allow you to upload your video with all the ease of youtube, but control which sites the video cam be embedded on. This protects your video and helps you keep that rich snippet result to yourself.

We often now look at using Wistia/Vimeo for the main video, but doing a second edit for YouTube if the content suits their audience.

As Dana says, Phil Nottingham has put out some very good posts about this, and also how to get the most out of whichever path you go down.  There is an outfit called reelseo who have also done some good posts on this.

The best links are the ones that your competiors don't have and aren't going to get. That means that backlink analysis is not much use in uncovering them (other than maybe for inspiration).

Tools like OSE (or majestic seo / ahrefs ) can be useful in picking up low hanging fruit.  However it seems to be the big ripe juicy fruit further up the tree that makes a difference at the moment. The best tools for finding those are Google + Inspiration.