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Yes, Google have turned down the link value of links coming from most of the directories but saying that the link value of directories is finished is untrue! There are many directories which contain a link value and paying for them is a worth investment (in terms of link juice and business conversions.)
Yahoo directory and others are few of finest example of it as people still find them reputable and pass businesses to the businesses listed here!
I had a client who has the same problem and I advised him the same what i am advising you... Think about the real life and see if a person can talk and talk about two completely different niches and the answer will probably be yes!
I am writing on my SEO blog as it’s my profession and at the same time I have a blog where I write short stories which is kind of my hobby! It is actually good to go with both website with the same author tag as I am actually the person behind it!
Similar is your case, If you are the real face behind the two website from completely different niches then you should go for the same anchor text.
Copycsape.com is a good place to see how much your content is duplicated with others…
If I would be at your place I might never have considered duplicate content as a problem because of the following facts:
Mostly this happens with blog, infect SEOmoz blog’s content has been copied on multiple places but I a haven’t noticed any penalty on SEOmoz nor I see scrapers ranking above the original content.
First thing first: Meta description is not really a part of the ranking signal (atleast not major if it really have any impact at all) so you have to care more about your audience and how they will react on it instead of the search engines.
Emoji is not a common trend and I haven’t seen any business using this in their description but if your competitors are using and you think your audience will like it, giving it a try won’t hurt you. Make sure you keep a full tack of your CTR to see if the change increase or decrease the CTR and click ratio.
If the results are positive, stick with that, if not move back accordingly.
Just a thought!
against you simply means that too many links from the blog comment give hint to Google that you are building low quality links which might take you to the area where Google penguin take websites in consideration ... and you know the rest! 
In all the 3 cases mentioned in the post, this seems like it is a good idea not to create new posts/pages and update the existing one. Obviously if the article is poorly written so in that case one should update the page after fixing the content of it instead of creating new pages... same is the case for the other 2 scenarios.
I think this video by SEOmoz contains your answer >> http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-interview-googles-matt-cutts-on-redirects-trust-more
Hope this helps!
I don’t think anyone will be able to come up with a Yes or No for this question especially with so little information.
Here is what I will look more if I had to make a decision about this:
- How many actually clients of you are recommending you (with a positive feedback) on Yelp. If your business listing is new on yelp putting that on paid advertizing will not be a good idea because on yelp people read recommendations before converting.
- How much more eyeballs a business can get (get the estimated data of it) and see if it’s worthy.
- What is the average client value that you are going to get from yelp?
And few more questions.
Once you have the answers of all the other questions the decision would be easier for you!
Hope this helps!
Joel, this happens to one of my client that few of his targeted land pages were not ranking and supporting pages were performing well instead of the main pages...
At that time there was no option to demote site links, so what i did is to get internal links from within the content to major pages and get some quality external links points to the major pages and boom... search engine gets it...
I guess in your thing you have to get more external links pointing to the major URL (off course if all other on-pages issues related to indexing are already fixed!)
Hope this helps!
If the website is great then there is no problem!
You get 2 backlinks from CNN, now if you have a choice to get one more... will you reject it?
Other than the fact that link helps in getting better rankings... links also drive referral traffic to your website which can also convert in to leads and sales....so if the website is good and can drive traffic... then I would say go for it!
I agree with Paul, The Google is re indexing the pages because you have few linking pointing back to these sub domains. The best idea us to restrict Google crawler by using no-index , no-follow tag and remove the instruction available in the robots.txt...
This way Google will neither crawl nor follow the activity on the page and it will get permanently remove from Google Index.
Thanks right Kari! Adding sitemap to webmaster tools is all that is needed and search engines will pick the website itself...
Ryan is right all you will receive after that is offers that will take you money away from your pockets...
You simply don’t need to go for it!
If they are mentioning your client’s business even without a link so you are getting the benefit of citation but as far as the links and SERP visibility is concern the idea is to be creative, launch something news worthy on your client’s website and then contact all the journalists to and then ask them the link on previous articles where your client is already available.
Obviously going directly to ask for a link will be inappropriate but making something up for journalists will allow them to take interest in you and then you can easily come to the point.
I believe if you are changing the title tag to enhance user experience then you should probably go for it and Google will also find it positive!
I believe adding number of reviews encourages people to click and chances are that the %age of CTR will increase!
I think you should go for it and this is because it does not really break any search engine guidelines and on the other hand it helps increases user experiences.
just my cents!
I am not exactly sure but I guess its counting the word available in all parts of the page that includes header, sidebar, footer and more...
Also, it’s not only about exact keyword but if you are using the term with other words then it is also countable.
Hope this helps!
Here are the following things that you can do to increase and maintain your ranking for desired key phrase in search engines like Google.
There are few of the basic things that can help you stay and jump positive in SERP rankings from the desired key phrases.
Hope this helps!
Hello Robert,
I just did the quick comparison of the three websites that you have mentioned and in my opinion the link profile of all the 3 websites are clean and properly optimized (no sign of over or spam optimization)
There can be two reasons why this is happening
1. On-Page Issues
There can be a huge possibility that the on-page is over saturated for two websites as compare to the one that contain less DA although in my quick look this didn’t seems to be the problem!
2. Penguin 2.0 Adjustment
If this SERP setting for this keyword is just few days old that this can be the penguin 2.0 settlement that launched around few days ago! If this is the case then it will fix within the next few days once the things will get settle down.
Not really sure about anything but I have shared what I believe can be the case!
Not really sure about this but i guess you should email to help team at SEOmoz and ask them if this tool support multi-language... Although i never tried using another language in this tool but i guess it doesn't
I think still the best idea is to email help@seomoz.org and they can tell you the best regarding this.
I agree with Chris on this! You should get links from resources pages but good link profile comes from the diversification of links so if the links are only coming from 1 kind of link building tactic thin might hurt you in the future... I believe, with this you should use 404 link building, infographics, guest blogging, links within the content, manual outreaching and more...In order to have an organic and diversified link profile that ideally search engines are looking for!
In my personal opinion slightly varied content can count under the duplicate content and this is mainly because the major %age of content on different pages is same...
As you explain how the content is generated, I don’t think there is a way you can manage to change the page in such a way that it becomes unique from each other and adding unique content to each pages is not a very good idea as there are around 100 thousand pages as you said earlier!
If I would be at your place I would have added the comment section below the content so that users who are interested in the content can share their experience, how this data helped them, what exactly happened in the market.... and this user generated content will help the up-coming pages to be unique with user generated content.
This idea will help to an extent to give new life to old pages but saying that it will make all pages unique is almost next to impossible in my eye!
Obviously, this is my suggestions but I would love to listen to others what they would do if they gone through the similar situation!
Ok, so this is a bit confusing... you want to publish the same information in the 5 new articles that you have in the 40 short articles? If this is the case then idea is to 301 old articles to the new one so that you don’t lose traffic. There should be no debate about the link juice as you said there is no link pointing to those pages...
But if the information is different and the previous 40 short articles have different information then the 5 new once then in that case leave them as it is if they are not damaging the user experience because it will help you gain a little traffic but if you think there is absolutely no value in those pages and it might hurt the user experience in that case killing the pages is the best idea!
I think i got your question... this is for some reason you cannot add your targeted key phrase within your content so when grabbing links you are planning to get exact match anchor text and you want to know if this still works!
If this is the question then I guess it’s not really a problem that you are not adding keywords within the content but when grabbing links make it natural instead of adding exact match anchor text... try to get some links with anchor texts that are not exact but move around the same!
How this helps!
If certain area of the website have a duplicate content that Google will only ignore those pages which contain duplication the affect will never be on the complete website!
Technically a perfect page... nothing so Thin about it!... in HTML version Google can find all the information that is available under each tab so technically there is no problem with the page and you can go ahead the way it is at the moment...
If you get a hit from Penguin then you should take this seriously and see if there are bad links pointing back to the website you should try and remove them as much as you can!
OSE take a month to update the data (my guess) so maybe you see the updates in the coming month but in order to be on the safe side just add the link in the link disavow file and submit it to Google.
Hope this helps!
Ok, your questions sounds like you want to verify if your strategy is right or not... In my personal opinion SEO strategy can be different from person to person because everyone can use different tactics to attain success and there is nothing wrong with this!
In my opinion, you are focusing too much on the quantity of content and missing the fact that how you are going to marketing each piece of content and grab real people’s eye on that! I think what you should really consider is to focus on marketing of your content and how exactly you are going to cater people to the website to read your content... No matter how quality your articles are but if you are not going to market it, it will drown in the deep sea of content in the online world.
Try to limit the content that you are going to make live on your own blog and consider outreaching to other similar websites within your niche and write on their blog as a guest author (instead of article submissions).
You should also exactly define your off-page strategy about how exactly you are going to get links on each article that you are going to make live... from links i mean quality links... dot run for blog comments, forums and directory shits...
As the business goal was not define so it was difficult to come up with a solid answer but i hope that this information worked out for you!
Social Network sites are pretty much different from the normal sites as much of the data is user generated. I think what you really need to do is to build some relatively active and serious communication on topics that has been discussed by people.
At the same time if you don’t have a blog and guidelines pages on the website, I would consider adding them as this will help your blog and guideline pages appear in Google.
But... the best strategy which i think will work for your kind of website is to promote your stuff by working on content promotions like Guest Blogging, White Papers, QnA’s, E-Books and more...
Why would it will be a problem? I mean if webmasters convince they will defiantly going to link to the source you are trying to promote and I think this will not really a problem for Google as well as you are providing better information.
This is similar to Content Refresher and Google is cool with this tactic!
Hope this helps!
Ok, the titles you are using on different pages are technically scary and almost identical... Google wants the titles to be more unique on different pages.... these titles are coming probably because its hard coded and added after the content.
My advice would be to contact your webmaster and ask them to remove the hard coded title and the issue of duplicate title will automatically be resolved...
Try to limit your title within 65 t o59 characters.
If you are experiencing a duplicate content issue this must be because most of your part of the page is empty and identical to others...
For example: http://www.newmanshs.wa.edu.au/articles/events/mining-alliance-program-map-pit-to-port-excursion and http://www.newmanshs.wa.edu.au/articles/events/country-week
Have almost 2 to 4 lines of content and rest of the page is similar to each other.... I would advise you to add more content in it so that it becomes more unique!
Personally i am also a fan of Yoast plugin but see if you have 2 plugins controlling the title area in that case there can be an issue... for SEO issues within wordpress, Yoast plugin is the best recommendation!
Although negative SEO is not common may be because he/she never know if it is really going to work or not because sometimes it really didn’t work! The best idea is to keep a good track of your links and if you see that the link has not built by you or coming from a spammy resource that you have no idea then update your disavow file accordingly.
I would call it a great startup... simply fascinate me!
Ok, I checked your link profile and it seems clean, websites SEO areas are not weaker... just a suggestion if there is a possibility try to shorten your URLs as it will gonna hurt you in the longer run!
Problem: I didn’t really figure out the exact problem but I am sure that there is no penalty case or something.... I believe you should continue to do what you are doing and after some crawls it is going to be back on 3 to 4<sup>th</sup> pages from several different key phrases.
In my personal opinion it doesn’t matter if you have this information on every page on not but it has to be on the contact us page.
Talking from the user perspective if you think you are in the industry where people love to have contact information then place it on every page may be in the header or footer, Google won’t gonna have any problem within in normal cases!
I believe the link from BBB is worth it if you are a business offering any particular services or products to clients. Other than the value of link, this is a trust signal for customers who are landing or your website and planning to buy.
The BBB logo can help them accelerate their decision making process and most of the time the decision will be in your favor.
The tip here is to think beyond search engine and get the links that have a positive impact on people!
Hope this helps!
Google is giving less and less value to domains that contain exact match anchor text but if all other ranking signals are constant (as you said) I believe Google will give the value to domains that contain exact match anchor text with standard extensions!
I believe the ranking order will be something like this!
- Sho.es
The reason why .es domains are ranking below the other two is because .es is the ccTLD of Spain whereas .com is a general extension.
Hope this helps!
Note: Google is not as simple as we think so this is just an assumption as per the best of my knowledge but we can be totally wrong about how Google think about this scenario!
Chris, I have a normal practice not to start with off-page optimization when on-page is not really fixed and this is because if the on-page is not fixed you cannot taste the real power of links...
This is common that the header tags are set with CSS as many websites do this from time to time...i think what you should do is to communicate the issue with the client and tell them how important it is to fix this problem as soon as possible.
I like this article and would recommend your checking this out and follow when selecting directories because Google is very much strict when it coming to getting a link from directories (not all paid are good).
After doing all the quality checks, when choosing directories keep the users in mind, if you are paying any directory website to place your link, do you think that your targeted audience will visit the directory and find you? If yes, go for it otherwise just drop it!
Hope this helps!
Usually when Google didn't find any description available on the page it usually grab it from 3rd part sources that may includes Open Directory Project or any other place where your website listing is present.
Now when you have added the Meta description it should change it once Google will re crawl the site.
hope this helps!
If you have just modified the URLs the idea is to quickly follow the process below!
Probably by this Google will get a signal about the new data on your website and it will crawl the new data accordingly! As it take time for Google to crawl, index and rank new URLs it is important not to hurt the user experience... redirection (301) will help your users move to the new version of the URL!
Hope this helps!
I don’t think there is a fixed cost for building quality links. My advice would be to talk to different agencies and ask them what will be their action plan and then decide the cost accordingly.
If the strategies will Include Link Baiting, then probably the charges will land on the higher side but if the strategy will be to get links from brand mentions, infographics, blogging and other content marketing then prices might land in the medium range.
Keep that in mind quality link building is never cheap!
Hope this helps!
Completely agree with Chris!
In your question you mentioned that your client wants to migrate some of his content from one location to another and in order to successfully do that you should use 301redirection so that Google can transfer the juice to new location and visitors can also move to the new location without any hassle.
Canonicals comes in when you need one content on both locations but want to prefer one over other!
Never really played with custom search but I am sure about one thing that it will never help you improve your rankings in search engines.
With Google custom search mainly you can get faster and relevant results and you can customize the look of it as per your website to make more money from ad sense but saying that it will help you enhance your rankings in Google.com is not a true statement!
Let me go and answer it one by one!
When you have a great content that you know can drive people come to your site after reading it, then go ahead and guest blog it! But if you think good amount of bloggers and audience will be interested in your piece then try to put it on your own blog and promote it so that people can find your piece and share it naturally.
This will bring your social shares, authority and links as well.
On Second question, creating content for links only… this is what Google actually hates! If plumber needs quality links naturally, my advice would be to invest time in creating a content that directly help their audience. Let’s say he write about “when calling a plumber is not a good idea!” And promote the post… as this is eye catchy content for the targeted audience, they will not only read but also share it with their circles…
Once they find the website helpful, they will most probably come to that site because of the trust factor! More traffic means more leads J
Hope this helps!
I would worry about the anchor text but not because it will make my link profile look unnatural but because of the branding issues. I mean if this is a link that is also transferring some targeted traffic to my website then I would really want to change the anchor text or else it will kill the user’s experience who is working on my website.
If the links are in 1000’s this is really shocking and a spammy signal to Google so if you can down the number awesome or else try to get your link removed from their website.
Hope this helps!
In my opinion what you should really consider is that what page (either home or internal page is working well for you in terms of conversions...
If home page is offering you more conversions then probably you should go for it! And direct your SEO strategy to get results from home page but if the inner page is offering your better conversions then you should prefer redirecting the angle of your SEO strategy towards inner pages...
I think there is no need to delete any internal page for this! But all you need to do is to build some great links so that your rankings can get stable positions against your key phrases.
I don’t think come up with any number or percentage would be a good idea but when I use to deal with these kinds of things… I just make sure that the anchor text should be as natural as possible. I mean if I got 15% of the links pointing back to my site with the Brand name, I probably will be fine with it but if it is a keyword that makes no sense in natural piece; in that case 3% is even a high number.
Hope this helps!
Two URLs containing the same content will be considered as duplicated content, do the domain level redirection so that every URL should redirect to the home page of the preferred domain.
I believe the first idea that was about creating a guide and update it from time to time is a better ideas as this will help you get more and more links over the period of time and people will always find it relevant so they will stick to it!
2<sup>nd</sup> Question:
There is no harm in having a 1 page website if it is about a guide but then do not expect it to rank for multiple different keywords and if you want that then you ideally should use blog for that!
Hope this helps!
In my opinion the best way to deal with it is to leave it up to them as you want things natural so play it the natural way!
Your options are pretty much limited!
You can:
- Email the customer serves and they might allow you to redirect from that blog to your new blog.
- Import the blog and upon the new blog (no SEO value)
- Leave a message to move to the new domain... This might not offer any SEO value but your true readers will defiantly going to shift towards the new blog.
Hope this helps!
John probably you have two options available!
The simple Option!
You have two website that have similar content that leads to duplicate content issues. Just write another version of the content and make it live on any one of the website so that this issues becomes resolved and both of your website will be able to rank in search engine from your desired key phrases.
The Ground Reality Solution!
In other case you should use cross domain canonical to tell search engine that you main website have the original version of content. This way Google will not consider that as duplicate content and your content on the main website will still be able to rank in search engines for the desired key phrases.
Hope this helps!