Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi - take a look at this previous Q and A in relation to reciprocal linking - http://www.seomoz.org/q/are-you-careful-about-linking-back-to-sites-that-link-to-you

I think a few well chosen outbound links to other sites that are natural are a good thing for making your link profile look more natural. This may include a few reciprocal links if they are in relation to some content on your site and a site that is linking to you would provide more depth, for instance if you gave a link in the appropriate place. However you don't want to be exchanging links purely for links in my opinion this is a dangerous practice.

It depends how you look at it - in terms of direct impact on your rankings then no, as there is no link juice coming from a mention of your domain without an actual link. However the BBC is a very busy site and has lots of traffic (it is high authority as you say), so a mention on there will no doubt have some impact on your website as there is a good chance that you product review will gain exposure through social mentions and this can lead to links from other sources which definitely has SEO value!

Hi Pablo

I think this previous Q and A would be a good place to start for sensible link building strategies - http://www.seomoz.org/q/drowning-in-a-sea-of-link-building-advice

Hope this helps!

Hi - please see the responses on this Q and A in relation to what you are asking - http://www.seomoz.org/q/blog-comments-good-for-seo

I think you should avoid this as it is a dangerous practice and potential for a penalty is high!

Have you considered trying to come up with some sort of infographic in relation to the services and then pushing this? You could also considered options such as creating a video campaign that will grab peoples attention about what you do. The potential for such things to go viral in a social media driven world is high if you can come up with a decent piece, but you need to think outside the box. You also need to build up our relationships on social media channels, especially with authority figures/influencers. This will make it easier to gain attention and recognition for such pieces as I have suggested.

Hi Caroline, links that are no followed don't directly pass any value in the form of link juice which has a direct impact on SEO and search rankings. However they are still very valuable as they can be linked to by countless people (on their own websites and guest posts meaning potentially followed links) that become aware of your links through social exposure on twitter and similar.

I did a bit of digging as I knew there was a decent Q and A on this here you go - http://www.seomoz.org/q/value-of-twitter-links

I think there is some sort of bug with GA because I noticed that when you apply the advanced segment it shows up some other keywords but then if you click on the next page arrow and then click on the previous page arrow it loads only the keywords that I have placed in the advanced segment - strange!

Hi Sander - you can achieve what you are looking for using advanced segments on the report you mentioned above. Click advanced segments > +New Custom Segment. Then name your segment something suitable. Select the green box that defaults to Ad Content and type keyword (select this from the list once it appears as it is your dimension). Then on the drop down box that says containing change it to exactly matching, finally enter your first keyword in the last input box. Repeat this process for all your keywords that you want in your custom report and make sure you use the Add 'OR' statement and the dimension option every time. This will produce a report that can be downloaded in pdf containing only the keywords that you have selected. Let me know how you get on...

Sander have you thought about downloading the list of keywords into a spreadsheet and manipulating them that way - this should be relatively quick and easy to do?

On one of the websites that I work on I have pages for geographic area that I am targeting for the same thing, these pages are all ranked on the first page for their location related search. I think the key is to have well written unique content for each of the pages with content that is specifically relevant to that area. Just because you are targeting the same thing in a different area doesn't mean you can't have pages that are unique yet cleverly target the same service in a different area. In these circumstances I always find it useful to use examples and testimonials for each area if appropriate. Bring input from locals that you work with to give the page a local feel. The recent changes with Penguin/Panda have not had a negative impact on my sites and I am not planning on changing my tactics, because at the end of the day Google is looking for better quality search results so when I produce a page I try to make sure it truly does serve a purpose for a visitor and isn't just spam.

Take a look at this great post by Jacob Klein it gives great advice on video marketing:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/building-links-with-video-content

I think that you can still get an A grade in the optimization tool without the page looking over optimised, it just depends how you go about fulfilling the criteria. I have lots of pages that get an A grade which haven't been negatively affected by the update, I think it just depends how you go about it. Are the pages that you optimise natural looking or are they spam looking in relation to being clearly optimised for a keyword for instance?

Click on content > site content > Pages - then find and select your cart url. At the top of the report you will see the navigation summary tab  which shows the previous page path and the next page path visited - you can click on these to follow the navigation routes taken. Hope this explains what you are looking for.

Unfortunately there is no way of guaranteeing that Google will always use your META Description, however there are steps that can be taken to help influence Google when it populates the description for search terms.

Dr Pete wrote a great in depth post on this topic here -

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/why-wont-google-use-my-meta-description

Hope this helps!

Well when I did it I put one removal request in for the whole domain and also put a disallow in the robots.txt for the whole site. Matt appears to be referring to putting in to many removal requests, but if you want your whole site removing you only need one so this wouldn't be an issue - you put your domain URL in. When you say your page has no snippet have you checked what your meta description is as this can help influence your snippet text. I would work at getting your development site removed a.s.a.p and then seeing what happens with your snippet - I think that there is a good chance it could be down to duplicate content issues. Have you checked what the cache for your homepage is in Googles results?

Do you mean that you are copying your competition and putting links to your site on forums and on blog sites?If this is the case then I think the links are of little value and can actually lead to penalties in the SERPs.

Please see this response to a similar question regarding these types of link: http://www.seomoz.org/q/blog-comments-good-for-seo

Also see this Q&A for sensible link building advice:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/drowning-in-a-sea-of-link-building-advice

THINK MY CONNECTION TIMED OUT AND WAS POSTED TWICE OOPS

This is my original message:

Do you mean crawl errors in Google Webmaster Tools? The most serious of these issues is the not found 404 errors - If you have a lot of these how you need to look at it is that some of your content is not accessible to Googlebot and as such you are going to affect rankings - if Google can't find your content it can't index it. Also if you have a lot of pages that are not found in Google Webmaster tools this will lead to poor user experience, frustration and a higher bounce rate for your site, which in turn will impact on your websites rankings. You need to remember Googlebot will only have a certain amount of time to crawl and index your site, if lots of this time is spent crawling and reporting errors less of your pages will be indexed and therefore you will have less pages ranking for terms in Google, once again impacting your rankings. Also if you have lots of pages that have 404 not found errors then you are potentially losing link juice if any links are pointing to these pages and they haven't been 301 redirected to tell Google of the new permanent location of the webpage.

Timed out errors also indicate that the pages listed have taken too long for Google to load, so it has given up. Once again check pages listed here and see if you can optimize them. Since Panda has come in site speed has become a factor in ranking.

Unreachable errors are those that are a result of internal server and DNS problems. Obviously these are serious as Google is having problems accessing parts of your site and once again if you don't intend to deny Google access to these pages then these errors are limiting Google from indexing these pages listed.

Good crawlability is an essential factor in user experience and search engine rankings, so take advantage of this excellent tool to make yours better if possible.

It is used over here in the UK too Alan - Marisa I would sum it up as follows - basically a moaner or somebody that complains frequently in an irritating way. I agree completely with your points Alan, it is good to see that it is becoming harder and harder for those wanting to take shortcuts and game the system!

Hi Max

A couple of questions to understand your situation better - do you have both Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools installed on your development site? Is your development site out ranking your main site for any of your key terms?

In my experience unless your development site is out ranking your main site I would add a robots.txt file to disallow all bot access and then I would also put in a removal request for your domain on Google Webmaster Tools. I found this fix very quick - within a matter of days everything was fixed.

However if you feel that you are getting traffic to your development site and it is out ranking your main site, so you have decided that the rel canonical option is best I would still remove your development site when rankings swap around (as Marie pointed out this took a week or so for her).

In regards to your development site I would always aim to have it removed from the index and when you have your issues sorted I would place a password on the whole site so that nobody can access it other than you or someone that has the password. This will allow you to use your development site to its full potential and not have to worry about competitors that have found the URL monitoring your development site even when it is de-indexed!

BTW when I had this issue I had several thousand pages indexed in Google from my development site. Unfortunately I can't give you an exact time as to how long it will take to fix this issue as it all depends on the current crawl rates to your sites.

Hope this helps!

Hi Lindsay - have you got Google Analytics or similar tracking code installed, as this will allow you get a better picture of where you traffic is coming from. My first thought on this is that your most popular article is likely to be ranking better than the others or ranking well for a particular keyword that is generating this traffic.

There are lots of factors that can cause one article to get more traffic than the others but your articles are never likely to have the same amount of traffic as they have different keywords in titles and other text on page, so they are likely to rank for different things. Also it only takes one person to retweet your article that hasn't had interest in the others and this can then cause that article to gain more attention (visits), if for instance they are an authority, without direct tweets of the article (people clicking through from a tweet about this article from a social influencer). The whole concept of social influencers. This article might have had a title that caught more attention or was more relevant at the time it was posted to social networks - this would lead to more visits and potentially more links. In turn this is likely to cause more traffic to your individual article. I would also suggest looking into the links to that page in comparison with the others.

If you do have Google Analytics installed I would go to content select your article url and then investigate traffic sources using the secondary dimension drop down option. This will help you understand where your traffic is coming from to this page. You can then compare it to the others for a better picture.

Hi Leon - I would say that is where building relationships with social influences/authorities comes in - ways of doing this are by getting involved in discussions and interacting on sites such as twitter. Building this type of relationship takes time and effort but will pay off in the long run. You could also consider setting up a blog of your own and asking established bloggers in your niche to contribute - this may involve incentives for them to participate, but remember when they do they already have a following and are likely to highlight their work to them. In turn this will increase your website exposure which will lead to links.

Remember lots of people are asking to be guest bloggers but you need to think how can I stand out from the crowd to help you get picked. This is where you have to think outside the box and try other routes to get the attention of the person running the quality blog. Also make sure you look on here at the different posts on outreach emails and how others have successfully gone about gaining links, attention for their work, etc.

There are lots of things that work for link building Leon - one of the best starting points, I think, is to aim at creating great content and then make sure people see it by building relationships with authorities and social influencers so that you can make them aware of your content - in turn they will help increase the exposure of your content. This method will lead to links and increased ranking.

What you have got to think is great content + exposure = links

whether this content is a blog post, press release or some sort of viral campaign (video or image). People link to great content and want to tell their friends about it - human psychology

No problem Luke - it is hard to judge whether your pages are keyword stuffed without some examples such as what are you page titles, headings and even an example of content (paragraph or two)? Do you think they look natural or do you think that you have included your keyword too many times - more than is really necessary? Even with an in your face approach you can reduce keyword stuffing I think..

Hi Luke

I wouldn't particularly worry about the actual keyword density of the page but more about whether your keyword optimized text actually looks natural and not stuffed with a set keyword. In regards to meta data this doesn't have an direct value in relation to your search engine ranking. I personally don't use meta tags as this tells my competition exactly what keywords I am going after. As far as meta description goes this is important because it influences what text is displayed against your page in the search engine results. Good meta descriptions can help influence whether people click through to your site from the SERPs. Hope this helps.

Keyword density is so old hat - if I were you I would stop measuring your pages by keyword density and make sure that you right decent content that contains your keyword. Also placing your keywords in important elements such as the title tags, H1 header, etc. In direct answer to your question if you insist on measuring keyword density meta data won't count as it is not a ranking factor - the days of meta crawlers are long gone!

No problem Garen - I would definitely always go with your gut instinct on this sort of thing - I have and it has always served me well. Establishing those relationships will pay off and best of all they are going to keep paying off - plus I think building relationships is more about time than money. The other advantage of building a relationship with authorities in your niche is that the relationship is often reciprocal and you can help and learn from each other as well as gaining retweets, links. etc.

Hi Mark - I don't use blog comments to build links and I wouldn't really recommend this as a way of building links with specific anchor text. The reason for this is that if you can do this then there are likely to be lots of others that are using it for manipulative practice. Your website might be full of great content, but there is a high chance others that have linked from this site aren't so great. Then when Google comes to look at the website that is linking to these bad/spam sites it is likely to either put no weight on the links or even start penalizing the sites that are linked to this site for manipulative linking building practice against the Google Webmaster Guidelines, your site will then most likely be hit as well.

Hi Nathan - there are two ways to look at this - from an SEO point of view meta description has no real value in regards to influencing your search rankings directly. However from a customers/visitor view point it can influence whether the person actually clicks on your page in the SERPs, as it will influence the description that search engines show for your page, so if you can I would look at working on this to make sure you are getting the optimum click-throughs from your SERPs postions.

Hi Garen,

If I were you I would stay away from this type of practice and actually concentrate on building genuine relationships with social influencers/ authorities and getting genuine links from social impact.  A retweet by an authority in your niche will put your content/site in front of an audience that is actually interested in what you are doing, so you will gain so much more from this. I always work by the fact that if something is worth having then it is likely to take time and effort - I think this is so true in the case of links and social exposure. If it looks to good to be true it usually is, as they say. If you think it looks spammy then you shouldn't be comfortable exposing your self and your sites to it. Like we all know Google is cracking down all the time and I wouldn't take the risk myself.

Hi Alex - have you considered using a format such as this for your title tags -

Word | Brand Name

However to actually answer your question it is fine to use hyphens I have several well ranked pages that use a hyphen in the title tag and this has not caused me any issues - out ranking sites that don't use the hyphen format. The thing I would think about though is having your brand regularly coming before anything else in the title tag that's why I suggested the format above - just a suggestion. You can still rank well for branded keywords with your brand being second in the title tag order.

Hi Adam,

I think the responses on this question page will help you with your problem - http://www.seomoz.org/q/google-webmaster-tools-notice-of-detected-unnatural-links-2

Shane Thomas gives an in depth answer which will help you.

Hi Eduardo,

I can see the logic behind your structure - I would consider changing the who we are to our database developers and then create content as I suggested above under this section.

• What we do
  • Database solutions
    • Access
    • Cloud
    • Quickbase
  • Mobile Solutions
    • Android
    • iPhone
• How we do it
  • Why Us?
  • Our process?
  • Your Role
• Clients
  • Who we work with
  • Testimonials
  • Case Studies
    • Access
    • Cloud
    • Quickbase
    • Mobile
• About Us
  • Our Database Developers
  • Contact Us

I would also consider moving the "Our Database Developers" page further up the menu structure - it could come under the How we do it section. Also have you got some good rich content for all these pages or would it be better to put several of these headings under one page/section, for instance "Our process" could logically go under "Why Us?" for richer content? As for your page titles you want to make them look natural but include you keyword  - remember you want your titles to not look spammy though. With the over-optimization penalty looming this is particularly important to get right.

Hi Sansonj - there is no set optimum for word count when it comes to SEO - the most important thing to remember is that you should write you content for the user's experience and not just for search engines. Yes include your keywords, but make sure it sounds natural. Obviously you should judge your word count in terms of quality if you just have a sentence or two that is rammed with your keywords then this is not good, especially with the over optimization penalty looming from Google. Try to create pages that are information rich and will serve a purpose for the user - something that will actually benefit them from reading. Also try to think-  have I just created this page to rank well and it doesn't really fulfill any other purpose in relation to visitors of the website - if this is the case look how you can improve your page and actually make it beneficial for visitors.

Hi Ruud - a 302 redirect is a temporary redirect whereas a 301 is permanent, so yes you would be better using the 301 redirect as this measure isn't a temporary one from what you have written. Therefore you want search engines to know that the page you are redirecting to is the new location of the one you are directing from.

For more information on redirecting here is the SEOMoz Best Practice link on redirection - http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection

The guide highlights how important using the correct redirect is in terms of whether link juice is passed - which we all know is important. 302 redirect doesn't pass any juice but 301 does!

Hi Eduardo

First of all I would say that the last thing you want is a mess with a little bit of everything - you want to rank well, but you also want a clean professional image for your website to give potential customers the right impression. Can I ask what you current title tags are for you homepage and also what menu items you currently have? This would allow me to get a better view of where you are at and how best my suggestions or others may be implemented to help target your keywords.I know one developer does more than one thing but you could still potentially target the broad and the specific keywords using my suggestions. For instance you menu could be somthing like this:

Home, Our Database Developers, Specific Type of Database Development 1,  Specific Type of Database Development 2, Portfolio, FAQs, Contact Us

Where I have put "Specific Type of Database Development 1" you would substitute this with the actual databse - e.g. MS Access Development.

Well I would personally look at the team and how they are split then I would create a page that is based around your team, who they are and what they do aiming mainly at the term database developer, you can still incoporate specifics such as MS Access. When it comes to the specific types of database I would consider having sections on each of these linking straight from your homepage. I think you really need to look at your current pages and how they present information to people. Can you produce decent content for each of these sections, how does your competition that is ranking well go about it? These are all things to bare in mind. I would consider the plural - so database developers or our database developers assuming you have several then you can create a rich page based around them. If I was considering this option I would set the URL to be database-developers.html or whatever your site is written in. Why do you feel that the creation of a page on the team is a stretch - not enough to wirte about? Thats when you could incorporate quesiton and answers by you team on database development and specifics.

Hi Eduardo - have you considered creating a team section on your website, talking about your database developer(s), their experience in database development and examples of previous work. You could easily optimise this page for the term database developer and you could also use the keyword in the anchor text on your internal link structure (menu) without it being incoherent/unnatural.

You could also consider producing an FAQ or Question and Answer section on your site and answer general questions on types of database and development etc. This is how I would go about optimising for your targeted term, then you can work on the off page elements such as links and social media making the link juice flow to pages such as the one I have suggested so that you can rank well for your targeted term with time and effort. I would also optimise the URL of the page to include you targeted term without going over board and making it look spammy. Hope this helps!

Hi Anthony - I am assuming that the site design change will basically be a change to the template more than the actual content? I think you need to make sure that you plan this carefully, but in my experience the most important thing is to make sure that the titles and other onpage elements stay the same, so that you are less likely to upset your current rankings. When you redesign the site are you going to keep the same URLs as you currently have or will this change? If this is the case you need to make sure you have mapped all the old URLs to their new corresponding ones using 301 redirects. I would also look at your current onsite menu structure and internal links between pages and make sure that you try to keep this the same. If you plan this carefully and make sure that you keep the current content, but add to it then there shouldn't be a negative effect on your rankings. While the redesign is being done you could actually plan on improvements like you have mentioned more content, you could also make sure you have all the latest Google tracking code for Analytics if you use it. You could also look at all the potential ways in which you could have the new design built to be optimised for site preformance meaning every page loads as quick as possible. Also adding new pages into your structure is another positive step to actually improving your online preformance with this redesign.

I tested this out myself but couldn't replicate it, however I can imagine it happening - like you and others have said they are testing things all the time.

Maybe they ran out of bananas that day! Just imagine all those years we have spent trying to second guess the algo of Googlebot and the key was a monkey haha.

The only problem with vanilla is that it is easily influenced by other flavours around it don't you think..?

Bulloogle.com would definitely have to be a metacrawler - putting emphasis on metatags - oh the good old days haha!

I have also noticed when answering questions myself and also when viewing unanswered questions that people regularly have their questions answered on here, but don't give credit to the people that are answering them. Are all mozzers aware that after so many automatic thumbs up from Q&A they no longer count, so answering a question and getting no recognition from the poster leaves the exercise almost pointless.

I think that it is a case of lack of knowledge and forgetfulness, as I have regularly seen verbal acknowledgement of an answer but no thumbs up given.

Is there no way round this? I know how busy the SEOMOZ staff are but to keep this community improving I think that this should be addressed as it is disheartening and I can imagine that some have already been put of from answering questions! Maybe look at appointing some specific Q&A moderators and not just associates?

Vanilla sometimes is the best flavour - I'd definitely give it  a go! Here's to making the web a better place Egol.

Hi Sofia,

Yes server location does still have an impact on SEO in my experience and if you are looking to target the UK then I would definitely make sure that your server is hosted in the UK.

A hosting provider that I have used for several sites and found to be reliable, in my experience, is www.uk2.net - servers hosted in London, UK and they use CPanel. Hope this helps.

Hi Marisa,

Have you done anything to encourage comments and social media shares? If you have email lists of past and present customers that you regularly use I would send them an outreach email asking for them to click on the link in your email and share your blog posts on social sites such as facebook when they are logged in of course.

You could also incentivise people to comment send them links to blog pieces, such as your competition once you have set it up and ask them a leading question then invite them to respond by commenting on your blog.

I have found increasing social shares and comments on sites has had direct impact on one of the websites that I was working on which was always sat at number 2 for one of my main targeted keywords until I went about pushing its social exposure. Without altering anything onsite other than the number of likes on facebook etc it suddenly moved into the top position and has been there ever since. I hope this answers your question or at least gives you some ideas.

Remember don't be afraid to ask the worst that can happen is you get little reponse or someone emails back saying no - which I haven't found to be the case. My point is that I have found social media impact to have a direct influence on search engine rankings so improving yours would always be a positive move.

Also you could have got the members of each of the different organisations involved with the 10 Impressive Embroidered Dragon Patches by leaving it open to which would be number 1 as it could have been voted for and you could have then posted on the different groups representing these patches pages on social media sites, such as facebook, getting them to vote for theres to be the number one and telling them to like the blog page and pass the message on to friends that would support their group, also increasing exposure for them which could potentially lead to new members. You could have also got asked them to start commenting through this method I think.

Hi Leona - what you have done is something along the lines of what I thought would work for you - sorry if I wasn't clear in my original response - I thought you meant if you created a robots.txt and specified Googlebot to be disallowed then Googlebot-image would pick up the photos still and as I said this wouldn't be the case as it Googlebot-image will follow what it set out for Googlebot unless you specify otherwise using the allow directive as I mentioned. Glad it has worked for you - keep us posted on your results.

I have worked on a site that targets two locations - for the terms that I have targeted in those locations they both rank number one. How I went about this was as follows: I setup a page on the website for both locations, optimizing all the relevant on page factors titles, headers, keywords in text etc. In your case you could focus on the clinics, how long they have been going and include testimonials from customers of each making sure that reference is given to the specific location. I also setup the URL structure to include the location targeted keyword for each page e.g Chester-acupuncture.html and Knutsford-acupuncture.html and I included the links to the pages in menu structure of the site. I then went about link building for each page getting both listings for their location. I also built group pages for each on Facebook and pointed them to the individual website pages. I went about pushing the social media exposure gaining members through offers and information building a rapport with users, this gained likes for both webpages. I found that this strategy lead to decent local rankings and traffic from the targeted place keywords. Obviously this is a brief summary of the strategy that worked for me, it took time and effort with analysis of my competition, but I gained the results I was after and I think you are looking for.

Hi Leona

Googlebot-image and any of the other bots that Google uses follow the rules set out for Googlebot so blocking Googlebot would block your images as it overrides Googlebot-image. I don't think that there is a way around this using the disallow directive as you are blocking the directory which contains your images so they won't be indexed using specific images.

Something you may want to consider is the Allow directive -

Disallow: /community/photos/

Allow: /community/photos/~username~/

that is if Google is already indexing images under the username path?

The allow directive will only be successful if it contains more or equal number of characters as the disallow path, so bare in mind that if you had the following;

Disallow: /community/photos/

Allow: /community/photos/

the allow will win out and nothing will be blocked. please note that i haven't actioned the allow directive myself but looked into it in depth when i studied the robots.txt for my own sites it would be good if someone else had an experience of this directive. Hope this helps.

Hi Carl

I have a UK site that has the same issue - I don't think it is anything for you to be concerned about, it is just the language settings on the person's computer. I know it isn't an issue because when I send an email campaign out it is to 1000's of UK customers that have been signed up and tied to their accounts at their UK addresses so I know that they are in the UK, yet the majority of visits from that campaign report reading languages as en-us. I hope this helps put your mind at rest! I know at the time until I looked deeper into it and did that test I was a bit concerned too.

Hi Paul

Have you looked deeper into your analytics - how do your traffic sources for the two sites compare- are they different? Are you getting traffic from keywords on your new site that you aren't on your old site? If so what is the bounce rate on these terms - my thoughts are you might be ranking well for some keywords that don't provide visitors with the information they are looking for. Alternatively your page could be so relevant for that search keyword that visitors don't need to dig any deeper into the new site. In this case time on page should give you a clue as to which of these it may be in this situation - is the time on page too short to read the content for you average person or not - how long does it take you to read? It might not be this but I always find looking deeper into the analytics of a website tends to hold the key, especially when you are comparing it to another site that you own in the same niche as you are in the fortunate position of having access to both sites analytics. Hope this helps.

I have been in this situation, but my site was hosted in the US and I moved the site to UK hosting and I think it was the right decision - I found my UK traffic increased shortly afterwards.