Hi Antonio,

I hope you're well and not pulling your hair out in frustration just yet.

There are a few factors that you need to consider before making a decision on this:

1. Would changing the URL of the post give more traffic through the search engine than you are currently getting?

2. How would this impact the existing links that have been built to the original URL.

Remember that if you are going to change the URL of a page, this will just look like a new webpage to Google. All of the Facebook likes, Google+ +1's, links, etc will be going to the previous URL. Not only that, if you do a 301 redirect to the new URL, you will only transfer some of the link juice that you have made.

URL changes really should be a last resort and need to be thought out properly at the start of the webpage creation. In the case of Mark (above), I have recommended that he change the URLs because they are all dynamic and the benefit of changing these pages vs not, wins.

Let me know the URL of the page in question and I will take a look and tell you what I think.

Matt.

No problem.

I think the URLs should be the primary focus, and if you need any help on this, feel free to drop me a private message, etc and I will help you out.

Matt.

Hi Christian,

No, this wouldn't be the case because what you are telling Google there is that "http://www.example.co.uk/properties/search" is the EXACT SAME page as the "/properties/search?page=1&commercialListingType=lease&propertyType=commercial/properties/search?page=1&commercialListingType=buy&propertyType=retail/" page.

For the likes of just search pages, you don't need to have canonical URLs because they are just dynamically generated search pages. Where you DO NEED canonical URLs is on the likes of category pages, product pages, etc.

So, in the case of Mark's website, the individual property listing pages (e.g, http://www.daft.ie/searchshortterm.daft?id=23606) need to have a canonical link because you could get to this page that has the EXACT SAME content with a similar URL (i don't know another URL to give the example here but a made up example could be http://www.daft.ie/searchshortterm.daft?id=23606keyword=dublin).

This is why you should have search engine friendly URLs to make it easy to understand which page is which. So having http://www.daft.ie/short-term/dublin/176-rathgar-road-apartment/ as the URL instead of http://www.daft.ie/searchshortterm.daft?id=23606 can make life a lot easier.

Has this helped to clear things up a bit?

Matt.

Hi Mark,

No problem.

Yes, you are correct to assume that. For each of the property listings you would need to do this (just like the example that Marcus has given below).

I think that all areas of the website should really conform to these search engine friendly URLs. It may take quite a bit of time, but it will help you avoid a lot of issues in the future (which I can guarantee you would have).

Matt.

Hi Mark,

I hope you're well.

Basically, the canonical tag is used to let Google know which URL it should refer to as the original source of the page content. So, if you had the following URLs that all go to the homepage:

www.domain.com/
www.domain.com/index.php
www.domain.com/home/

Then Google could crawl each of these pages and identify them as three different pages all with the same content. This could say to them that there is duplicate content on the site (which is not good). Usually with the homepage Google is intelligent enough to understand that there is just one page and the /index.php for example isn't a duplicate.

The problem that you do face, especially on the site that you are optimising, is with the different pages that have information on the lettings, etc (i.e. your product pages). For example, if you look at the following URL on your website:

http://www.daft.ie/searchshortterm.daft?id=23606

This is when you go through to the short-term searches and then I find the '176 Rathgar Road' apartment. Due to the dynamically generated URL (search.shortterm.daft?id=23606) I can gather that there would be several ways to get to this page with a different URL. My first suggestion would be to set up Search Engine Friendly URLs, for example, instead of having 'http://www.daft.ie/searchshortterm.daft?id=23606', it would be:

http://www.daft.ie/short-term/dublin/176-rathgar-road-apartment/

This way you could clearly optimise the page on Google search and have the canonical link to the page as:

href="http://www.daft.ie/short-term/dublin/176-rathgar-road-apartment.html" rel="canonical" />

This would improve the SEO performance on the website and avoid duplicate content issues.

I hope this helps, but if you need any more info then just let me know.

Matt.

Agreed

Hi Eduardo,

I have just tried to access the http://cursos.workea.org/sitemap.xml sitemap and it is coming up with a 404 error.

Are you sure that you have placed the sitemap in the root folder of the subdomain? Try deleting it from the server and then re-uploading it again.

Matt.

Hi Eduardo,

Do you have multiple sitemaps that are shown in an initial index? If so, it may be that there is a problem here.

Try just making the sitemap's name sitemap.xml, and making sure it is within the root domain folder. If this is already done then you will need to drop us a link to your sitemap to take a look,

Matt.

Hi Marisa,

I think what me and Billy are both saying here is to put most of your focus toward building niche-specific links. The other links will come, and it is actually good to have non-niche related links so that it looks natural to Google.

What I was trying to say was this if, for example, 80% of your links all came from motor racing websites, and your website is about cats, this can be confusing. If only 20% come from there, 20% from dog websites, 10% from directories, etc, then this is good.

Make sure that you don't focus too much on building non-niche specific links though as the most powerful links are the related ones. Also, completely agree with Billy regarding getting rid of those spammy .edu links. They could come back to haunt you.

Hope this has cleared things up,

Matt.

If you think about the links to your website as a web of semantic data. If your website was about cats and you have lots of websites that also talk about cats linking to you then Google can identify that your website is, in fact, about cats. However, if your website is about cats and you have a lot of websites that link to you about motor racing, then this can confuse Google and actually maybe believe that your website is, in fact about motor racing.

Semantically similar information is becoming more and more important and is the basic fundamental of search. Having a lot of links pointing to your website can help with building authority to your website, but niche specific links are invaluable.

Hope this helps,

Matt.

Hi Guys,

I just wanted to add to what I have previously said as when I have dug a bit deeper into this, I have found some info that could go against what I have previously said.

You can use the rel=publisher tag alongside the rel=author tag on a webpage. With this in mind it would be a good idea to have the rel=publisher present on every page in your website to enable you to be eligible for Google's Direct Connect feature.

I found this out when looking through a Google forum and one of the Google Trend Analysts confirmed this by saying:

Hi guys

_just a few short comments: it's fine to have both a link rel=publisher and author-markup on the same page. The rel=publisher confirms that your website is the publisher of that Google+ Page; the authorship markup confirms that you (your personal profile) is the author of the content on that page. This markup can be used independently, since  the meanings are slightly different. The issue with the Rich Snippets testing tool flagging this as an error is a bug on our side and should be resolved soon (sorry about the confusion caused by that!). _Cheers__John

Just thought I would share this with you all as it might help.

Matt.

It certainly makes sense. We are all in the dark at the moment to exactly how it will work, however, there have been a few tests that have been done to show that page authors have a direct effect upon SEO.

I would imagine that this will be the case for business pages too, however, for the likes of blog posts, etc, (i.e. content that is made by a specific individual within the business) it is best practise to author them to the page. Google is having a big push at linking who actually created the content on websites (and rightly so!), therefore they like it when this is done. Not only this, but it can help with click-through rates within the SERPs to have this.

Matt.

Yes, but it is important to understand the power of authorship toward SEO. Google is placing more and more importance around actual authors of content when they decide up search engine rankings.

My advice would be to have the content of the business authored to a relevant employee (i.e. the CEO, the blogger, etc) and ensure that they are active on Google+.

This way, you can get a headstart on your competitors and have a powerful author rank.

Matt.

Yes, the rel=publisher tag is used for pages that would be displayed giving information about your business. For example, when you search 'SEOmoz', the company profile appears on the left side. This is because they have used the rel=publisher to link to their Google+ business page.

Use the rel=author for pages that have content on that was done by someone specific, i.e. a blog post, or in your case: holiday guides. This is when you link to your actual personal profile page.

Hope this clears things up a bit.

Matt.

Hi Paul,

Yes you are able to do this via the rel=publisher code. This is used the same way in which rel=author is used, however, you link it to your Google+ business page.

To verify it on Google+, all you have to do is place the link to your website within the about section of your Goole+ business page under the 'website:' section.

Hope this helps.

Matt.

Hi Angela,

Sorry, I meant the Google+ page for your business (i.e. not your personal Google+ profile).

I would probably avoid using this on individual products pages. Use schema.org markup on those pages to show product images, price, etc within the SERPs.

For your about us page, home, etc, I would use the rel=publisher to link your Google+ business page.

Hope this helps.

Matt.

Hi,

Yes I would do this for your website's main inside pages. Make sure that when you use rel='publisher' that it goes to a business page and not to a user page or it won't work.

For example, the one I use on the Wow Internet website is:

Hope this helps.

Matt.

No problem Craig.

Well, if you do need some help with your social, I can help you there.

Send me a private message if you want some more info on what we offer.

Matt.

Apologies, typed that up wrong. Have updated above post.

Hi there,

This is quite a tricky question and, unfortunately doesn't have a definite answer.

As long as you have set up the 301 redirect in your .htaccess file correctly and have informed Google, then this is all you can do. From here, it will depend on when Google next crawls your website (this differs per website). It could be today, tomorrow, next week, next month...

There are ways that you can get Google to crawl your site more often though. Add regular content to your website, submit a sitemap and keep it updated, etc.

At this point though, it is a waiting game.

Hope this has cleared things up,

Matt.

My apologies. I would go with the following example in order to maintain a good SEO with your webpage headers and also a solid navigation:

Home page:

<header>

My PC Store

<nav>

• Desktop PC's

• Notebook & Tablets

• Multimedia

</nav>

</header>

Sub Page:

<header>

<nav>

Notebook & Tablets

*** Desktop PC's**

• Notebook & Tablets
  *** Multimedia**

</nav>

</header>

**<nav>

• Laptop
• Netbook
• Tablets / iPad </nav>**

Hope this helps.

Matt.

This is true if it is wrapped within JavaScript, so that the search engines cannot read it. However, if you use two separate navigation menus then you can negate this problem.

Also, if you were to code up the 'mega menu' style navigation with CSS3 then you could also avoid these crawling problems and make the navigation much more search-engine friendly.

In general, I try to avoid using sub-pages within site to extend navigation (unless it is completely different product areas or business verticals).

Matt.

Hi Craig,

I have done this in the past and found that it used to work fairly well to build up links. Since the Penguin and Panda updates earlier this year, it has become significantly more risky.

I find that the best way to get your blog out there is through social means. Build up a good network within the likes of Google+, Twitter, Facebook, etc and engage regularly with your followers. This way, once you write a new blog post, you can then feed through a link to your following and this can be a good way of building some links.

Also, submitting your blog to social bookmarking websites such as Digg, StumbleUpon, Inbound.org can be another way to get a bit of traffic and a few links coming your way. Probably the most important part of encouraging link building to your blog is actually preparing it to be shared. Look into Open Graph code (you can use a WordPress plugin that does this: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-facebook-open-graph-protocol/) and ensure that your posts are social firendly. Also, have 'Like', 'Tweet', etc buttons on the page as this is proving to be a more and more significant factor toward search engine rankings.

Moving back to your original point, I submit our blog to Technorati and Blogwogo but that is it really. We have an RSS feed set up which can help as well. All in all though (and other can correct me if I'm wrong), I don't think that just submitting your blog to a load of directories will do much good.

Its all about the social!

Hope this helps

Matt.

Hi There,

I think I have got the jist of what you're trying to achieve.

What I would recommend is that you have links to Desktop PC's, Notebook & Tablets, Multimedia, Laptop, Netbook, Tablets / iPad directly from your homepage. The reason being that this will allow the search engines to crawl your webpages easier and the subcategory pages won't be so deep within the domain.

What I mean is that I would use either a drop down list, so that when the Notebook & Tablets is hovered over, the subcategories are then displayed below it. Alternatively, you could have a secondory naviagtion on the homepage, i.e. with an extensive drop-down list lower down or at the side of the webpage.

Great examples of this type of navigation can be found on: http://www.ebuyer.com or http://www.musicmatters.co.uk/shop.html (look at the secondary nav on the right for the Music Matters shop page.

I hope this helps.

Matt.

Hi Carrol,

It can take a little while for Google to update this and show your Google+ image next to your listings. When I did it, it took about 2 weeks before my profile image started showing next to my webpages.

I wouldn't worry, just hold tight and over the space of the next couple of weeks it will happen

Matt.

No problem Sameer.

I would also pay attention to what Dana has said below with the Open Graph code because it is just as important to prepare your page content to be shared as it is to optimise for the search engines.

Do you use a CMS? If so, I know a few good plugins that automate this process within both Joomla and WordPress.

Matt.

No problem Sameer.

I would also pay attention to what Dana has said below with the Open Graph code because it is just as important to prepare your page content to be shared as it is to optimise for the search engines.

Do you use a CMS? If so, I know a few good plugins that automate this process within both Joomla and WordPress.

Matt.

The best place to start here is with schema.org markup code. It will allow you to markup the different parts of your product pages to signal to the search engines the different attributa that your product has.

An example of some of the code that can be used is shown below:

1. <div< span="">itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Product"></div<>

2. <span< span="">itemprop="name">Kenmore White 17" Microwave</span<>

3. <img< span="">src="kenmore-microwave-17in.jpg" alt='Kenmore 17" Microwave' /></img<>

4. <div< span="">itemprop="aggregateRating"</div<>

5. itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/AggregateRating">

6. Rated <span< span="">itemprop="ratingValue">3.5</span<>/5

7. based on <span< span="">itemprop="reviewCount">11</span<> customer reviews

8. <div< span="">itemprop="offers" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Offer"></div<>

9. <span< span="">itemprop="price">$55.00</span<>

10. <link< span="">itemprop="availability" href="http://schema.org/InStock" />In stock</link<>

11. Product description:

12. <span< span="">itemprop="description">0.7 cubic feet countertop microwave.</span<>

13. Has six preset cooking categories and convenience features like

14. Add-A-Minute and Child Lock.

15. Customer reviews:

16. <div< span="">itemprop="review" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Review"></div<>

17. <span< span="">itemprop="name">Not a happy camper</span<> -

18. by <span< span="">itemprop="author">Ellie</span<>,

19. <meta< span="">itemprop="datePublished" content="2011-04-01">April 1, 2011</meta<>

20. <div< span="">itemprop="reviewRating" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Rating"></div<>

21. <meta< span="">itemprop="worstRating" content = "1"></meta<>

22. <span< span="">itemprop="ratingValue">1</span<>/

23. <span< span="">itemprop="bestRating">5</span<>stars

24. <span< span="">itemprop="description">The lamp burned out and now I have to replace</span<>

25. it.

The itemtype tag signal what type of content the webpage is about. In this example, it is about a product. Then the itemprop tags act as labels to group the different information as the product name, rating, etc.

Full attribute lists can be found at http://schema.org I hope this has helped.

Matt.

What I always try to do when writing any articles is watch the length of my sentences. try to keep them to around 10 words long so that they don't become too complex. Also, if you are explaining very technical points, use imagery to convey the points a lot better.

Use a readability test like the Flesch Readability Test which looks at how readably your content is. You can do this within Microsoft Word by following these steps:

1. Click the Microsoft Office Button, and then click Word Options.
2. Click Proofing.
3. Make sure Check grammar with spelling is selected.
4. Under When correcting grammar in Word, select the Show readability statistics check box.

I hope this helps.

Matt.

Hi Paul,

My advice would be that you don't want to have rel=author on your e-commerce pages, i.e. for product pages. You should have different schema data for those pages to let Google know that it is about a product, the price, etc. You can check most of this info out at http://www.schema.org

With regard to how you actually go about setting up the rel=author to your Google+ profile, you can check out this blog that I wrote on the wow internet blog.

I would stick to using this on blog posts and information pages on your website, i.e the homepage, about us, etc.

Hope this helps,

Matt.

Really appreciate that Robert.

I did worry that I might have opened up the floodgates to every man and his dog trying to sell me things, so that is great advice. I will take a look through the list and see if I can find what I'm looking for.

Seems like everyone is a bit stretched for resources at the moment!

Thanks again,

Matt.

Hi Everyone,

We are a small online marketing firm in the UK and we are starting to hit a bit of a bottleneck in terms of the resources that we have that can be devoted to link building. As a result, we need to outsource the link building for some of our clients (around 10).

Obviously, we only want ethical, white hat link building to take place and it really is a focus on quality rather than quantity. As you can imagine, being a fairly small firm, we also have a very limited budget!

We would ideally like to work with UK link builders but would definitely look at overseas partnerships if it worked out more cost effective and the standard of the link building meets our standards.

Just so that I'm not wasting anyone's time, we have a budget of around £200-300 for this (I know, its a very limited budget!). I understand that with this budget comes limitations so we would be more than willing at looking at some stripped down packages (for example, we already have in-house bloggers, so we wouldn't need that).

Let me know if you are interested or if you would be able to recommend anyone to me. It would be a great help.

Matt
Wow Internet
matt@wowinternet.net

Hi Bilal,

A blog is good to have within your website for a number of reasons:

1. It creates new content on the site that will encourage Google's spiders to crawl the website more frequently.

2. It is an effective way to build more links to your website.

3. It encourages more traffic to get to your website (which is always good!).

Hope this helps!

Matt.

I think that as long as you are offering something to users then it is definitely an interesting and credible way to build links.

If you simply dictate back what Rand is saying in the Whiteboard Friday vids then no, but if you add your own expertise and insights to the points that have been discussed then it would be great.

I know I would be interested in something like this.

Matt.

Hi Steve,

I have seen quite a lot of these kind of Whiteboard Fridayesque videos created by SEO agencies. I think that they are a great way of making what would be a slightly boring article, quite enjoyable to watch/listen.

This kind of content will also encourage sharing through the likes of social media routes a lot more, which as I'm sure you are aware, can be great for building a few more links.

What I would suggest is to maybe incorporate your own spin on the traditional whiteboard Friday; something unique to you. For example, it could be something as simple as 'Blackboard Monday', where you get out the old school chalkboard! Or maybe using some sort of slideshow in the background. This will just help you stand out from the crowd a bit more.

Overall though, a good idea, and it is one that I have been considering myself!

Matt.

I think one of the best resolutions to this problem would be that instead of just redirecting everything is to just add canonical tags to the duplicated pages that then point to the page with the original content on.

This will tell Google that the webpage contains information that is taken from another page and you wont be punished for this.

For example, on the http://duproprio.com/some-listing-1234 page, the canonical tag would link to the http://some-city.duproprio.com/some-listing-1234 page (or vice-versa depending on which page is the priority). So the code would be:

href="http://some-city.duproprio.com/some-listing-1234 page" rel="canonical"/>

Hope this helps.

Matt.

Hi,

Its hard to actually quantify the impact that that kind of change makes.

What we do know is that the closer your keywords are to the start of your wepage title, the more effective they are for your SEO. Also, if you are targetting the specific phrase 'Tours Nepal' then it would be more effective than 'Tours to Nepal'. However, if it is primarily the 'Nepals' keyword you want to rank best for then changing it to something like 'Nepal Tours' would be best.

Hope this helps.

Matt.

Hi Nicola,

I think that you need to think about 2 things here before you go ahead with this:

Firstly, I would definitely class this as grey hat. It could be said to be a mild form of negative SEO. I don't quite know how your users would feel about this as well, because many people will actually see right through this. As well as this, if you are going to try and outrank your competitors for their own brand name, it means that you are going to be competing with their homepage, which is likely to be extremely difficult seeing as you will have a hard job getting links to your 'competitor brand pages'.

Secondly, it is worth thinking about how this will affect your brand. For example, if a user enters your website through another brand-name page, it could provide them with a lot of confusion, and this could lose trust with your customers.

Personally, I would stay away from this tactic, as you have much more to lose than gain in this kind of scenario.

Matt.

No problem.

Hi Craig,

I would definitely recommend this method.

It is much better to have a wide spread of keywords within your website, because if two pages use the same keyword then they will be competing with one another for ranking, and this is not what you want.

Optimise the titles and the content around one or two major keywords; for example, 'Web Development Edinburgh' (it doesn't hurt to add Edinburgh here as you will also be optimising for Web Development as a short tail keyword anyway.

Hope this helps.

Matt.

Hi Craig,

SEOmoz has a great list of free & paid directories that you can get backlinks from:

http://www.seomoz.org/directories

Also, you can use this great list:

http://www.avangate.com/company/resources/article/blog-directories.htm

Hi Craig,

Glad you found it! Joomla can be a nightmare sometimes.

Matt.

To concur with what Brent has said above; although we know that Google divides the PR passed around from links on a page, we don't know exactly how much by, or in some cases, they can actually just ignore the duplicate link.

I wouldn't worry too much about this particular case to be honest. It would be more of an issue if there were 10-15 links all pointing to the category page on each page of the website.

You could, however, maybe do a test over the space of a month or so by removing the second link and see if you get any noticeable improvement in rankings. If you do this, I would be quite interested to see the results, so let me know.

Matt.

Hi William,

I think the linking on the page could do with some improvement.

The first thing I would do is remove the 'www.canvaspaintings.com' link from the header & footer as there is no need for them. And, like you said, maybe a bit of improvement to the navigation links.

As well as this, I would look at using h1,h2,h3, etc tags a bit more effectively as this can make a big difference.

Hope these quick tips helps slightly.

Matt.

Hi Craig,

I often have the joy of trying to find where data is on Joomla.

What might be the case is that it is in a module. This is just a guess but I have found that on some websites, they keep the text (for one reason or another) within a Joomla module that is then linked to your homepage.

What is your website address so that I can have a quick peep at the code (this might help a little).

Matt.

Hey there,

You've pretty much hit the nail on the head with all of your comments.

1. Google will only really pay attention to the first link that it crawls and not really pass on any link juice through the second.

2. By having the two links, you will be watering down the amount of PR that is being sent over to page.

If the image is next to the text link, you could just wrap them both in the same hyperlink (obviously if they are not next to each other then there is no point.

One thing that I would say is that this isn't going to be an incredibly damaging thing toward your SEO, so you need to sum up whether it really adds to the user experience and conversion potential and see if this is outweighed by the decrease in SEO. Once you have decided which one wins, make your choice there.

Hope this helps.

Matt.

No problem.

Glad you managed to sort it out.

Matt.

No problem.

Hi Guido,

I think I have gathered what you are trying to do here.

I would avoid passing the link to page that will just redirect the link as this will result in you losing some of the link juice (i.e. it will be worth less).

With regard to your second question:

"what's best? and second question what's the way to keep the page on this adress ( www.zenucchi.it/ITA/poltrona-frau-brescia.it ) but show poltronafraubrescia.zenucchi.it as url?"

Could you give me a bit more information so that I can understand what you mean by it?

Matt.

Hi Guido,

I think I have gathered what you are trying to do here.

I would avoid passing the link to page that will just redirect the link as this will result in you losing some of the link juice (i.e. it will be worth less).

With regard to your second question:

"what's best? and second question what's the way to keep the page on this adress ( www.zenucchi.it/ITA/poltrona-frau-brescia.it ) but show poltronafraubrescia.zenucchi.it as url?"

Could you give me a bit more information so that I can understand what you mean by it?

Matt.