Hi Andrew,

If you can send me the domain I'll have a look at the DNS and see if there's anything that looks unusual. Drop me a message on here, or email me on david@bringdigital.co.uk

Cheers

David

Hi Andrew,

This can be solved, you have a couple of options:

• Do you have Google Analytics accounts for these subdomains? If so you could register search console via GA and remove the subdomains from there

• Even if you don't have web hosting for these subdomains, as long as you have control over the main domain you can still take control of these subdomains. Is the core domain still under your control? If so you can register for search console via the 'domain name provider' option.

Thanks,

David

Yep - attached. I've redacted the title as it showed the client's name but would be good to see whether you think this is properly optimised?

lTsMcoJ

Does anyone have any experience with SVG image files and on-page SEO?

A client is using them and it seems they use the title tag in the same way a regular image (JPG/PNG) would use an image ALT tag. I'm concerned that search engines will see the multiple title tags on the page and that this will cause SEO issues.

Regular crawlers like Moz flag it as a second title tag, however it's outside the header and in a SVG wrap so the crawlers really should understand that this is a SVG title rather than a second page title. But is this the case?

If anyone has experience with this, I'd love to hear about it.

That's how I got started many moons ago.

You're welcome Kristy, I'll have my fingers crossed that you see a nice jump up next month

Anything I can ever help with just give me a shout on here, or tweet me @mrdavidingram

David

Hi Kristy,

The first thing to say is that Domain Authority is a third party metric, so unless you have seen a drop in your traffic then there should be no need for immediate alarm. Although DA correlates with successful rankings, there is still no guarantee that a change in DA will effect your rankings in any way.

The solution for your issue might be quite simple. In last months update the number of links in the index was around 50% smaller than the previous update. This meant that a lot of links that where contributing towards your DA score are no longer in SeoMoz's index, and can therefore not contribute towards your DA score.

In no way does this mean that these links are no longer in Google, as the Google index and the Mozscape index are two entirely separate entities and are in no way connected.

After this month's update, it has been noted that the index is even smaller than last month (albeit by a much smaller margin). If you read the Q&A entries following last month’s update you'll see lots of people asking the same question, and it was confirmed that the drop in DA was due to the smaller index.

I expect we'll see the same over the next week.

Personally, I saw my clients DA drop by an average of 3-4 points.

If your drop in score correlates with this pattern, then you have nothing to worry about at all. Especially if your traffic hasn't been effected.

Here are the details of the smaller update from last month:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/july-mozscape-update

And here are this month’s details:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/august-mozscape-update

If your drop in score doesn't coincide with this, then it most likely means that you've lost one/some links that were contributing to your overall Domain Authority score. You can get to the bottom of this by using the historical link date in Majestic to figure out what links where lost, and when.

If this is the case then you can either try and rebuild the lost links, or create some new ones. Or ideally, both!

Best of luck.

David

Hi Dan,

Not necessarily, there are plenty of occassions when hiding content is valid. and actually adds value to the user especially with the rise in popularity of jQuery (some of the coolest transition effects rely on the display:none mark-up).

The real question is why you are wanting to hide your H1 tag? If there is a valid reason then you're not going to have any issues, however if you are hiding a keyword stuffed title for the sole benefit of SEO, then you could come into trouble.

For example, I know some sites use images for H1 titles so they can get the design quality they simply can't achieve with CSS, however they also include a written title to back it up. Technically verging away from the rules, but it's not going to see your site penalised.

The thing to remember is that a small thing like this isn't going to get you struck out of Google's indexed. If you follow their best practices but the occasion arises when it's necessary to bend the rules a little with a trick like this they are not going to outcast your site. It would only be a problem if it was part of a larger set of tactics that were violating Google's guidelines, and it was clear you are out to manipulate the search results.

So in summary:

• If the trick benefits your visitors, then don't worry
• If it is solely for SEO benefit, then make sure everything else is whiter than white
• If it is part of a larger campaign to hide things from users but not Googlebot, then stay well clear

Thanks,

David

Thanks Jarno

Hi,

In regards to the geo-targeting, have a read of this case study. To me it's the definitive guide to the issue as it goes through most of the options available, and offers a pretty solid solution:

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/territory-sensitive-international-seo-a-case-study

And if you are worrying about the white/black aspects of using these tactics, here is a great guide from Rand on acceptable cloaking techniques:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/white-hat-cloaking-it-exists-its-permitted-its-useful

And finally a great 'Geo-targetting FAQ' piece from Tom Critchlow:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/geolocation-international-seo-faq

In regards to the other locations ranking that you don't think have been crawled, this is probably down to the number/strength of the links pointing at this sections. Google have stated in various Webmaster videos that a page doesn't neccessarily need to be crawled to be indexed (weird huh?), Google just needs to know it exists.

If there were plenty of links point at a page, Google would still believe it's an authoritative/relevant result even if it hasn't crawled the page content itself. It can use other signals such as anchor text to determine the relevancy for a given search term.

Here is an example video from Matt Cutts where he discusses the issue:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBdEwpRQRD0

Best of luck

David

Hi,

In regards to keyword stuffing; yes it can be an issue in alt tags and personally I believe it is a spam signal to the search engines.

For example, a good alt tag would be along the lines of:

'A young couple stood in front of the Egyptian pyramids whilst on holiday'

However, you will find some people will stuff and go with:

'Egypt, Egyptian, Egypt Holidays, travel to Egypt, flights to Egypt, see the pyramids' etc

It's fairly easy for Google, and your customers, to see that you are trying to manipulate the rankings.

The alt tags should be a simple description of the image, however you need to be SEO savy enough to include your keywords as well.

In regards to your site; if your competitor isn't using alt tags on their buttons, then it's a fantastic opportunity for you to take the lead. It's difficult to tell you what would/wouldn't work, but if you work on the lines of offering a genuine description then you will be fine.

If your site is selling events, then it makes sense to explain in the alt tag that this is a buy button for X event on X date.

Again, with a little bit of code trickery you can have this created dynamically so it's on a quick job and will happen automatically whenever you add a product/event.

In regards to making words/phrases bold or italic; there is no SEO benefit or risk here so it should be simply down to what looks best and what portrays the information in the best way for your visitors.

Thanks,

David

Blue Widget 2143 was just an example product, without knowing what kind of products you sell it was the best I could do. If you sold soccer jerseys, your alt tag could be 'buy button for the 2012 Manchester United home shirt'. This would pick up more search traffic, as well as make your website more accessible to customers. The whole point of the alt tag is to provide a description of the image you are displaying. 'Buy now' tells neither Google nor your customers any information, and you are missing out on a great opportunity to please both. Depending what language/CMS your website is built on, you will be able to insert a bit of code that dynamically creates a suitable alt tag depending on the product. So whatever page/product template currently instructs the alt tag to be 'buy now', would instead instruct a dynamic name to be generated along the format of 'buy button for <product name="">' Cheers</product>

Blue Widget 2143 was just an example product, without knowing what kind of products you sell it was the best I could do. If you sold soccer jerseys, your alt tag could be 'buy button for the 2012 Manchester United home shirt'. This would pick up more search traffic, as well as make your website more accessible to customers. The whole point of the alt tag is to provide a description of the image you are displaying. 'Buy now' tells neither Google nor your customers any information, and you are missing out on a great opportunity to please both. Depending what language/CMS your website is built on, you will be able to insert a bit of code that dynamically creates a suitable alt tag depending on the product. So whatever page/product template currently instructs the alt tag to be 'buy now', would instead instruct a dynamic name to be generated along the format of 'buy button for <product name="">' Cheers</product>

Hi,

By definition, the alt tag is there to give a description of the image for users who aren't able to view it (visually impaired users, or visitors with restricted browsers or speeds).

In regards to the search engines, it's an opportunity for you to tell them about the content of an image which the crawlers simply can't see. This gives you two opportunities; firstly to let the search engines know that the media content of your page is relevant for a search query. Secondly, images with a full description will stand a much better chance of ranking in image search, which can be a rich traffic source for you.

For both circumstances, the alt tag should be descriptive and a genuine reflection of the content of the image. A alt description of 'buy now' doesn't add any value to either your visitors or your SEO efforts, as it tells them very little.

I would recommend using an alt tag along the lines of 'buy button for the Blue Widget 2143'.

This gives visitors a full description of the image, as well as helping the search engines know that your site is relevant for the Blue Widget 2143.

This would also solve your issue of duplicate alt descriptions that are adding no value to your site. If you followed the format of 'buy button for the <product name="">' it would give you unique descriptions that genuinely benefit your SEO campaign.</product>

I definitely wouldn't recommend blocking the alt tags, this would be totally shunning a serious on-page ranking factor.

Thanks,

David

At a domain level (and exact maths aside), yes. However at a page level (i.e within an article), then the link juice is evenly distributed across the links on the page.

It gets complicated when the other link strength factors are brought into it. For example if there were two links on a page, one in the article and one in the page footer. The link juice would be distributed 50/50, however the footer link wouldn't be given the same importance and strength as the one in the article.

This goes for your links in the article too. Although the link juice will be spread evenly, there are still other ranking factors that skew the importance of the links, such as the order and placement.

So the number of links you have in the article effects the PageRank distribution, but there are many other factors surrounding links. The main one that will effect this issue is the diminishing returns of links to the same website (e.g yours).

So if you have 4 links on a page they might get the PageRank spread evenly at 25% each, however this doesn't mean that they will all carry the same weight and value to your pages they are landing at.

Cheers

Yes, technically they each pass 20% of that pages link juice.

However, things get a lot more tricky as the importance of the links vary on things like order, and page placement. i.e the value of a link in the footer of an article doesn't carry as much weight as a link in the first paragraph etc

Thanks,

Ah, now your right in regards in link juice distribution on a single page. It is literally divided by the number of links, so 5 links would get 20% each, 100 links would get 1% each.

In this sense, there is technically no limit in how many outbound links you would have to your site, although obviously there would be some spam signals hit after a while.

So if you have three seperate pages you want to share a single external page's link juice, then you can work on the basis it will be split evenly. But again, the more it is split the less benefit you will see come through to your pages until there is practically null.

The rule of diminishing returns applies to the number of links that are individually benefiting you from a single domain. So from a pure SEO link juice point of view, there is no more benefit in having 8 links coming from example.com than having 3 links.

Cheers

To be honest though, I think my example above is a bit too excessive. Somewhere in the middle would be more accurate (100/50/25) with a steep drop off after that.

To be honest though, I think my example above is a bit too excessive. Somewhere in the middle would be more accurate (100/50/25) with a steep drop off after that.

Yes, sadly it diminishes a lot steeper than that, I will have a dig around and see if I can find some study data.

Sadly, only the boffins at Google HQ know the exact figures.

Cheers

So this isn't the exact maths, but for arugments sake:

The first link gives you 100% SEO benefit

The second link gives you 25% SEO benefit

The third link gives you 5% SEO benefit

The fourth link gives you <1% SEO benefit

After that, there is no additional SEO benefit of received links from that page.

I'm not taking about link juice distribution, I'm talking about the actual SEO benefit each link with provide you. That's why you will always here SEO's tell you the first link is the most important, and why people only tend to put a couple of links in a guest post or article, as there is really very little value after that.

Looking at it from a purely SEO point of view (so not consideration for branding, advertising or other general marketing), you want to be getting links from lots of unique domains rather than lots of links from a single domain.

Of course if you had 50 links coming from say the BBC there would be other benefits such as the amount of traffic you'd get and the brand association, but if you're looking at it from purely an SEO link juice point of view then there is no real value after getting a couple of links from the same domain.

Cheers

David

Ah sorry, I see what you mean.

The amount of links you place on a single page will have diminishing returns, so the first is valuable, the second less so, the third less so. After a while there is no additional value at all.

Personally, in that scenario again I would look to use 2 or 3 links, one branded in the footer and one or two in the article body (again, only if they made sense and fitted in naturally.

The main thing to consider in that scenario is the wishes of the Webmaster you're working with. Some only want you to use a single link in guest content, other are of a 'more the merrier' philosophy (although you still don't want to go link crazy).

2-3 is good for the user, good for the Webmaster, and good for your SEO

Cheers

David

Hi Gary,

Just so I'm clear, you mean if you had xcompany.com and then xcompany.blogspot.com, how many links per blog post would you send to the main domain?

If that's the case, yes I'd recommend using the same rules and treating it as an internal blog.

If you don't mind me saying, I'd never recommend hosting a blog externally from your main site unless it's completely unavoidable. Is there no way to integrate both? The easiest way is to just host Wordpress in the subfolder of your main site, and match the theme to your main brand.

Thanks

David

Hi Gary,

I tend to use 2-3 internal links in a 400 word article as a rule of thumb, although there is going to be no harm in using more if the article calls for it (i.e you genuinely need to reference several sources on your site)

On the other hand, you don't want to be forcing links into articles just to meet a 3 link quota. If there is genuinely no relevant reference or keyword uses that sensibly links to another site, then don't try to force the issue.

Try to think of it from a users point of view, i.e when reading this article does the link make sense, and would it be a logical and positive path for a visitor to follow.

Cheers

David