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Hi - I tend to always set the urls to be the full post title. You will also notice that the likes of Moz does this as well if you look at this post for instance. Your plugin is trying to be clever as there is thought that having too many hyphens and words in your url will dilute the effectiveness of your main keywords once you start going over 4 or 5 words, depending where the keywords occur in the title. I believe Matt Cutts addressed this in a webmaster video many moons ago and I think the main conclusion was that having too many hyphens in your URL may look a little spammy to searchers and put them off clicking on your result in the SERPs. However nowadays this is a common practice and I don''t think this has negative impact on click through rates from the SERPs. If I were you I would look at my URL matching my post title personally. Small words such as A and with help to add context to your page contents in my opinion.

I appreciate what you are saying - so my gut feeling would be if you looked at it from the point of someone that never read this sort of thing then you would post it and not worry about no follow but your link would most likely be www.yourdomain.com, so I think this would be ok as it is more natural - though at the end of the day this is just my opinion and your choice as no one truly knows the impact. I would still think about looking outside the box and seeing how you can push the exposure of this article to gain you more authority online.

"I see SO so many sites ranking with nothing but press releases and garbage article submissions... What does it all mean? I don't know. But I do know we are working on a press release to go out this week and I need to make a decision on this...hmmm"

Depends how safe you want to play it and how strong the content of your press release is! How many press releases have you done in the past with followed anchor text links? Do you have a strong well balanced link profile? I see sites that are still getting away with using this practice but they are in for pain when Google finalizes how it will deal with those abusing its latest guidelines - I don't think Matt Cutts and others at Google would empathize this if it wasn't worth taking note of! As with many manipulative practices those committing them don't suffer straight away but when they do get caught it is usually painful...

I would opt to play the long game and look at using your press releases as a way of attracting more attention that will lead to links and social shares rather than using them for direct followed links to increase authority..

I think that none keyword anchor text such as your websites URL is safer if you are going to have a followed link from a press release. Although I would be careful if you are creating a press release to gain authority from the link(s) in it with the recent changes by Google. Remember the main aim of your press release is to gain your brand exposure and even if the link from it are no followed if you do it well and what you have published is news worthy you are likely to pick up followed links and social shares from other sources indirectly anyway.

Always a good recap I think - http://searchengineland.com/google-links-in-a-press-release-should-be-nofollowed-like-advertisements-168339

Have you contacted them to ask them to remove your images - informing them that they don't have permission to use them?

Oh yes, varying your...oh wait sorry you didn't want that haha.

Erm this is an interesting idea - on first read my first thought was you're trying to game the system and that's never a good idea.

Then I thought a little more and I suppose it is very similar to dynamic content such as offers on your linking page, although it always points at one location.

I suppose it is only similar to changing your anchor text manually to see what works best, but I think that such frequent changes could end up getting noticed - a link anchor changing every time Google visits - surely Google is clever enough to notice this pattern and doesn't it smack of over-optimisation?

I bet others have already tried this - have you done any digging to see if you can find out what the impact was?

Firstly I would ask what the purpose of your link directories were in the first place? How do people submit to your directories and what value do they add to your site apart from possibly having too many links on some of your sites pages? Do you have a lot of spammy sites submitted? I personally would look at cutting this facility as Penguin has hit a lot of link directories and as you say there are a lot of irrelevant sites in your directory! Are your directory pages indexed on a "site:" search in Google?

Yeah I would say it appears that they are working on some changes in relation to video results in their SERPs unless it is just a bug but the strangest set of results I have ever seen! Yeah funny that they are all YouTube links - who owns them again? haha I'm sure its just a bug

Nice spot William I have never seen a first page like this one - something new being introduced I wonder - a Youtube takeover?!! I better get some more videos quickly lol

I agree with Rob you would be best to place a nofollow on the links between your country level domains. By doing this you get to keep the links and convenience from a users point of view, but you are flagging to Google that you are not trying to pass authority between your sites by interlinking them. Essentially you are waving a flag that says you are not trying to manipulate your rankings by creating your own link network.

I think you are right about this Adam I should have looked what I wrote I didn't mean just point www.competitor.com to www.yoursite.com and have done I meant do a 301 over a single link from homepage that auto-redirects after 10 secs - you should always redirect at a page by page level as it helps the user find the content they are looking for. I think that redirecting at a blanket level like this can actually hinder rather than help you - see http://moz.com/blog/save-your-website-with-redirects

so thumbs up

Quick note as Cyrus says in the above linked post you won't see much benefit in terms of SEO by doing a blanket redirect to your homepage!! So don't waste your purchase take your time and make your redirects relevant Mike

Oh yeah one more quick thing I would have a glance at this thread on webmasterworld - http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4348449.htm

I have never personally bought a competitor and implemented a 301 redirect - what adam and myself speak of would be best practice for this in terms of pass authority from the site you have bought in terms of its link profile. However this is all done around the pretext of boosting your ranking and Google knows this goes on and isn't daft!

Have you done this in the same situation Adam - buying a rivals site? I would be very interested to hear yours or anyone else's first hand experience on this and I think it will help Mike as well. As you are redirecting between two sites that are well established in Google's index rather than between an established site and a new one or new structure, which I have done and think is more commonly the case for 301 use.

I personally would look at doing a 301 redirect from their website to yours. This will give you the most benefit as it will pass authority to your site from links that they have gained. Increased authority equals better ranks in general so this will be a good thing! Much better than having a single link from their homepage effectively passing the benefit of a single link from their site rather than the multiple links they have gained. Have a look at this video about the passing of pagerank through 301 redirects from Googles Matt Cutts

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Filv4pP-1nw

Hi Quilbur

These guys have all given you some great answers I just thought you might like this extra little bit of info - Bing actually takes meta keywords as a spam signal since about 2011.

Have a look at this article by Danny Sullivan - http://searchengineland.com/the-meta-keywords-tag-lives-at-bing-why-only-spammers-should-use-it-96874

As the only thing that meta keywords actually do is make it easier for your competitors to know what keywords you are targeting  (as jamesm5i stated) I never implement them.

I always make sure that there is a strong call to action on the meta description as I have seen the results of implementing this with sites already in postions 2 and 3 - a strong call to action increased the search traffic generated by them significantly.

Hi

I personally would say that you want all your classifieds ads indexed (INDEX) as they will help with your long tail traffic from the search engines. I used to run a classified ads section on a site that I ran and the classified ads system picked up a fair amount of long tail traffic. In turn this helped drive more traffic and conversions through the site as a whole.

Have you considered adding a plugin like Yoast SEO? This is an excellent tool and it will help you sort out your Moz Campaign results.

Have a look here - http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/

As far as too many on-page links goes moz reports what is best standard but I can tell you from experience that I have had successful sites redesigned and there on-page links have increased to above this threshold so have been flagged by Moz. However my rankings went up even with this issue because it made sense from a users perspective so I stuck with it and it paid off.

Meta descriptions are your page description and call to action so not having them misses out on the added benefit of enticing a potential visitor from the SERPs. However Google is pretty good at determining what meta to incorporate and this element doesn't directly affect your rankings. I used to have a summary section/text box that users had to enter a short description into in order to submit a classified. This was also used to populate meta description. It just made this element easier to populate and make unique I found.

FINAL NOTE - just to be clear you don't want to restrict access to any of your sites content in terms classified adds and their categories - the more unique content that is indexed the better it is for your SEO - more chances of picking up traffic especially from the long tail specific searches.

I hope this helps

Hi

You are obviously going to need to change around the 301 redirect and do it on a page by page basis, so that any links gained on those pages will pass the authority gained to the corresponding pages.

If you don't do it at this level you will end up with an increased bounce rate and this is likely to impact your rankings as visitors that find a current page in the search engine results aren't likely to search your site again if they are just taken straight to your homepage - they are likely to just assume that this content no longer exists.

You will also need to set the change of address in Google Webmaster Tools to help Google figure out your change.

I would recommend you read this great article in relation to minimising the impact of a change on your rankings -

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/achieving-an-seo-friendly-domain-migration-the-infographic

Also have a look at the other articles mentioned in this one.

Hope this helps!

Thanks - I have always found it a quick win in terms increasing traffic to your site and it is one of the first places I would look at optimising in order to see noticeable benefits.

The meta description tag hasn't had an impact on your actual ranking in the search results for a very long time. However you should still be utilising this tag and writing a custom description for each page on your clients site in order to help increase your click-through in the search results. I always view it as a call to action to help increase CTR - how can you entice searchers to click your page over others surrounding you?

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/meta-description

Great bit of info by DR Pete of SEOMoz -

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

Glad I could help Brian and welcome to the community, by the way

Is your domain a brand name or an exact match domain targeting a specific keyword?

If it is an EMD then it could be as simple as your site doesn't rank as well as the others and these types of domain don't have the same benefit they used in terms ranking for the terms they match quickly.

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2214115/Google-Warns-of-Upcoming-Exact-Match-Domain-Algorithm-Change

Without the "site:" query in Google it is common to only have one result when doing a domain search - this may have multiple sitelinks under one listing. An example of your typical domain listing would be amazon.co.uk typed into Google - a strong well ranked brand but it only appears once for its domain search on page 1, yet it does have multiple sitelinks for the one listing.

When you say you had a robots.txt live at first - many well ranked sites have them live all the time, but it is more a question of what was in the file? For instance where you restricting access to any or all parts of your site?

Hi Brian

I think you might find this helpful - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6634302/how-to-leverage-browser-caching-at-asp-net-iis-7-5

and...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/642954/iis7-cache-control

You should be able to do this by making/editing (if you already have one) a web.config file in your root folder, which is explained in the article above.

Firstly welcome to the community David :),

Very interesting video  - I hadn't seen this! Additions like this show why this community is so great! We are constantly helping each other expand our knowledge.

I think you will agree that a 301 is still the answer to this question and the best method for moving domains and taking the value of your old domain with you in terms of the search engines and ranking...

Hi Craig

Sorry for taking a while to come back to you but I have been very busy, however I have a couple a question -

When you first noticed the blocked pages had you made any changes to the site at that time and if so what were they?

Have you done anything that could have slowed your site down - running your homepage through a speed of load test I notice that it took over 4 secs which isn't very quick.

I once had an issue of lots of pages being de-indexed when we made an update to our sites template and the load time increased drastically. Even if this isn't the cause of the issue looking at optimizing your load time will help increase the speed at which your site is re-crawled. Google will be able to get through more in the time it allocates to crawl your site each time it visits if it is smaller and loads quicker hence speeding up your recovery.

There are lots of tools and information on optimizing load times - here is just one - http://www.webpagetest.org

Google has been changing/rewriting title tags in some situations for a while you may find this article interesting - http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2049990/Google-Changing-Titles-in-Search-Results-SEOs-Not-Happy

Try the following in your .htaccess:

RedirectMatch 301 ^/stuff-1/(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/stuff/$1

Hi Chandu - yes you can do this by using a 301 redirect from your old/existing domain to your new one. It will pass 90-99% of the link juice and therefore value in terms of your search engine rankings.

Here is some more info - http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection

Google on 301 redirects - http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93633

Doing this will lead to keyword cannibalization, so I would recommend you have a read of this post from Rand in regards to the issue for a greater understanding

- http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-solve-keyword-cannibalization

If I were you I would aim to make each of the title tags different...

One suggestion I would make is look at your pages meta description as it sounds like you have relatively strong rankings but people searching the related terms aren't clicking on your listing in the SERPs. I found that there was a significant increase in the traffic generated from pages that were already ranking well by optimising my meta description in order to entice people more.

I would suggest you read this in relation to meta descriptions

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

Always good to refresh the basics:

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/meta-description

Consider using rich snippets if you don't already as this will also help entice users to click on your result as it will make it stand out more in the results.

Have a read of this excellent article in relation to them -

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/a-visual-guide-to-rich-snippets

Good point Keri - I think it would probably be appropriate to have a link to this as well http://www.business.ftc.gov/documents/bus61-can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business

Have you glanced at SEOMoz's best practices for title tags? - http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/title-tag

In my opinion you should have the title as natural as possible and that should be the a clear label as to what your article is about. Have you looked at examples such as how SEOMoz has titles on their blog - article title | brand

In my experience you will also pick up more long tail traffic with more natural titles such as using the full title rather than just a specific keyword. It also looks less spammy and over-optimized which is something to take into consideration after recent Google updates.

Hi Jemin

My experience of too many on page links is that I did a site redesign in 2012 and the on-page links went up to over 100, which SEOMoz crawl reported on my campaign. I was ranking well before hand with numerous first page listings. However after the redesign my ranking actually went up and my search engine traffic has been steadily increasing ever since - so in short if it make sense to have these links on page and you aren't repeating lots of links then I wouldn't worry. Have a look at some of the big ecommerce sites like Amazon who have well over the link limit on pages yet they rank very well.

I would just take this notice as a guide. In terms of reducing on-page links if you are still concerned then you will need to post your website as it is hard to make a judgement without actually seeing it.

Hope this helps..

Hi Matthew

In order to capture more email addresses I would advise that you have some sort of incentive that makes it worth signing-up for - maybe a discount or some free aspect to your service.

I would also make sure that you customize your messages to different groups where possible - for instance you would want to hit a different angle with existing customers as against potential customers.

I imagine you are already planning on doing this but I thought I would mention it - create and integrate your form from AWEBER as this will make list management so much easier and you can create auto-responders easily. For instance if a person signs-up with your form you can have it set so that an automatic email with an introductory article or an offer is sent.

Always make sure you capture the persons name in the form so that you can personalise your email campaigns.

When sending your campaign with links to your blog I would write the email so as to encourage  readers to leave comments on your articles as this will be beneficial in many ways..

I would also consider encouraging customers to forward emails that are promoting your blog posts. This will increase your traffic and will help capture more email addresses in my experience.

I would also encourage you to push your blog posts via social media as well as by email, but I would try and make sure subscribers are getting extra value for being part of your email list - like I say maybe occasional promoted giveaway or discount etc.

Chamber of Commerce specific - personal email maybe saying something like it was great to  meet you at the chamber of commerce. I thought I would email you as I am starting an new periodic (weekly, fortnightly, monthly?) email about current SEO and our experiences/findings/knowledge so I thought you would be interested. As well as receiving some great information you will also be entered into a free prize draw or x amount discount on work (you would have to decide which works best for you), which is only available to those on our email list.

I find http://blog.deliverability.com/ a very useful resource when it comes to email marketing - lots of interesting information that will be of great use to you.

There are so many things you can do with email marketing and it is such a powerful tool if used right! These are just a few of my thoughts on your subject which I hope will be of help and will get you thinking...

Placing something like this in your .htaccess file will redirect every page on your site without a "/" to one with a "/" without having to specify over 3k URLs individually.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.)/$
RewriteRule ^(.)$ http://example.com/$1/ [L,R=301]

No problem - well I would definitely look at removing the keyword cloud for a start as this just looks so spammy in my opinion and is likely to stick out like a sore thumb to Google. The other issue you have is that some of your pages with videos on are very thin on content and so all this repeating text in the footer across the site isn't likely to help in terms of duplicate content.

I don't see an issue with the pictures and they do look good apart from why do you have them on Flickr and not hosted on your site maybe I am missing something? I would consider adding another link to your top menu for the whats new links and have them on sub-menu as your other items currently do rather than repeating them on every pages footer as they look like targeted keywords to me. Adding them to the main navigation won't complicate things and at worst gives these pages more weight. I would also have one page that talks about who you are but I also think that repeating it across your site devalues your homepage content as the majority of it is basically your footer. In short I think the current layout will be devaluing your SEO, but the choice is yours...

Have you considered putting a 301 redirect in place so that the none trailing slash URLs that have links pointing to them redirect to the trailing slash version as that is now your preferred format? It will help reduce duplicate content and cut the potential of wasting link juice if some links point to one version and some to the other. You also need to make sure that your navigation structure is updated to point to the trailing slash version rather than being redirected to it.

Yes you are talking about the words that the areas you have mentioned above focus on but remember don't just use your keyword try and make your optimization look as natural as possible whilst including it in these areas.

Yes you have the right idea in terms of your homepage and subsequent pages.

Copy is very important when it comes to websites in terms of SEO. Search engines will see every element on that page as part of it and it will take into account the text wherever it is. Just remember that the higher up the page the more weight is given to that content. Descriptions of your videos will count as they are text on your page so they will be read when crawled by Google.

Can you just repeat your question on site wide footers as I am not sure what it is and can't see it above?

In terms of your footer I don't think it is a good idea to have a keyword cloud like you have repeated across your site as this just shouts over-optimization in my opinion and you are risking trouble as it is clearly there for one reason and one reason only - boost rankings! I also think it isn't worth repeating a paragraph about you on every page. In the current climate there is little advantage to your footer as you have it in terms of helping you rank - as I say content above the fold/ higher up the page is where the most weight is placed.

You also need to remember that only the first link on a page is counted, so repeating your menu in the footer has zero value from an SEO point of view.

Footer tactics for ranking are old hat and the likes of Google have wised up to manipulation tactics using them...

Yes in terms of a redirect the target URL is the new page that you are redirecting the original one to, so just add the URL of page you are redirecting to.

Hi Iain- that's what this community is all about isn't it great! I take it the specific urls you mention above you mean is it ok to redirect to a page with a completely different name? The answer is yes if that is the new location of that page then your redirect is absolutely fine.

I have had a quick check and your redirects are setup fine well done - happy seoing

I believe the keyword field you are talking about is setting the meta keywords on your page which unfortunately has no positive impact on your rankings in the search engines. The most adding keywords in this field will do is tell your competitors what keywords you are targeting at a quick glance. This field use to be used by a type of search engine called a meta-crawler and it was common that when you searched for something totally unrelated you would get porn as they would have unrelated keywords in their meta tags (this is the common example people mention when talking of such) hence why this type of search was surpassed for more efficient methods years ago.

You need to make sure you include your keywords in the title, headers, body and so on in order to target keywords with your web pages. I would have a look at seomoz beginners guide to seo for a better understanding of on-page optimisation.

Btw you do want to do some keyword research in order to identify which keywords you want to target in relation to you niche but don't try and target the same keywords with every page and I would focus on one rather than multiple keywords per page personally But the trick is to write decent content that adds value and is natural not just aimed at targeting a keyworI in the search engines.

hope this clears things up...

Hi Craig - you are right that the directive without a slash means allow everything - I was just trying to figure out how you could have caused this issue because Google doesn't appear to be following your directive to crawl everything hence why I asked about the layout. Have you tested your robots.txt in Google Webmaster Tools?

What is the location of your robots.txt?

What does your index status say in Google Webmaster Tools?

You can also just create an empty robots.txt file which will allow all as well or

User-agent: *
Allow:/

I take it that you have this website setup as a campaign in SEOMoz - has this identified any relevant issues in the latest crawl?

Would you share your web address with us or even private message me with it so I can have a look for clues as this is very interesting!

I have experienced something similar after a site redesign the test version was put live with the robots.txt disallowing all. My site was deindexed quickly as when you block pages with a robots.txt their page content wont be indexed so won't appear in the search results. Google may index urls that are disallowed if they are linked from another page online however the rank will be lower due to the page content being ignored. Remove your robots.txt above as it is disallowing all It would appear although that command should allow all but there is no point in having robot file allowing all as this happens without. Though you would usually have disallow: / - to stop all!! Then I would resubmit an updated site map in Google Webmaster Tools and you should see your pages start to be indexed again. If you don't have a site map you can just wait for Google to start to re crawl your site. I would also check your homepage source code to make sure there isn't a robots meta tag turned on by accident saying no index no follow as I have seen this done by accident with CMS before.

have a look here on exactly how google handles robots.txt - http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=156449

One quick question -  have you laid out your file exactly as above with the user agent and disallow on the same line as this might be what is causing the issue? I haven't tested it but the standard is to have them on separate lines.

No problem Iain - firstly I would still create the redirects from your old html pages to their new locations as you rightly say there will be other sites with old links. You wouldn't want potential visitors/customers thinking your site is no longer there or down because they found it via a redundant link..

Secondly I wouldn't worry about doing anything regarding the current redirects - if you type any of your pages without a trailing slash you will see you are redirected to one with a trailing slash essentially reducing duplicate content for you.

Have a look at this article as to why it is something you don't need to worry about changing - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.html

Yes excessive reciprocal links is likely to lead your site into trouble, as it is likely to appear that you are exchanging links with these sources in turn for a link to you. How will Google decipher that the company wrote an article about your company and you are just linking to it in order to show visitors this and not an attempt at manipulating Googles SERPs?

If you work for a company that wants to acknowledge articles about your company on other sites your are going to have to come up with an alternative such as a graphic that has a logo of the sites and maybe saying we are mentioned on website x, website y and website z.

Before you think about going down the route of placing a nofollow on all links I would have a look at these wise words by Egol in a previous Q&A -

http://www.seomoz.org/q/adding-nofollow-to-all-external-links-is-this-a-good-idea

I would explain to your company why you shouldn't have all these links and the negative impact they are likely to have on your link profile. As we all know the more natural a link profile you can have the better in the eyes of Google. Saying that a natural link profile will have some reciprocal links but only a small proportion when it adds value to the visitor.

The other down side to reciprical links is that they essentially have the potential of taking the visitors attention away from your site - which in terms of business is not a great thing as this could distract them from converting to being another customer.

Hope this helps..

Have you considered allowing only a certain proportion of each page to show to any visitors including search engines. This way your pages will have some specific content that can be indexed and help you rank in the SERPs.

I have seen it done where publications behind a pay wall only allow the first paragraph or two to show - just enough to get them ranked appropriately but not enough to stop user wanting to register to access the full articles when they find them either through the SERPs, other sites or directly.

However for this to work it all depends on what the regualtions you mention require - would a proportion of the content being shown to all be ok??

I would definitely stay away from serving up different content to different users if I were you as this is likely to end up causing you trouble in the search engines..

Accessing Webmaster tools from the same location won't be an issue otherwise there are lots of agencies that would have problems when carrying out work for different clients in the same or similar niches. You are essentially operating both your sites as stand alone and there is nothing that is connecting them, so having two sites in the same niche should be fine. Just make sure that you write unique relevant content for each. Up until the end of 2012 I worked on two sites that would both rank for certain keywords and I actually acknowledged the relationship between both sites - having a link from one to the other and also having them on the same Google Account for analytics and webmaster tools. They had separate hosting but both were registered to the same company. One site was stronger than the other but there was no issue in terms of search engine rankings as the content was unique on each even if it was about the same or similar things.

Both had a legitimate reason for being there and I think Googles algorithm when it comes to things like attempted manipulation through link networks is cleverer than a lot of people give it credit for!

These are my thoughts and experience hope it is of some help...

Hi Keri - I agree so just added the link to redirection plugin to my reply - should make Iain's life easier..

Hi Iain

You don't need to create your old pages again just create 301 redirects in your .htaccess file which can be done using Yoast plugin - http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/#files

Here is SEOMoz's guide to redirection - http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection

Here is a redirection plugin for Wordpress just enter old url and new one you want it to point to and it will do the work for you - http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/redirection/

If you have content that is indexed in Google and has moved to a new location due to a site change such as this then I would recommend that you place 301 redirects from your old pages to the new corresponding ones..

Glad I could help and give you something to think about - I would definitely think about 301 redirecting one site to the other site and push forward with building one great information resource for customers new and old..

No problem - can I ask why you have two separate sites not just one? The reason I ask is that if they are about the same thing then I would consider joining them together into one information resource as this will save on time in terms of admin work and it will also mean that your link profile and therefore domain authority is likely to higher and hence better rankings. The reason I say it will be better is because there will be links that one site gains and the other doesn't, but by joining them together they will both benefit from every link gained. Having two sites in a situation where they could just be one site will only dilute everything in my opinion. Just a suggestion...