Welcome to the Q&A Forum

subdomain = www.

So what you're probably seeing is a lot of your domains are pointing to www.domain.com rather than domain.com

There are no automated link building solutions, however SEOMoz does offer lots of education on the subject:

http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links

http://www.seomoz.org/article/the-professional-guide-to-link-building-2011

Many good blog posts in these categories:

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/category/4

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/4

A good list here:

http://www.seomoz.org/directories

And an excellent tool for starting the process here:

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org

You may also find this Labs tool useful:

http://www.seomoz.org/labs/link-intersect

Something is funky there, and I'm betting it's the impression numbers. I've had issues with reported impressions before in something similar like this.

With a null CTR reported in GWT, are you seeing any organic traffic from that phrase in your analytics program? If not, I'd say impressions are over represented by a few orders of magnitude.

Sounds like someone is seeing you ranked well in a personalized search, and it's tossing off that number. Is the a number of impressions received on that keyword in webmaster tools?

Nope

My understanding is this would be an average actual position per time it ranked, so if the phrase was searched 1000 times, and you received an impression 10 of those times, once #1 and the rest #10, but didn't rank at all for the other 990 searches, you'd see an average ranking of 9 (the average rank you were at when you actually got an impression).

If I were you, I'd schedule a call and ask questions. Like what the benefits of having your content syndicated across the network is outside of name recognition, how they handle duplicate content problems, how they ensure your content is used properly, etc, etc. Put the onus on them to alleviate your fears. Chances are it won't be that beneficial for you.

With regards to your fear of not providing a URL, this is probably a form mass-email to pre-identified targets that was just badly executed. Call nSphere directly, and ask to speak to him. See how that goes.

I'm looking for opinions on the following scenario:

SuperWidgets buys GreatWidgets. That business acquisition involves the purchase of GreatWidgets.com, a standard but well-established website with some nice backlinks. The business acquisition is communicated to previous customers of GreatWidgets through the normal channels.

What should be done with GreatWidgets.com. Re-direct to a splash page informing visitors of the acquisition? 301 page-to-page for directly relevant content? If a splash page, how long would you keep it up?

Also, any opinions on how to handle any non-claimed local listings for the now-acquired business? Claimed ones will of course be handled, but what about the non-claimed and unclaimable?

For your primary target I've got you lagging behind Yelp x 2, Yahoo Local, and a semi-heavy with a Places page. All in all not bad for a month's work!

Checking on some of your secondaries, you look like you're again fighting directories and Deep-Steam. They appear to have the local advantage, but once you get your Places page and some more citations coming in, I think you'll start to bump up.

Since it appears you're targeting locally, I suggest taking a spin over to getlisted.org, and make sure you're listed in the places they indicate. Give David Mihm's local ranking factors a good read, and put that to use as well.

All in all, you're making it happen, just keep trucking along!

Thinking it might be that I used a hyphen and you didn't, I just re-checked. Now, with hyphen I'm getting rank 19. Without, rank 9.

This is weird. :S

Quite possibly. I'm still getting a not-in-top-50, however. See attached image. :S

1eimY.png

Yes-ish. You're going to want to read this:

https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/

What is telling you that you have these rankings? Rank Tracker has you NIT-50 for any page on your website.

If this is just you manually checking, there are many reasons you may be seeing your own pages. Search personalization is huge, from rank history to geography.

I'd say use it where it makes sense. Location finder? use it. Contact page? Use it. Footer of every page? Nah.

Assuming this domain move is a recent re-direct from your .co.uk to your .com, and a website previously existed separately on the .co.uk, did you just blanket redirect, or does each page point to its equivalent? If it was just a blanket redir, you may be leaking link juice. Also, to confirm, you're stating that the .com's previous DA was 44, then when you redirected the .co.uk to it it dropped? Or are you saying the .co.uk was 44, then when you moved to the .com it is only 33 now?

With regards to on-page reports, how are you attempting to pull this data? Just in the campaign tool, or are you using the on-page report card tool manually?

If your page does not rank top-50 for a keyword, it will not have an automatically produced on-page report for that keyword in the campaign tool. To recieve reports for non-ranking pages/keywords, you will need to pull them manually using the report card grader under Research Tools.

I've never understood the point of having a meta title tag if you're going to use a regular <title>. Seems a little skeevy to me.</p> <p>To your question, it would not have any <em>positive</em> effect on ranking, since that juice was already supplied via the traditional title.</p></title>

While there is no authoritative answer from Google or Mr. Cutts, general consensus amongst my SEO peers that were just IM'd by me seems to be multiple titles on a page is bad. I agree with the consensus.

Years ago, multiple <title>s was a common blackhat technique.This is back when you could successfully stuff meta keywords and it'd actually work. As for now if it would just be neutral or actively negative...I don't know, but my gut leans to it'd be actively negative to some degree.</p></title>

Not logged in, no location set, I've got you coming in 6th naturally here, just below a block of videos, and well below the fold. Might be that many searches, but you're below what I would consider just-as-relevant (and then Wikipedia, sigh) content. 1% CTR is not bad for slice #6.

I think you should consider query-intention a bit here. What is a user searching for 'kitchens' looking for? It's a very general term, so you can't really tell.

If I were you I'd focus on local terms, ones that were more query-matched to content you have.

So, yeah, I'm agreeing with you

I'd check with your delivery network. Might be something on their end. Or it might be that my user-agent switcher isn't working properly (it has happened before).

A further hmm:

Xenu 403's, but Screaming Frog doesn't.

Further to Alan, if I manually change user-agent to something unknown, the site 403's. Are you or your host using any sort of user-agent detection funkiness?

I'm in the process of reviewing on-site URL structure on a few sites, and I've run into something I can't decide between.

I am forced to choose between the two examples:

MediaRoom/CaseStudies.aspx  (camel case)

mediaroom/casestudies (all lower case, mashed, no dashes)

I would personally rather see:

media-room/case-studies/

However implementing the dashes would require manually re-writing about ~10,000 URLs. Implementing 301s from the existing structure to whatever I choose would be trivial, so there is no concern there.

Given the choice between CamelCase and lower-mashed, which would you choose? Why?

You need to use a rel-canonical tag. You can read a really informative post by Rand on it here:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps

This thread has some good opencart-specific advice regarding implementation:

http://forum.opencart.com/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=18817

I would first determine your reporting threshold. If you're below, say, result 100, I would consider yourself not there at all. Perhaps refine your target keyword list to something more realistic.

Personally, I use NIT50 or NIT30 (not-in-top-*) as my threshold measurements.

BOTW has a free listing that I think most people opt for, rather than the paid ones.

You can view the Open Site Explorer index update schedule here:

https://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/345964-linkscape-update-schedule

The next update is on Feb. 29th.

Next crawl in progress there for 5 days? Wow, no, unless you've got an absolutely huge site that shouldn't happen. I'd send in a trouble ticket.

Swing on over to your dashboard. Find your campaign, navigate to crawl diagnostics. Under the first errors/warnings/notices box you'll see something like:

Last Crawl Completed: Feb. 9th, 2012 Next Crawl Starts: Feb. 17th, 2012

Your dates, of course, will be different.

If you mean comments left through Facebook Connect, then yes. Pretty sure that happened in November last year.

As for how Facebook influences search rank, I'm pretty sure a book can be (and probably has been) written about the subject.  Also, this:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/facebook-twitters-influence-google-search-rankings

In the interests of not starting a subdomain vs subfolder flamewar, I'm going to say: it depends.

Same branding as the rest of your site? Want to treat is as part of the whole? Go with a subfolder.

Different brand? Different style? Different purpose? subdomain.

I'm about to make a whole lot of assumptions about your website to give this answer, just be aware.

Your website is built static, using HTML. Hence the .html file extension. If you're seeing websites that don't have file extension, it's most likely they are using content management systems (or have some serious /folder/index.html stuff going on).

Having a file extension like .html or .aspx or .php is not a bad thing. On websites like yours, it is required (unless you do the above subfolder thing) because it's an actual file the browser is grabbing rather than something being dynamically generated by a CMS. It has nothing to do with future-proofing.

As for 301'ing non-extension URLs to extention'd ones...well I don't know why you'd need to do that for your type of site.

Yes, it really is that bad.

And you answered your own question with regards to fixing it: rel canonical. That is your best bet, and really not that hard to implement (not sure on Joomsocial, though). Google pretty much explains to you the downfalls of using the other options.

Other solutions would be Joomsocial-specific, and I have no experience with that platform. Perhaps someone else who does have it can chime in on that.

Assuming all other things equal (keyword relevancy, anchor text, etc) I'd go for site 3. The DA is good, but I'm really liking the PA/DA combo on that one. Second choice would be site 1.

PA and DA are primarily based on links. It looks like your competitor is out-shining you there. I'd make your major next step a link building campaign.

Ah phpBB. First, do this:

http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=543997

That'll fix your ugly URL problem.

Then see what kinds of errors you get. If it still spits duplicate content, you can rel-canonical.

How does your forum handle the URLs for that login/register? Is it a ?string paramater after the base URL? If so, you should rel-canonical. If not, how does it handle those URLs?

Not a clue. I'd guess they're nofollowing the internal links to better architect what internal pages are ranking, but maybe they intended profile links to pass juice, and implementation wasn't what they'd thought it be.

Passing through multiple 301s is not the best solution, but it works. I've never seen it generate problems of any substance, even on some huge sites.

Worst I've ever seen was 4 passthroughs, old versions of multiple pages (date-sensitive) being 301's to new versions for 4 years. I didn't set it up that way, just inherited it. Didn't see any serious loss of juice.

Of course optimal would be to have everything 301ing to the right place. And depending how you're 301ing (.htaccess, IIS) might be as easy as doing a find/replace to get it all in line.

I'm 99.9% positive the answer is no, they do not pass link juice. JS-redirected links are all hinky like that.

You're right, the home page would be / in that case. See that a lot on WordPress-based sites and such.

I can't diagnose absolutely without direct access, but I'd say check for URL malformation based on entry. / may not really exist for functional purposes. Or, you just aren't getting any home-page traffic.

Also, make sure your GA code is actually on your home page and properly firing.

You'd figure there'd be some query-deserves-diversity on that SERP, but then again it is a brand name search.

Well this is an easy one.

_Will search engines consider the "-" url a different one? _Yes.

Do we need to 301 the old url to the new one? Yes.

I hate scrolling through the Q&A section and seeing a 0-response question surrounded by so many answered and responded-to ones. Whenever it's one of my questions with no responses I always get the feeling I'm being ignored. Know, CJ, that I'm not ignoring you, I just read your question and honestly have not a clue.

It sounds like it could be a campaign bug. It happens, I've had them happen to me a few times. I've had duplicate URLs tagged as duplicate content one crawl, changed nothing, then next crawl it was fine. Sometimes the crawler hiccups. If I were you I'd pull a manual crawl (research tools), or use Xenu to run one, and see if it's there too. If it is, you can see the referring URL, or at least more information. I could be of more assistance then.

If it doesn't appear in those, well, campaign crawler hiccup/

I said this in a question earlier...today I think. The threshold for bounce rate creating a negative impact for SEO is very high, to the point where you don't need to worry about it.

With regards to using Pinterest as a marketing channel, ask yourself what the benefit to your user is. Are you going to create intriguing SEO images that people will want to save or share? If so, I don't think I'd spend that capital in Pinterest, rather I'd try to turn it into good link bait.

I haven't seen anything good on whether or not Pinterest generates a measurable social signal that could influence a SERP, so I can't speak to that.

Agreeing with Brent on password-protection. And everything else he said.

Also, if these are CMS-driven sites, I can almost guarantee you you've got paths pointing back to the dev-version. Probably absolute links to images and such. I've had that happen before. Remove the database and files from your dev directories and see what breaks on the live-site

Moving to a new domain means new link building. You can 301 all you want but it's just not the same. Close, but it's never feels as pure as your first.

I'd business-case it. Will the keyword-as-domain give you some ranking power? Probably. Will the boost be worth the $2500? Well...maybe. Also take into consideration what happens if someone else snatches that domain up. Then $2500 might not look so bad when faced with a competitor with a new full tank of SEO gas.

There are many potential reasons.

1. GWT hasn't re-crawled since 301 implementation

2. The 301ing URLs aren't all right

3. You're 301ing to 404'ing URLs.

4. About 100 other things.

Can't give specifics without specifics.

Google SERP displays the title tag as the domain, indicating that it either hasn't been re-crawled or wasn't indexed in the first place.

There are some matter-of-opinion items that hit me, but nothing huge. Just truck on down your SEOMoz error list and you'll be good.

GWT = Google Webmaster Tools. There is an option to view what pages from your site is indexed. Check there to see if you've got duplicates indexed.

Backlinks don't pass 100% of their SEO juice through a 301, just most of it (like 90%). That 10% loss can be a lot if you've got tremendous amounts of backlinks pointing to the non-preferred domain.

That looks good to me. The existing is just...really long and saturated. And not indexed.

How new?

OSE doesn't track every website, and the index isn't updated real-time, so you could be either too new or just not included in the index.

I mean, right there in the OSE page for your domain, it tells you this:

No Data Available for this URL

Although our index is large, there are a number of reasons why we may not have data for the page you've requested. These can include:

• Recency of Page Creation:
  Linkscape crawls the web constantly, but we update the index only once every 30-40 days. Thus, pages and links created since the last index update won't be available until we've seen them. A typical timeline for getting a page/site included in Linkscape is 45-60 days, sometimes less for very important or well-linked-to pages.
• Deep Down in the Web:
  Our crawl focuses on a breadth-first approach, and thus we nearly always have content from the homepage of websites, externally linked-to pages and pages higher up in a site's information hierarchy. However, deep pages that are buried beneath many layers of navigation are sometimes missed and it may be several index updates before we catch all of these.
• Blocked Pages:
  If our crawlers or data sources are blocked from reaching your URLs, they may not be included in our index (though links that points to those pages will still be available)
• No Links:
  The URLs seen by Linkscape must be linked-to by other documents on the web or our index will not include them.