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I think they only pay attention to the anchor text of the first link, this would stop people from stuffing multiple links to the same page each targeting a different term. So if you have a few text links to the same page make sure the first one contains your primary key phrase.

Nofollowing the rest of the links wouldn't have any positive effect. The total link juice a page can pass on is divided by the total number of links on the page (regardless of follow or nofollow). In fact it can have a slightly negative effect as the juice from the nofollow links essentially evaporates instead of being passed to other pages on your site. Here is an article on how this works.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/

I would agree 100%. I can't see it being a problem if you are using your brand, you should be able to get credit (and traffic) for your work.

As mark suggested there's no need to 301 all pages that you remove from your website.

One situation I can think of where you should do this is if the page has many external links to it. Setting up a 301 redirect will then mean that the inbound link juice will not be wasted, plus any potential customers don't end up on a 404 page.

I've recently undertaken the same task and I decided to make a decision based on the quality of the directory. If you currently have a low amount of back links with your brand/domain in them then changing the anchor text on some of the links will definitely help you build a more natural and strongly branded profile.

Install a page rank toolbar if you don't have one already and check the PR on the home page of each directory. If it comes up as 0 then rather just remove the link (if possible) as it's either a low quality directory to begin with or it's been totally devalued by Google.

Was this link in the header of only one website? If yes then I think it's very unlikely you've been penalized for one site wide link, or else it would be far too easy to get your competitors penalized. It's more likely that you're been bumped down from one of the recent Google updates in which case you will need to work to get your rankings back.

Yes, the resource is still correct. The 302 will pass none of the link juice, changing to a 301 will pass most of the link juice (90%+).

Nice answer. If your thinking about creating a reciprocal link ask yourself if the link would be beneficial to your users. Search engines want to see you linking to closely related and useful content, this is how the web is "supposed" to work. If you're thinking of just slapping a random link in your footer then don't bother.

Not quite yet. the schedule was changed to show from Monday to Friday so could be any time this week. I know mine hasn't been updated yet.

Look at the strength of their link profile:

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.maggiesottero.com

Their home page has a page authority of 74 which is fairly strong. Look at the anchor text section, they have many links with "wedding dress" and other variations of this term in the link text. They also seem to have a strong social presence on Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

With shorter term phrases the link profile is a massive factor.

That is correct. The next update is scheduled for the 27th.

http://apiwiki.seomoz.org/w/page/25141119/Linkscape%20Schedule

And here's why.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/linkscape-index-delay-explained

I think many people have misinterpreted this article. They say that they have changed the way they categorise links in Webmaster Tools, it does not mention any change in the algorithm. Many comments on the article asked for clarification on this and here is the response:

"Re: all the search algorithm- and ranking-related questions: This update only changes how links are displayed in Webmaster Tools. It doesn't affect how links are valued in relation to the search algorithm or ranking. It has nothing to do with Panda, nothing to do with keywords, nothing to do with PageRank."

So you should still leak a bit of link juice from a 301.

This is the best company I have come across

http://www.webmarketinggroup.co.uk/

The domain might be PR4 but what will the quality of the actual page containing your link be? Sounds too cheap to be honest. These could just be profile links, where the site is trusted and has a high PR but they will just create a profile page for you buried deep in the site with no value and no themed content around it.

I've done a lot of research in outsourcing link building and I've found that the quality links cost around $100 per link. obviously if it's a quality link it will take them time to find and negotiate the link acquisition

Hi Samuel,

The redirect seems to be in place. Paste your URL, http://www.musicliveuk.com/about/feed, into this tool: http://www.internetofficer.com/seo-tool/redirect-check/

You will see that the page is being 301 redirected to your about page. Webmaster Tools can take a while to update.

Purely from a link profile point of view (I haven't looked at the quality of either sites onsite optimisation) I would say that their link profile is of a much higher quality than yours.

Their MozRank is much higher than yours (remember that this is a log scale). You have 4 times more external links than they do, 10 times more total linking root domains, 7 times more C blocks. Despite this they still out rank you in MozRank and MozTrust. This probably indicates that their link profile consists of high quality links from trusted websites while your links are of a much lesser quality (could even be considered spammy).

I think you need to focus on obtaining high quality links from quality websites. This is just a suggestion from quickly looking at the link metrics, you should do some in depth comparisons of the links going in to both sites. I hope this helps.

Great, thanks Phil

I think that means that it won't recommend other videos after your video has finished playing. You will probably still have all the ads popping up during the video though which is not ideal.

Hi,

We are planning to host videos on our site for the first time.  It looks like YouTube is a bit too over focused on ads these days for commercial use, can anyone recommend any better video hosting services?

I also realize that hosting somewhere like YouTube has little SEO benefit, am I better off hosting them on our site if possible?

Please share your experiences with the various services and methods of hosting.

Thanks

MozTrust and PageRank and two very different metrics. MozRank is calculated in a similar way to PageRank while MozTrust, as James explained, is used to determine if you are a trusted source by measuring your distance to other trusted sources.

Here is an interesting article that explains how MozRank is calculated and how closely it related to Google's PageRank.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/mozrank-and-pagerank-for-metrics-driven-seo

Will that return a 301 header though? Shouldn't it include "R=301"?

Hi Jay,

The two will be viewed as entirely different pages. You will need to 301 redirect all .html pages to the .php version.

Hi Maria,

I've just had a very brief look and it seems that the menu is quite reliant on JavaScript (try disabling Javascript and you will see that you can't access most of your pages). Crawlers do not use JavaScript so this could be a problem.

The ideal way to do this sort of thing is by showing and hiding menus with CSS, not JavaScript. I can have a better look and provide you with more info tomorrow if you need it.

if you add all your keywords to the rankings section of your campaign in seomoz then you can see how each keywords rankings change on a week to week basis. If you want to keep more detailed historical data then you may need to invest in software such as http://www.link-assistant.com/rank-tracker/

You'll need to post the URL of your website for us to give you a definite answer. Try browsing to your website then right click and select 'view source'. if you can't see the links in the source code then crawlers can't see them either.

Sometimes menus are built badly with JavaScript, you will probably need to ask your developers to change your menu.

I would try and stay clear of doing this to be honest. It won't validate, older browsers may have problems with it and I'm not sure how search engines would treat it (they may not follow it). There are better ways to do it.

If you set your anchor tag to 'display:block' you can then set the height and width too. This way the whole div would be the link, not just the text.

These errors don't affect you negatively at all, it's more for you to find errors in your site. Follow Alan's advice by looking at the 'links' data and fix the one's that are caused by any coding problems in your site. You will always get a certain amount of bad links coming from external sources, you can either just leave them or if you are finding many links to the same 404 page you can actually recapture that link juice by 301 redirecting them to a relevant page on your site.

If done carefully you may not see much (or any) drop in traffic. I've recently restructured the entire URL structure of a website and saw no drop in traffic or rankings. This was also on a Microsoft Server and I used this software for the URL rewriting - http://www.isapirewrite.com/

As long as all your 301 redirects are configured correctly (test thoroughly in your test environment before going live) the transition from the old URL's to the new URL's should be pretty seemless. It would be a good idea to submit a new sitemap shortly after the changes have been made to let the search engines know what your doing.

If the page simply exists on your site but is not in the navigation and has no backlinks to it then the chances are slim that you will rank well enough to drive a decent amount of traffic.

This strategy can work but you will also need to add these pages to your link building campaign to raise their authority.

The PR flowing through will be divided by the total number of links on the page (not necessarily equally), regardless of whether they are internal or external. I have seen various articles suggesting that maybe external links "could" receive more worth than the internal ones but it's hard to be sure. I can say that the 3 links would not get a third of the total PR in your example, the internal links would dilute it.

The new synonym pages are not ranking anywhere significant for their exact synonym - it is the primary synonym page ranking for them.

To me this would be proof that they are seeing the synonym pages as duplicate so you may be better focusing on one page per keyword. Although if these pages are only a week old they could take more time to get picked up. As Ryan mentioned, changes need time to settle in properly, you won't see final results in a week.

As you mention in point 3 you are definitely going to decrease the strength of each location if it has to share link juice between 8 similar pages, so you are making it harder for them to rank well.

Click on Content then Content DrillDown then select the page you want to see the keywords for. Near the right, bottom side of the page there is a link that says Entrance Keywords. Make sure to apply the filter that says non-paid

Have a look at this post - http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-many-links-per-page/

The recommendation is to not have more than around 100 links per page. One reason for this, as you mention, is that more links will mean that the value each link can pass on will be diluted. Another reason is that Google may not actually follow all the links on the page (this rule is not set in stone but will depend on the page) so you may see little value from a link in a page like this.

Hi James,

Firstly it may be worth checking if Google is actually ranking every version of a page, they will exclude some of the variations if they see it as duplicate. Try doing a site search in Google e.g.

1. Try site:domain.com Las Vegas Vacation - See if the vacations page is listed
2. then try site:domain.com Las Vegas Holidays - See if the holidays page is listed etc.etc.
3. If you find that you only have one page listed for Las Vegas then you could have a duplicate content issue.

In terms of the hidden text I don't think the search engines are quite as skeptical of hidden content anymore because most sites these days are heavily reliant on hiding and showing sections through JavaScript. it would be a problem if the hidden text was unrelated to the rest of the page content or was 'keyword stuffed' but an extra information section should not be a problem. The important question is how is the information loaded? Since search engines do not use JavaScript you need to make sure that the info paragraphs are loaded first and then hidden so they are part of the HTML. If your info section is empty and then the text is loaded into the container when you click a button then they will not see this text.

There will be many different opinions but if it was me I would only have one page for each location, try and use all the synonyms in that page and then vary the anchor text when creating backlinks to the page. Google is clever enough to understand synonyms so you don't really need to have different pages for them however, I'm sure that there are many people who have had success with this strategy.

They always say that a key guideline is to build your website for users, not search engines. So is it useful to the user to have many versions of each page? Probably not, and it might confuse them. It may also confuse the search engines as they will not be sure which version is the important one and could end up showing only one in their rankings.

As John says you need to 301 redirect all your old URL's to the new URL's.

We have recently done a complete restructure of our site (the old site was very badly designed) and have had no loss in traffic or rankings. You need to make very sure that all your 301's are set up correctly (so do plenty of testing) so that you do not lose any incoming page rank from other sites.

SEO Spyglass is a great product for this. Even the free version is quite useful, you just won't be able to save or export data.

Anthony, I never said I disagree with you. I did not see your answer at first, I must have opened the thread before you posted your answer. reading your answer now yes, we are in agreement.

No you should not.

When the nofollow tag first came out you could "sculpt" page rank by saying which pages you can pass it on to, this is no longer the case. Google made a change a few years back to stop people from doing this. An example would be:

When nofollow first came out: If you page had 10 links on it, each link would pass on 1 point of page rank (PR). If you nofollowed 5 of these links then each link without the nofollow tag would then pass on 2 points.

They changed this (I think in 2009) to : If you had 10 links on a page and 5 were nofollowed each link would still only pass on 1 PR point. The remaining 5 points essentially disappear into thin air.

So by adding nofollow to internal pages you are wasting your PR, rather let it be passed on to your less important pages which will return a certain amount back to the top level if you linking structure is correct. Only use nofollow for external links which you don't want to pass on PR to e.g. If it could be considered a bad neighbourhood etc. This may not be 100% how it works but the basic concept is correct, there are extensive explanations of this on Matt Cutts blog.

Hi,

Our site was originally created with a very flat folder structure  - most of the pages are at the top level. Because we will adding more content I want to tidy up the structure first. I just wanted to check what the best way to go about this was. Is it best to:

1. First configure all the new 301 redirects to point to the new pages, while leaving the actual links on our site pointing to the old pages. Then changing the links on the site after a few weeks.

2. Configure the redirects and change the actual links on my website at the same time to point to the new locations.

My thinking that if I go with option 1 route then I will give Google a chance to process all the redirects and change the locations in their index before I start pointing them to the new locations. But does it make any difference? What is the best wat to go about making this sort of change to minimize any loss in rankings, page rank etc?

Thanks for the help.

Hi there,

A linkbuilding company that has been building links for us has not gained any sustained results. They have advised that our domain may be toxic, and that we should consider permanent redirecting from .co.uk to another domain extension in order to remedy this.

Is this a recommendation worth considering?

Hi,

I just wanted to get some clarification on whether Google would penalize your site if you had many links coming from a questionable site.

We've been struggling with rankings for years even though we have one of the oldest sites in the industry with a good link profile and the site is well optimized.

I was looking through webmaster tools and noticed that one website links to us over 100,000 times, all to the home page. The site is www.vietnamfuntravel.com. When I looked at the site it seems that they operate a massive links exchange, I'm not sure what the history is and why they link to us so much though.

Is there any chance that this could impact us negatively? if it is then what would be the best way to deal with the situation? I could ask them to take the links down but can't guarantee they would do it quickly (if at all). Would blocking their domain from our htaccess file have the desired effect?