Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I would ask you the following questions:

1. Are all the client sites on the same server ?
2. Do you have a clients page where you link back to each of your clients ?
3. How does your link profile look ? Do you have lots of other links ?
4. How many client sites are we talking ? 10/20/50/500/1000 ? And then how would you compare them to the total links you have ?

If your link profile is mostly natural, I wouldn't worry about it that much. But going forward you could nofollow them. Also, what's the anchor text in your links ? Your Company Name or Website Designed ? Do more of Brand Name, combined with Anchor Text. So all sorts of variations. Do not make them consistent.

I hope that helps.

None of these are tools that build the links. These are more links tools that help you identify opportunities or some of the good links you should try and get. More like a starting point.

I think there's considerable value in understanding more that goes into SEO and how you can build your business both short term and long term in the World of Search. When you say "Basically, I live and die on search engine ranking.", that really answers the question itself for you.

I would strongly recommend the Link Prospector tool from Citation Labs - http://linkprospector.citationlabs.com/

I personal preference would be to use B) Audi A4 | Automobile | 4 Cylinder | Made in Germany. The reason for that is because the length in that case is not a problem (at 52 characters). It also tells me a lot more about what I am looking for without clicking through, and makes me click if that is indeed what I am looking for.

Well, it's like any other International targeting. If it was a site targeted to India only, I would have suggested .in domain for sure and hosting in India maybe. In this, I would just concentrate on Google and English. You should be good.

Think about having Breadcrumbs available on your product level pages. Good both for SEO as well as usability and sends some anchor text internal link juice to those category pages.

I think I agree with you that pricing does not make sense. Let's say you have 3 plans like most of those sites: $2000 a month $5000 a month $10000 a month As a client, it does and does not help me because the $5000 package you offer may not be right for me. So it is kind of misguiding and only creates confusion. However, it also does provide some direction if I am a $500 per month budget, that I am not ready or need to extend my budget. IMO, providing an explanation makes most sense to me.

Alex It sounds like the homepage URL or whatever URL you are seeing in SEOmoz ranking reports is the one that is ranking in the SERPS and that's how SEOmoz does the grading of pairing that search term with that URL. I would advise you to look at this article from Rand on this topic - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/wrong-page-ranking-in-the-results-6-common-causes-5-solutions

Yes, I would not worry about it. Google understands these issues specially on large scale websites. I have worked in scenarios where there's a weekly rebuild or deployment which essentially means the site is down for 2-6 hrs. Nothing happens. In a rare occasion, if your page with the maintenance message gets cached, you can always request a re-crawl of upto 50 pages from your Google Webmaster Console. I have never had to do that.

Google does crawl the Mobile sites. I have seen that happen several times. The best way to handle this is via robots.txt Lets say your site is yourdomain.com and mobile site is at m.yourdomain.com yourdomain.com/robots.txt User-agent: googlebot-mobile Disallow: / m.yourdomain.com/robots.txt User-agent: googlebot-mobile Disallow: User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: / I hope that helps.

Here you go... Visit http://linkprospector.citationlabs.com/

This tool does a great job in find potential guest post sources based on your niche/keywords.

Will the only URLs still work ? Like for example we had something like: www.domain.com/blah-blah/categoryname-categoryid.html and we changed to www.domain.com/better-stuff/categoryname-categoryid.html, we did the canonical tag and that worked like a charm. Just FYI. In your case it sounds like 301 would do the job right. Is it WordPress by any chance ?

My experience has been that .com, .net and .info all work great. And .org works wonder in certain niches.

So yes, to answer your question directly...go ahead... .net is fine.

Yes, I have seen it only 2-3 times ever since it launched. I guess the way we all search or the kind of searches we have, don't have short answers

Yes, that happened almost a year go.. See http://microformats.org/2011/02/24/google-launches-microformat-powered-recipe-search It's pretty neat and works great. Very user-friendly. And since it's done using microformats / recipe schema, it's pretty easy to implement. There are tons of Wordpress plugins that let you do that.

Are you sure you don't have noindex on your tag pages ? PM me the URL. Is it wordpress ? Are you using any SEO Plugin ? Some plugins have a noindex on Tag and Archive pages by default.

It's just another link. It's completely navigate-able and they have canonical tags in place to prevent any duplicate URLs. It looks good. http://www.ties.com/long+black-ties Canonical is consistent with the linked URL.

PM me your website URL with example 404/302 of the discontinued products.

Yes, try to find the backlinks for your competition...not just the top 10 competition for your top term. Use other keywords to see if the same set of websites ranking. I am sure there will be other niche sites ranking for some of your long tail keywords or something. Look at their backlinks as well. I would also sometimes try to look into the backlinks of the backlinks to see if I can find any opportunities.

I like what "Optimize and Monetize" said. Links is like Oxygen. Think of them as Website Food. That's the nature of the internet. Social signals, internet citations, activity on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and local / niche directories, yellow pages, forums etc based on the nature of your website/business, it all adds up. Panda is just trying to find and discount the effects of the "manipulations" per se. I hope that helps :). Good content, Good links - Works.

This is good. It's not an error, its a warning. So you are good from both the duplicate URLs issue as well as the canonical tags I think.

Yes, I understand. I would check the domains being redirected to see if they have any history associated with them. If they have been linked from anywhere on the web, then Google knows they exist. If not, they are pretty much (almost) like brand new domains. This process would also make sure and help you find if there was nothing fishy/spammy going on with those domains in the past. I would still do a staggered redirect depending upon how many you are planning to do. As you said few dozen, I would just spend some time looking them up and based on the results, select the ones that have most type-in traffic first. And then in a few weeks, check to see how it's working for you and if you want to redirect more of those.

I would suggest implementing canonical tag for Magento. That would take care of duplicate URLs for the same pages. As for the review pages, if you are not using the functionality, isn't there a way to disable them completely from within Magento administration ? If not, I would first install that canonical fix and see what you see on those review pages. If not, you can always do a disallow using robots.txt but it's better to have them not exist at all specially when you are not even using them instead of doing a disallow/noindex kind of thing.

I hope that helps.

If these product goes away, do you expect them to go away forever or they may come back when they are in stock ? Are these "out of stock" scenarios or is it a gone forever scenario ?

If they are gone forever, a 301 to a category page make sense from usability perspective. If I am a blogger and I blogged about a product of yours, linking to it...I and all my users would prefer/expect the link to be working. If it's not available, out of stock message or if it's gone forever, a 301 to a category page or a plain 404 is better. Why do you have a 302 / Temporary redirect to a 404 page ? Are these really temporarily gone products or permanently gone ?

I would imagine most of those domains won't have any link profile or backlinks of their own. In that sense, you are not really doing it for SEO...you are doing it for traffic. Also, if you think about it...when companies merge, domains get redirected. Think Continental.com > United.com in which case there is a massive SEO advantage in doing so. Anyways, long story short, in your case, most of the domains with the domainer won't have any Search Engine history, therefore not much SEO advantage. As you said, doing it for a few domains is okay. At the same time, start building a natural link profile and content that people would want to link to...along with activity in social media...all that would work in your long term strategy and those domains would blend it very well.

That is very useful...good to know...thanks Keri.

Can you do anything at all at the root of your domain..ie myurl.com ? This makes no sense. How can you host a domain and have no control over the root of your own domain name..the one you hosted. Don't you have FTP access ? When you connect using ftp, can't you see the server path for the root folder ? You should. I would check via FTP. I have never seen such a scenario.

Yes I agree they work great. But this topic has been openly discussed way too many times..including directly with Matt Cutts at Pubcon. In short, the effects of EMD have changed a lot from 2 years ago...and it will continue to decrease. It's not that they will get penalized (although in a way they will)..it would basically mean that the "magical" effect will go away but they will still have an advantage in my opinion. Here's how:

Let's say your website is abc.com and keyword is Blue Widgets. If somebody links to you, the link code will be:

Blue Widgets vs if your domain was BlueWidgets.com the link would be: Blue Widgets or Click Here

You see what I am talking about. That advantage would always be there. Having your keywords in every incoming link, even if it's not an anchor text link.

I would be very careful about this. Here's what I would ask you: 1. Do you want both the US and presuming the other is UK site to rank in both Google.com and Google.co.uk ? 2. Is the UK site on a .co.uk domain and hosted in UK ? Is it ranking well ? How well does it perform on Google.com ? 3. Would you have 100% of the products in the same category structure on the .com site ? 4. Would it use the same shopping cart platform ? I would look into whether you can target the .co.uk site for US searches. If not, I would look into each of the above points and see how you can separate the .com site as much as possible from the .co.uk site.

Social Media presence has been actively influencing the SERPS. I have seen the impact both on local as well as global search. Even if the links from those websites are nofollowed or are not links at all, just URL mentions (or citations) they help. So I would just analyze their backlink profile and get better links. Also, are you outranking them for other keywords, keyword variants and other long tail keywords which are essentially beyond their exact match domain? How is your Domain Strength and Page Strength vs them ?

Assuming you are talking about the website in your profile...here is what I would check: Do you have any content duplication between your multiple language subdomains ? Do you have XML Sitemaps for your pages ? Are they submitted via the Webmaster Console ? If yes, what %age of your pages do you see indexed vs how many you submitted ? Have you considered doing an Images XML Sitemap ?

Do a site:yourdomain.com and then do a site:subdomain.yourdomain.com and you should be able to find the pages you are referring to. Doing a site:www.yourdomain.com will only show pages from www presuming non www is set to correctly redirect to www and the preferred display URL is set in Google as the one with www. I hope this helps.

The way I have seen duplicate page titles reported is "Exact duplicates" So if you have 2 pages with Page Title as "Widgets", they will show up as Duplicate. However, if one of them was a Blue Widgets and the other was Red Widgets, they will not show up as duplicate. It's a good idea to work on Duplicate Page Titles, but don't do all the work to make sure Google does not see them as Duplicate any more. Look at them as opportunities to display the correct, relevant information in the SERPS so that user's click through to your website. I hope that helps.

I would ask the following question:

Regarding those 500 redirects: Do you have external sites linking to any of those 500 pages ?
I would at-least identify pages that have external links and keep them if possible.

I would recommend spending that money getting an SEO Audit done and based on the outcome, plan your SEO Strategy. You can try and do some of the stuff yourself and have an SEO company do the rest. I would also spend time educating yourself (specially since you already have this resource handy....SEOMoz.org

I agree. As others have noted, I would worry about your entire link profile. If you are concerned about certain image ads or other advertising, you can always have the webmaster add the rel="nofollow" in which case you are telling the bots not to pass any link juice to the linked site (even though it does pass some value).

I would recommend doing a complete backlinks audit and see what you can do to plan a long term natural link profile.

Definitely. I would also suggest varying anchor texts. Think what would be most natural. Don't always get the perfect links

If that's the case, I would suggest doing a rel=canonical tag on www.tryg.dk/forsikring to your homepage. Essentially, it's like a 301 for search engines but not for the users. The users will be able to come to your homepage, use navigation and or other links to visit www.tryg.dk/forsikring or they can come from external links which are linking to www.tryg.dk/forsikring. But Google will de-index that page and rank the homepage instead.

I hope that helps. The exact canonical tag you would use on www.tryg.dk/forsikring page would be :

My response would essentially be the same for this question as your other question about article directories.

Do the most important/niche directories first. Check/find directories where your competition is listed, specially the ones that are outranking you in the SERPS. But again, don't do just a ton of those directories in one day. I would pick the niche ones, do them randomly amongst other link initiatives.

I am sure SEOMoz is using Google API to pull the data rather then essentially scraping Google that tools like WebPosition Gold do. I remember the days when people used to love WebPosition Gold...the industry has changed so much since then.....isn't it.

For any link building profile, they key is diversity of links. If there are lots and lots of Article Directories, Guest Posts, Niche Directories, Blog Comments....in other words too much of any one linking technique and specially anchor text links is a pattern that is easily detectable and stands out from the crowd. We all know links help. We do need links. However, If you lots of article directory links in your back profile and not much of others, I would look into other oppurtunities.

In your words, every 2 weeks, when you want to essentially repeat your process of gaining links...do it...except use a completely different anchor text, maybe don't use anchor text at all...use the domain name, use the brand and so on. And try to use a complete different technique every time.

Invest that time and effort of the 500 words of content into a very useful piece of content and put it on your main-website or as guest blog posts on industry related blogs.

I hope that helps.

are you saying your homepage is not indexed/cached in Google ? If that's the case, there might be something wrong. There might be a noindex tag, some sort of a disallow to your homepage. Personally, I can't remember seeing a similar scenario where inner pages are indexed and the homepage is not. If it's not ranking but is cached, that's another issue.

Please confirm.

You are thinking right. What would stop all the major brands to go out there and buy the "spammiest" links networks pointing to their competition. How does the competition prove they did not do it.

I think Google dealt with this years ago with the Miserable failure change.... here. They basically altered their algorithm to not give "too much" advantage of links/anchor text from all over the web. In a sense, they created the ability for their algorithm to discount the value of links, not penalize the website being linked to. Does that make sense ? I think what's happening now is not any different...they can and will continue to identify link spam, de-index link networks and manipulative techniques using pattern identification. But if not all, most cases, discount the value of those links...and not directly or not 100% penalize the site being linked to, because then technically a group of people/websites could run a mass campaign and kill any online business. That's not how the Internet is supposed to work...

Let's say the guest blog on a blog unrelated to you is linking to your site A. I would not recommend linking to Site A in anyway, that would technically mean reciprocal links.

However, if you have another guest post on Site B, that "may" very selectively link to your blog post on Site A. It does help strengthen link at times.

I would recommend trying to get citations and / or links from all kinds of local directories based on your niche. For local rankings, citations are pretty useful as well. It really depends what your niche is to think of other ideas, but local business, schools, libraries etc are all good opportunities worth pursuing depending what kind of business we are talking about.

Also think about local events, sponsorships and donations possibly. I would also recommend the following articles:

http://searchengineland.com/10-unorthodox-ideas-for-local-citations-links-77468

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-places-citations-5-tactics-to-earn-links-for-your-local-business

Well, Yahoo uses Bing technically, so if you are indexed, you should be indexed at both the places. Have you tried submitting a sitemap in your Bing Webmaster account ? Does your site show any indexing issues in the webmaster console ? http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster/

I second that. You need to look into optimizing your website. In most cases it's not a server/hosting company issue. Check their main website or other sites on the same server / IP and see if they have the same issue as yours. But to directly answer your question, no it would not impact as long as the country of the hosting company stays the same. I hope that helps.

Any kinds of bulk links...I would suggest to stay away from unless you are trying this for a throwaway site if it gets penalized. If you are planning long term, invest in content and more "real" link building which is a lot of hard work.

Also read this question here.