Welcome to the Q&A Forum

As Luis says, the canonical tag would be your best bet, although that's more of a band aid than a complete fix as it's not guaranteed to be adhered to. In your example, I'd advise the following:

• Use a META Robots tag (http://www.robotstxt.org/meta.html) to NOINDEX,FOLLOW any content that you don't want to be indexed. This could include your sign in / sign up pages, etc.
• Use rel=prev and rel=next on your pagination (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html) and canonicalise back to page 1 if and only if you genuinely don't want the subpages to be indexed.

The last of those two is completely dependent on your circumstances, and I'd advise looking and thinking about things like:

• Whether you're getting organic traffic to the sub-pages (a reason not to);
• Whether they sub-pages target a different keyword to the main one (a reason not to);
• Whether the sub-pages create any duplicate content issues (a reason to do so);
• Whether having the sub-pages affects your crawl quota (if so, a reason to do so).

Finally, on the note about your competitors... there's loads of stuff that will influence rankings so don't be guided by them too much

Hope that helps - let me know if you have any more questions, or just post a link here if you want me to take a (very) quick look at your site.

Matt

Although a little over-used, infographics are still a great way of gaining links if you market them properly. A quick outline of the process would be:

• Pick a topic (doing all the proper research into making sure it's going to be interesting to people, etc)
• Create the infographic (make sure to use a good designer - it's worth spending the extra cash)
• Seed it through social media, employing the use of friends, colleagues and random homeless people if needs be.
• Market it to blog owners in your niche.

That last part has a workflow of its own which is time consuming but something that you can outsource (drop me a PM if you need any help). Another quick outline:

• Create a list of blogs. Columns should include things like their URL, contact name, email, contact form, twitter handle, facebook page, title of a recent post, why that post was interesting, etc.
• Add a new column to your spreadsheet with a quick few words about why you find their blog interesting. This will be added to your email so needs to sound like a real person and written in the correct tone... so don't rush this too much.
• Email all of your blog owners telling them of your infographic and asking if they'd like to feature it. This can be automated with data from your spreadsheet but make sure it looks like you written and sent the email manually.

Hope that's all helpful - it's really just a quick overview of a much larger process but should  help at least a little

• Matt

Hi Chris,

It all depends on your budget - you're likely to find resources on oDesk that will give you far lower quotes than you'll receive from the higher profile members of the SEOMoz community. Having said that, I've yet to find anyone over there who really knows what they're doing with SEO (although I'm sure there are people, just not in the usual $3/hr price bracket).

If you're looking for help from a Mozzer I'd advise contacting a few people who post on the QA forum or comment on blogs and asking them to spend a few minutes doing a high level review of your site. If you like what you hear start to explore the option of putting them on a monthly retainer / day rate and work out some outline costs.

(Self promotion alert): I'd be more than happy to help out - just drop me an email / tweet / contact form from my site.

• Matt

Hi Lewis,

I've done a couple of tests (nothing scientific - just trying things out and looking for trends) on this in the last few months and have found the following:

• Using the same keyword more than once doesn't seem to have any impact on keyword rankings
• The first keyword in the title element seems to be given priority, assuming that it's matched up with other on page elements (ie. Broad usage throughout the page, alt tags, etc)

The best title tag will most likely have your keyword first, followed by some kind of call to action, and then your site name at the end. This works on a few levels - namely that you're improving your rankings, click throughs and also brand awareness.

Kieran's definitely correct in saying that it should be tied in with the meta description, although I'd disagree that there's no benefit to having the brand at the end of the tag - particularly if you're working with a client who's looking to build, or reinforce, their name.

Remember that it isn't all about getting to the top. By including your call to action you're potentially helping with conversion rate optimisation and by including the brand you're helping build trust over the long term... which is incredibly hard to measure but will surely add hidden benefit and gives you another string to your bow!

As far as keyword density goes, the old ways of looking at it are completely outdated. If you aim to use your keyword 3-4 times in a reasonable sized page whilst also employing the ~ operator on Google to find, and use, related terms you'll be fine.

Hope that's helpful - would be really interested to hear how you get on

Matt

The site you've pointed to uses ajax to load its content. When the page loads there's a javascript snippet which takes over and adds the # to the page (hence why you're not seeing it as a httpd header). If you click on any other link you'll see that the base URL stays the same with some extra parameters on the end.

There are potential crawling issues with this and a number of fixes (some Google documentation here, although this isn't the fix that the site in question is using: http://code.google.com/intl/en-US/web/ajaxcrawling/).

So, in short, there's nothing fishy going on - it's just good old ajax content loading

• Matt

Hi Andy,

This is a fun one! I've checked, and the latest version of the site that Google has cached contains the new <title>, so for some reason it either hasn't update yet or is choosing to ignore the tag. If that's happening, it could be for a few reasons:</p> <ul style="color: #5e5e5e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;"> <li><span style="color: #5e5e5e;">There's an OpenGraph tag as follows: <span><meta </span><span>property</span><span>='</span><span>og:site_name</span><span>' </span><span>content</span><span>='</span><span>Emeryville Pharmaceutical Services</span><span>'/>. It might be that Google's using that because it doesn't see your title tag as being relevant. If that's the case it's a completely new one on me as I've never seen this happen before.</span></span></li> <li><span style="color: #5e5e5e;"><span>More likely is that it's a relevancy / length issue, causing one of these to happen: <a href="http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/url-titles">http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/url-titles</a></span></span></li> </ul> <p><span style="color: #5e5e5e;">Looking at your backlink profile and page content, there's nowhere that matches your chosen title so this is the most likely reason. You could try shortening the tag or tweaking your content but, to be honest, why would you want to? The branded title looks far nicer on the SERPs...</span></p> <p><em><span style="color: #5e5e5e;">Matt</span></em></p></title>

I can help with a few of those:

1. Looks like you're using the crawl tool. If this is for an on-going project, go to http://www.seomoz.org/campaigns and set one up. That way you get a sexy GUI (if you like robots that is) and weekly crawls / rank tracking.

2. That number is almost certainly a UNIX timestamp. To convert it inside excel use the formula below (don't forget to format the cell as a date, otherwise you just see a random number!):

=(A1/86400)+25569+(-5/24)

3. I wouldn't worry about that at all - the crawler converts any non-standard characters to ASCII but, as far as I know, it won't affect your SERP performance.

4. Could you give a few examples of the pages that are affected so I can take a look?

5. That's either a bug or (not too likely but worth checking) an issue with how the numbers are formatted in your spreadsheet. I'd advise opening the file using a text editor to check that the numbers that excel shows match up with the raw format and, if they do, submitting a bug report to the SEOMoz team.

6. The referrer cell tells you how the crawler got to that page. If you don't have any internal links to a page on your site then, chances are, the crawler won't find it. The only caveat to that (and I'm not 100% sure so would need confirmation) is that if the crawl tool uses external linking data. I'd always assumed it didn't but SEOMoz will know where some of your pages are even if you don't link to them internally as external sites will point to them. If that's the case it could be the reason that the referrer cell is blank.

7. Remember that this is SEOMoz crawling your site, not Google. Anything you set in Webmaster tools isn't visible by other search engine spiders such as those used by Bing, Yahoo!, SEOMoz, Majestic, etc. Because of that they won't know how to handle your URL parameters. You're best setting this through either a meta robots tag, robots.txt, or .htaccess (depending on what you're trying to do). Be careful though - if you mess it up there's a strong possibility that you'll end up blocking pages that you want the search engines to be able to access!

Hope that's all helpful... give me a shout if there's anything else.

• Matt

Haig,

It's all about citations and making sure that your 'place' is picked up from as many sources as possible with identical location data (this includes everything from the business name, address, telephone number, etc.)

There was a great tactic posted by Rand a few weeks ago which is extremely easy to follow and, more importantly, will give you the results you're looking for:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/one-dead-simple-tactic-for-better-rankings-in-google-local

The most important thing to remember from this is to be consistent with your information so be sure to take your time and don't try to rush things

• Matt

Some of the most important things:

• Product Feeds: Most of our sales come from Google shopping - forget this at your peril.
• Search engine friendly URLs (i.e. /blue-widget/ or /categories/widgets/ instead of ?productid=5 or ?catid=10)
• Make sure your CMS works for you - it should help you match the URL, Title Tag, alt tags, H1 and body content with the product targeted on that specific page)
• Social Media integration (a service like addthis will make that easy to implement)
• Ensure that pages load as quickly as possible - use as few js libraries as possible, combined css, etc)
• Not related to your cart but... Use a blog to post good, interesting content and then market it to other blog owners.

I'm sure there're loads more but that's a starter

Matt

Hi Justin,

URLs definitely aren't case sensitive from a Google point of view, although depending how the RewriteRule is set up (I'm assuming your web server is Apache) the e-commerce software itself might require a URL to be typed in the correct case.

I'd advise testing this on a subdomain first though (ie. dev.stupid.com)... but remember to block all search engines using robots.txt so you don't get some accidental indexing!

As for other things to think about, one would be pagination. Make sure the new tool deals with that the same as the old one or you'll end up with a load of broken links to your sub-pages. Static pages are also something to check, particularly if you have landing pages or product reviews posted through there.

I'm sure there'll be something I've missed but that'll give you more than enough to be getting on with

• Matt

I always get that URL wrong - sorry! Curse of the bookmark - it's like speed dial... 3 years later and I still don't know my other half's phone number. She's consistently disappointed when I have to ask for it.

With regards to the research, use oDesk and hire a virtual assistant. You can get someone who's proficient enough to create you a list of sites that accept guest blog posts / niche directories (and do the submission) for $2-$3 per hour.

• Matt

Are the longer links historical or are they being pointed to from somewhere on your site?

If it's the latter I'd advise sorting out your internal linking structure so that it's the shorter URL that is pointed to. A canonical should be enough, but it's only a pointer... so if Google sees loads of links going to a page that is canonicalised which, in turn, points to a page with virtually no juice then it may be that the tag is ignored.

It's also worth finding out if it's just webmaster tools showing the error by checking if both pages are indexed. If they are, you definitely have a duplicate content issue... if not then it may just be a reporting error.

• Matt

Have you tried seeding your new content through social media to see if that helps? (As soon as the new article is released post it to your Facebook and Twitter accounts, along with getting a few RT's / likes)...

This is a bit of a long shot but if the files have been uploaded using their API it may have been that the 'X-Robots-Tag' http header is set to no-index...

Also, those URLs don't look great with the commas in them. Have you tried doing a small subset that just has the image id (e.g. http://res.cloudinary.com/greenplantswap/image/upload/nprvu0z6ri227cgnpmqc.jpg)?

Matt

Hi Bill,

I've just had a look at your site and the canonical tag is set as:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.autoserviceexpertsonline/index.html"/>

I'd advise changing it so that index.html isn't included (simply because that's the most likely way that people are going to link to you and how they'll get to your site, so it makes sense that the canonical tag points to the most popular 'page' in the eyes of both users and search engines). So, you'd end up with:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.autoserviceexpertsonline/"/>

The error that you're getting through the Report Card may appear if you're checking the base URL of your site (http://www.autoserviceexpertsonline/) as SEOMoz would see your canonical tag pointing to a different place (index.html) and therefore being incorrect.

My advice would be to do the fix (as above) and recheck your page through SEOMoz immediately - you shouldn't need to wait until the following Tuesday when using the report card tool as it does an immediate refresh of the page content.

Also, to explain why you only see index.html in the file manager (in simple terms) is that the webserver (apache) sees index.html as being the base file for your site. So, when someone goes to http://www.autoserviceexpertsonline/ apache grabs the index.html file and shows it on the page.

Hope that's helpful - let me know if you have any more questions,

Matt

Mahalo!

I've had a -really- quick look and to me it seems that you're doing fairly well already! Being up against Career Builder, Monster and Indeed (I hope I'm seeing the correct results - did a non-pers Google.com check) is never going to be easy but the few rankings I checked look pretty good.

I'd probably leave it as it is and spend my time thinking about content creation and outreach as you've already got a great foundation

Good luck!

Matt

Hmmmm, okay... Could you post the examples they gave, and an example page where the images are located on the site?

I'm guessing that you currently load the login form if the user isn't logged in onto the page without redirecting? If so, that's perfectly fine... all I'd do is add a 'noindex, follow' meta robots tag to those pages.

Others might think differently though - would be interested to hear if there're any benefits in redirecting to a central login page...

Hi Kristian,

Sorry this is a bit late - logged off when you posted this (I'm in the UK) and only just had chance to get my 'Moz fix

"non-pers google.com" just referred to using the SEOMoz Chrome Toolbar to do a 'Non personalised' check on Google.com for your keywords. If you want to check rankings compared to your competitors, use your SEOMoz Pro account (if you have one) or if you need something large scale and custom, get in touch with AuthorityLabs.

As for the no-follows, yeah - it would make sense to me. Again, depends on the exact situation but sounds like a sensible thing to do...

Matt

Ignore the developer - what worked for one doesn't mean it'll work for you

The easiest way to test this is to manually create a sitemap with 100 or so 'clean' image URLs. Just pull the messy ones into excel and use the formula below to create a clean version (Use A1 for messy, B1 for formula).

Good luck mate.

=CONCATENATE("image:imageimage:lochttp://res.cloudinary.com/greenplantswap/image/upload/",RIGHT(A1,LEN(A1)-(FIND("",(SUBSTITUTE(A1,"/","",(IF(LEN(TRIM(A1))=0,0,LEN(TRIM(A1))-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A1,"/",""))))))))),"</image:loc></image:image>")

Hey,

I would strongly advise you to be very careful when deciding whether or not to try these kinds of tactics. There are few things that could happen here, all of them bad:

1. Nothing. Buying an exact match domain and adding a 301 in itself won't make a blind bit of difference to the target site.
2. You build a load of spammy links into the domain that you're 301 redirecting to your main site. This ends up with an algorithmic penalty, which disappears when you remove the 301.
3. As above but you get a manual penalty. Removing the 301 does nothing. You're screwed until the penalty expires (if it does).
4. You build good links into the domain that you're 301 redirecting which helps the target site... but not as much as it would if you just built the links straight into it.

Exact match domains are on their way out so using this as a tactic to get better rankings just isn't going to work in the long term. Having said that, we all know that there are still instances where they rank very well when they possibly shouldn't, so if you really have to do something like this, create a separate site with some great relevant content and build good links into it. For now it might increase the chances you rank well, and will still be within guidelines as you're providing a good experience for your users.

Honestly... You'd be far better off spending your time, effort and money creating a video, building a really cool interactive resource, or making friends with some niche influencers. It'll be cheaper and give you more benefit in the long run.

Matt

One thing to remember is that PageRank is just one of many ranking factors, and Google themselves say not to worry about it too much. The thing to look at is your traffic - if you're seeing a sudden drop-off then you may have been penalised. If it's gradual or seasonal then there are other things at play such as not gaining links as fast as everyone else, outdated architecture, etc.

Finally, google.com actually dropped from a 10 to a 9 in the recent update and I'm pretty sure they aren't having any traffic issues

As for being able to tell if you've had a penalty - the only real way is a sudden drop in rankings / traffic across your site. Sadly Google don't tell you anywhere so it's all guess work!

Hope that's helpful,

Matt

Hi Bob,

If you're looking for reasonably good quality at inexpensive rates, I'd use TextBroker.com and choose the '4*' option when you create the job. You'll pay around $10 for an average length article and the majority of the time you won't need to do much editing.

Hope that helps,

Matt