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Try this:

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The main thin I consider is that the maximum size of the title is defined by the pixel-width, not by the character count. For this reason, I prefer "|" as you can fit more on it. But for individual services on a brand with a short name, "-" can be preferable.

Thanks for the reply. The problem is that it is a local business and looking to rank well for local results.

1. Too late, the domains are pretty close to each other.

2. The content is unique on both websites, but some of the categories and product names are similar

3. Both sites need to rank well for local searches. Using this advice means that the 2nd website will not be able to perform well locally. Am I right in saying that the websites can not effectively co-exist with the same details?

As I say, both websites are on page 1 for their primary keywords but are struggling to get near the top of the page. Is there anything I can do or will Google always treat them as duplicates and hold them back?

I like to use screaming frog or xenu. They basically crawl the links on your site and give you a report on the results. To put it simply, if pages do not show up in the results then Google probably wont either. Be careful though, the free version of screaming frog only crawls up to 500 pages.

You can also look at individual pages by typing "cache:[url]" into the address bar in chrome. This displays Google's latest index of the page. If it shows a 404 error then it has not indexed it - although this will often be the case with new products as Google just hasn't indexed it yet.

One of our clients decided to launch a 2nd website to market specific products and services that they provide. The trouble is, they have the same address, phone number and have a similar name. Whilst we have had some success and both websites are on page 1 for their primary keywords, I have a bad feeling that they may have hit a glass ceiling.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to perform local SEO?

I just typed cache:www.hotvsnot.com and got a blank screen. When I looked at the code, I got information about www.hotvsnot.us and a small amount of content about adult themes. Definitely something fishy going on there.

From what I've seen, a lot more focus is being put on the onsite content these days. However, I have noticed that websites with keyword anchor text links still perform very well if done properly. General rules I would follow would include:

• Keep keyword anchor text links below 10% of your overall link profile

• Try to have unique anchor text for each of this type of link. Try to avoid using just the keyword, but a short phrase that includes the keyword or a variation of it.

• Avoid sitewide links. I've seen examples of single websites using the same anchor text over 500 times, which destroyed search rankings.

%7E is the ascii code for ~. I'm not certain whats happening, but sometimes when copy and pasting rich text (like from word), the browser will see the ascii code and not the actual ~ character. This makes internal linking a bit awkward and can result in duplicate content, although I'm not sure if search engines would see this example as a problem.

I've noticed that you do not have rel="canonical" tags set up, it's worth putting them in just to be on the safe side.

I would also have a word with your developers as the urls are very long and messy. Also, try to avoid using upper case and avoid using non-alpha numerical characters (such as ~) except for hyphens. Something like http://www.arkwildlife.co.uk/straight-foods/sunflower-seeds/premium-sunflower-hearts would look a lot better and avoid problems like this occurring in the future. The only problem is that changing the url can temporarily affect search rankings and you must be sure to set up 301 redirects properly.

It's important to remember that the Moz toolbar is uses the moz crawlers so will not have as much information as Google's own crawlers. I would imagine that a lot of the product pages are newer than other pages in the website, so there is a good chance that they will not have any PA as the moz crawlers may not have crawled them yet.

The PA of sub-pages and product pages will mostly be down to internal linking. If you are worried about the pages carrying weight for the website, there are a few things you can do. First of all, run the website through a crawler tool like screaming frog or xenu. These will tell you if the pages can be crawled by search engines (if the pages do not show up in the results, they can't be crawled) and also tell you how many internal links point to the pages. Also, have a look through the website yourself, see how easy it is to access product pages without using search forms. As a general rule, no page should be more than 3 clicks away on an ecommerce site, but this is open to discussion.

Remember though that it is perfectly normal for a large website to have a tiered internal linking structure. If all the pages on the website had the same authority then it would look unnatural. I'm fairly sure Rand has done some talks about best practice for internal linking.

When I'm doing keyword research, one of the first things I do is go on competitor websites and see if they have the meta keyword tag. If they do, then it instantly gives me access to all the keywords that they're targeting and allows me to work on beating them. Deleting your meta keyword tag prevents your competitors from doing this to you.

What about having a subtle call to action in there?

What you have written is fine, but it might be worth having a play around to see what works best. Maybe get 2 pages with similar performance in search, use one descriptive meta description like you already have and one with a call to action along the lines of "visit our website to find out about...". Then simply see which has the better click through rate.

Thanks Miriam, I'll give them a try.

Just starting work on a client providing care services in the local area.  They have a number of local branches in the area, but no Google+ page (which we will sorting shortly).

One of the first things that struck me about the company is the offsite citations are a mess. Their addresses all have different information and they have several phone numbers for each branch. I've been trying to gather a full list so that I can go through them and either change them or ask for log in details if necessary. However, this is time consuming and there is no guarantee that I will get them all.

I know that moz local has a tool to do this quickly, but it the grader seems to only work in the USA, we're based in the UK. I'm also trying to use whitespark to get a list, but this is difficult due to all the different phone numbers being used. Does anyone know of another tool that can speed up this process and ensure that I get all the citations?

Archive.org basically shows you how the website looked in the past. Therefore, you can make sure that the new content is consistent with what visitors from referral sites are expecting. Do not plagiarize the old content though or your might get sued.

It's a risky tactic that you're using and definitely on the darker shade of gray. I wouldn't do it more than once or twice and make sure that the content is relevant.

You could try Majestic SEO and see if they show up there.

However, you need to be very careful when buying used domains with existing back links. What are you planning to use it for? If it's simply to 301 to your main site then you could be looking a manual action straight down the barrel. If you are planning on using it as your primary site, be careful that it doesn't already have a penalty.

Instead of who the links were from, have a look at what niche the old website served. If it is relevant, then you will have links from relevant websites and you might also inherit some relevant and diverse anchor text which will help. Use archive.org to have a look.

You need to think about why the website was performing well before the penalty. If it was spammy artificial links that were boosting your site, then removing the penalty means that they no longer help you. Therefore, your website is receiving considerably less link juice than before.

You may need to face facts that your link building efforts will probably need to start again from scratch.

The general rule of using HTML for everything is one that I would follow. If you're unsure if something is crawlable, try downloading the web developer plugin for chrome http://chrispederick.com/work/web-developer/. Then disable javascript and plugins and refresh the page. Any content that can't be seen then probably won't be seen by search engines either.

If you're a newbie, it might be worth using the on-page grader to make sure that all of your content is relevant. Make sure your content looks natural though and you do not over optimize or do any keyword stuffing. Once the content is sorted, you can get started on more advanced stuff.

You mention mistakes that you have made, if you told us what they were then we could make recommendations for you.

However, there is a LOT to SEO and some of it takes a long time to explain. I would recommend reading the beginners guide to SEO http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo

So whilst searching for link opportunities, I found a website that has scraped content from one of our websites. The website looks pretty low quality and doesn't link back. What would be the recommended course of action?

1. Email them and ask for a link back. I've got a feeling this might not be the best idea. The website does not have much authority (yet) and a link might look a bit dodgy considering the duplicate content

2. Ask them to remove the content. It is duplicate content and could hurt our website.

3. Do nothing. I don't think our website will get penalised for it since it was here first and is in the better quality website. Possibly report them to google for scraping?

What do you guys think?

Thanks Michael, you raise some good points.

I just want to raise one point though. I was under the impression that the amount of link juice passed from one website depends on the total number of outbound links from that site (I'm sure I recall Matt Cutts saying something along these lines). Therefore, a link from a local newspaper would be good but watered down due to the total number of outbound links. A site with lower authority but with less outbound followed links (or 1 in this case) would still be of value. Is this correct or am I talking nonsense?

So the general view on satellite sites is that they're not worth it because of their low authority and the amount of link juice they provide.

However, I have an idea that is slightly different to the standard satellite site model. A client's website is in a particular niche, but a lot of websites that I have identified for potential links are not interested because they are a private commercial company. Many are only interested in linking to charities or simple resource pages. I created a resource section on the website, but many are still unwilling to link to it as it is still part of a commercial website. The website is performing well and is banging on the door of page one for some really competitive keywords. A few more links would make a massive difference.

One idea I have is to create a standalone resource website that links to our client's website. This would be easy to get links from sites that would flat out refuse to link to the main website. This would increase the authority of the resource and result in more link juice to the primary website.

Now I know that the link juice from this website will not be as good as getting links directly to the primary website, but would it still be a good idea? Or would my time be better spent trying to get a handful of links directly to the client's website? Alternatively, I could set up a sub-domain to set up the resource, but I'm not sure that this would be as successful.

Thanks guys.

I'm aware of the negative effect on user experience and I tried to convince them to replace the redirect with a banner, but they refused. If I has some evidence that suggested that having the direct was having an effect on SERPs and therefore the number of potential customers they attract then I might be able to convince them better.

I need a complete report telling them why they should reinstate their website on mobile devices and remove the redirect or they won't listen. Dreadful user experience is a start, but the website is now almost invisible in mobile SERPs which is a serious issue. However, I'm not sure if this would affect the desktop SERPs (although I know that user experience is taken into account).

I would do

User-agent: *
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But test it first in WMT first to be safe. However, you must be sure that this is the route you want to go down. Robots.txt will prevent all of those pages from being indexed, which means that none of their content will count. Any links to these pages may also be devalued. The result is a potential drop in SERPs.

What is the reason why you don't want them appearing? That way we may find an alternative solution.

There's a few different methods of doing a redirect or a rewrite which might work. What code are you trying to use for the 301?

You can demote sitelinks so that they are less likely to appear but Google displays the pages that it considers to be most relevant to the searcher. Use the Mozbar to have a look at what the PA of the pages displayed are compared to the ones you want to display. You may need to have a look at your internal linking structure to improve the authority of the pages you want to display.

We recently started working on a website and most of the work done so far is resolving onsite technical issues (duplicate content, duplicate titles, broken links, pagespeed, grammar, etc.). Everything done has been positive, but their position in SERPs has actually gone down. I'm having a look to see if anything I have done could have had a negative effect.

However, when visiting their website on a mobile device, it automatically redirects you to iTunes so that you can download their app. My first instinct is that this is a horrendous idea as it would result in a massive bounce rate which would be impossible to track. I have tried convincing them to do it differently, but this is how they want it. However, when googlebot visits the website as a mobile it returns an error. I'm fairly sure that this would have a negative effect on search results but I could do with a second opinion.

I agree with Adam, if the links are natural then there is no need to disavow them.

However, if the links go to pages that no longer exist then it provides a poor user experience that can harm your rankings. Think of it like having dead links on your website. Have you set up 301 redirects for the pages that have become inactive? If not, set them up and make sure to redirect the pages to relevant areas of the website (no all to the homepage). Do this and the links should pass more juice and your website's performance should improve.

Hi John, just be a bit careful asking that on here. A lot of PPC agencies use these pages and will just advertise themselves.

Thanks guys.

I suspected the profiles wouldn't be worth indexing, but it's always worth getting a 2nd opinion. Just annoying as the links are already there on good websites, but not offering any link juice. Nevermind.

Whilst looking for link opportunities, I have noticed that the website has a few profiles from suppliers or accredited organisations. However, a search form is required to access these pages and when I type cache:"webpage.com" the page is showing up as non-indexed.

These are good websites, not spammy directory sites, but is it worth trying to get Google to index the pages? If so, what is the best method to use?

For the most part, Google can crawl any links on the page, but I think I could do with a little bit more information about what pages are being linked to and how the links are being generated.

If you are using javascript or even (shudder!) Flash to generate the links then search engines will struggle to see them.

If it's in html then it should be fine, but you need to be careful of duplicate content. If a single page can be called up by multiple dynamically generated URLs then it can harm search ranking if rel=canonical tags have not been used.

Thanks Tim, Google has been able to access the pages fine, as the all the pages are showing as indexed in WMT. I just think its odd as after 3 months, the site should have been crawled by moz (as with all other websites I've worked on). There is nothing wrong with the linking structure as all the pages are in the nav bar in simple html. As I said, when I took over the website, they messed up big time with the rel canonical tags all pointing to the homepage. After reading this article by moz (http://moz.com/blog/catastrophic-canonicalization), I'm a little bit worried. What is the correct procedure for fixing incorrect rel canonicals? I thought it was simply a case of removing them, but I might be wrong. Thanks again

I took over a website a few months ago which is not performing well at all for chosen keywords. When I first inspected it, I found a rel canonical tag pointing to the homepage on every page. This was quickly deleted and all the pages were fetched in webmaster tools.

3 months later and the website is still performing badly. When I use the mozbar, it shows that all of the sub-pages have a pa of 1. It is only a small site and all of the pages are linked to on the navbar in a simple way. The links are not made using javascript and all the pages are on the sitemap which is submitted to wmt. I have checked that all of the changes that have been made have been indexed as well.

Could it be possible that google still sees the canonical tag even though its not there? I can't think of any other reason why the pages have no pa or why it is so far behind the competitors despite having better content and links.

Also, the site is appropriate for adults, but I found (among the mess left for me) a meta ratings tag set to "general". This has now been deleted, could it negatively affect rankings?

Thanks for replying. As it happens, I checked wmt this morning and found that all of the old pages had been deindexed on their own (with the exception of 2 that had not been 301'd - they've been sorted now) and there are now no duplicate title warnings. The site is also looking better in SERPs.

You are right, I just needed to wait a few weeks and show some patience. Its quite easy to get impatient when justifying our cost to a client.

Thanks again.

I recently changed the URLs on a website to make them tidier and easier to follow. I put 301s in place to direct all the previous page names to the new ones. However, I didn't read moz's guide which says I should leave the old sitemap online for a few weeks afterwards. As I result, webmaster tools is showing duplicate page titles (which means duplicate pages) for the old versions of the pages I have renamed. Since the old versions are no longer on the sitemap, google can no longer access them to find the 301s I have put in place.

Is this a problem that will fix itself over time or is there a way to quicken up the process? I could use webmaster tools to remove these old urls, but I'm not sure if this is recommended. Alternatively, I could try and recreate the old sitemap, but this would take a lot of time.

Make sure you have google webmaster tools installed. On your dashboard, it will tell you if there are any crawl errors, click here to see where they are. Click on each link and it will give you the location of the URL and which pages are linking to it.

A quick solution would be to create 301 redirects for each page in your htaccess. However, it may be better in the long term to find all the pages linking to the missing pages and re-write them.

Due to the management software used for a lot of our websites, the URLs for specific pages appears as:

brand.com/page/pagename/number

I want to add slug URLs so that they appear as:

brand.com/pagename

First of all, do you think this is an effective use of my time and will it significantly benefit SEO in the long run. Secondly, these pages have developed a decent PA over time and I don't want to lose that. Will adding 301s for all the renamed pages be enough to not have a negative effect?