Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Michelle, just be careful on whatever link building techniques you are using. Don't overdo any one kind of links. Think natural. Also, I'd recommend building more brand links to build your overall domain authority rather then getting the perfect SEO anchor text links. Think long term. You don't want your website to get penalized for manipulation of the SERPS via Anchor text link building.

As for your question about links to your main domain (homepage) or deep links, I'd say go for a combination without trying to do too much anchor text links. Concentrate on trying to build great content that people naturally link to and share. That would do the perfect link building for you.

I hope this helps.

What makes you think it's an over optimization penalty ? Have you received any webmaster console messages. Were you ranking 2 weeks ago and now all of your rankings have dropped or is it that some of your rankings have dropped. Please explain the exact situation a little bit more before there can be a solid conclusion.

Real Press Releases get picked up by traditional media and get redistributed/reworded all over the web, which is lesser duplicate content. That's how the traditional news world works and helps in all aspects of SEO/Brand Building. But to your point, if it's the same release over and over again, it would get combined and in most cases you'd only see 1 (if any). Most of those PR sites don't even make it into Google News.

I agree with Moosa. I have not seen a difference at all. It gets generalized to (XXX) XXX-XXXX in my experience. That's how I prefer to provide it. But if you have to do it either of the other formats, for example when you have a Toll Free number or something else, I prefer to use the hyphenated version. The one with periods is the least preferred. Also keep in mind how browsers, VOIP applications like SKYPE, Google Talk etc interpret these numbers on webpages when you are browsing for you to click to call.

I think you have the perfect responses from Kade, Takeshi and Christopher. I agree with each one of them. In my opinion, the crux is that if done correctly it can be very very beneficial in terms of functionality, features and how visitors like your website and interact with it. I totally understand the concerns, they are very legit concerns. I would suggest to build your new stie using Wordpress on a staging server, test it to make sure all images, file paths etc are consistent and the code is clean. If you like it all, do the switch. You'd be fine.

A sub-folder would be best. So if you can install PHP, that would be great. If not, or if there are security concerns, I would suggest looking into Reverse Proxy.

Andy, I agree with John. It does not sound like you'd be using a lot of tags from tracking. EG 3rd party tags for A/B Testing, Conversions, Goals and changing them every once in a while with specific goals and not having direct access to be able to do it.

Is it's easier to analyze if you have an example URL. These can be coded many different ways and a slight change can make a difference.

Sean, as Paul said it would be easier to analyze with the URL available or paste the code fragments after you anonymize your data if you'd rather not have it discussed in public or PM the URL.

I agree with Ian 100%. It does not make sense (Even though that pingback link is nofollowed). Does it help your user ? Would it be useful to have that link available to them ?  Think about the user experience and in most cases, we get the correct answer, which is almost certain to be white hat way of handling the situation :).

Great answer Ian.

You are 100% right. That's it. The concern is having 100's of thousands of links that would be very very low quality links. The affiliate link pattern will make it "sort of okay" if you decide to keep them follow. Those links are there for the affiliate tracking, but typically the majority of the web uses some sort of an affiliate tracking site like GAN (Which is closing down), CJ, Linkshare etc. Considering that, is it really worth the risk of having that many number of links ? Maybe, maybe not. And that's the business decision you need to make.

The affiliate traffic and sales is important (which justifies the affiliate program). Your natural SEO rankings (current and future rankability) helps you justify the importance of these kinds of decisions and which is why you are asking this question.

We just need to find the right balance without tripping too much on either side.

I'd suggest using a rel="nofollow" in the link to you.

Fabrizo

How big is your natural link profile ? How many affiliate links are we talking ? Do you get a lot of natural links ? Is this your own affiliate program ? Can you do some sort of a link shortener of your own ? EG:

http://www.MSLink.com/whatever/?affid=[affiliate_id]

that redirects to

http://www.merchantsite.com/products/product_page/?affid=[affiliate_id]

which then further redirects to your product page.

This way if there are future problems, you can change/remove the redirects from MSLink.com if they happen to be hurting you anytime in the future while maintaining full control.

I hope this helps.

Dana. As of right now, I can confirm I can still see the related searches in Houston, TX.

It's not needed per se, but then if you have a large website and you think about the user and you want them to be easily able to find sections of your website, it can't hurt to have a HTML sitemap.

As for XML sitemap, the only reason I consider doing them to make sure if there are any issues of indexability, I know. So that I can act on that information and do something. Otherwise for a large scale website with over hundreds and thousands of pages, how'd you know if you have a section of your site not indexed for whatever reasons ?

Honestly, it varies so much based on your niche, your domain strength, nature of the keyword(s), your competition, types of results returned. Do you see local search results showing up ? How strong is your domain ? How competitive are the keywords ?

Honestly, all(most) links are good links. I would not stress out on those links not showing up in OSE. Just make sure they are cached by Google and if they are, you are good. Other tools will eventually find them. There's just an infinite amount of data on the web and we can't expect "anybody" to be able to crawl it all.

If I were you, I would move on to my next set of things.

If they need to be linked, you could do the nofollow as you have already done. I would also change them to brand anchor text. So in my opinion you are on the right track.

Next, I would go build some unique content on all the sites as well as some fresh natural, uncommon links from sites that are not related to you. Natural Links.

I would not worry about changing so much. These are not monster changes.

As Mike D and Mike G said, they basically tell you how important domains are the domains (in terms of number of backlinks). It helps you guage and measure their strength in your head.

Answer to Question 2 first: I see why an SEO might have include /canada/ in it, but considering your domain is .ca and it's probably hosted in Canada (which it should be), it's not really needed unless you are also targeting /usa, /london and so on.

Answer to Question 1: I'd do the language first. That way, all your fr-ca cities are in the same language folder. But then, it could totally be the other way around and /location/language. I would recommended /language/location

I hope this helps.

Yes, that's right. What you'd end up with is a small list of URLs that have nofollow anywhere/somewhere on the page. If it's a big list of 5000 links and this tool can trim it down to maybe 200 having nofollow somewhere or 500 or 2000. In either case, it's a small list. Definitely not a solution to what you are looking for.

Marie

What you could do is use Screaming Frog to crawl all the links (the combined list of ahref links and WMT and then use the custom filter to check if the domain is there, ie your link is there and  then the 2nd filter to check if there is the word nofollow anywhere on the page. It's not going to be a perfect list, because you may end up seeing a page that is linking to you, but is nofollow'ing somebody else from the same page.

But then most of the times, the regular links, they are either nofollowed or they are not. "Mostly".

I hope this helps.

Gina

Create your identities on the social networks and share some of your content. Also put links to your social networks on your blog for your blog visitors to follow you on, look you up, contact you, connect with you etc. See how that works out. In my opinion, it depends and varies by niche to see where most of your audience is and how they like to interact with you. Over time, I would include more call to action sort of things like, towards the end of the article, Follow me on twitter to get notified when I post new articles. Or Like me on Facebook to get notified about my new article before anybody else etc.

It all depends what niche you are in, how big your audience is, where they are, demographics and how they interact with social media. Look at sites similar to yours and see what they do.

I hope this helps.

I know, totally understand. Coming from where YP is, as you said, it makes complete sense.

I am guessing your site is corazonas.com ? If yes, I am seeing sitelinks for both the terms. The only difference is that for corazonas foods, it's the expanded sitelinks.

Even for corazonas snacks, you have expanded sitelinks.

There are a lot of ranking factors that influence the ranking for a certain keyword, right ? Given that thought, there has to be something beyond the Page Title / Meta data. Think about some of these things:

• Extermal In-bound links
• Internal Links
• Size of the site / Number of pages within your website
• Nature of content
• Images, Image filenames, Alt Tags etc
• Any social media related to that keyword ?

It's absolutely possible for a website to rank for hundreds and thousands of keywords but that does not mean if they are targeting another keyword, they optimize it, create a page and rank for it ?

Think about it, if Amazon.com wanted to rank for Car Insurance (Extreme examples, super competitive keyword and an equally strong domain). The site may have lots and lots of pages somehow related to Car Insurance (Books, DVDs etc) with Page Titles, On-page content and so on, but they still probably would not rank higher then the competition even though the competition may not have anywhere close to the link profile as Amazon.com

Does that make sense ?

In my opinion, it's a combination of content and internal/external links.

Maybe I am wrong and it's something else. Did you actually get any penalty ? Are/were any of your other keywords affected ? Keep in mind, your site is 6 months old. So it does not really have the age aspect as well as domain authority.

Marie

I just found this Chrome Extension, which does have a copyscape aspect in it. So you can click a button and it can check the entire page, not just a small snippet of text or phrase.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/meta-seo-inspector/ibkclpciafdglkjkcibmohobjkcfkaef

I hope this helps.

Considering all this, I would create a second GA account temporarily until you figure out and do what you need to. Should not be an issue. Do what you need to to clarify and confirm the situation as well as identify the problem.

Can the YP/agency setup an Adwords sub-account for you guys to access ?

On my iPhone5 (Gmail App), it shows up fine.

Clearly, it sounds like there isn't enough domain authority / page authority or off-age that is needed to rank competitively for that term. The other terms that you are ranking for in the US and UK, might not have enough competition that you were able to trickle through the SERPS and get higher positions.

I would look at the link profiles of some of your top ranking competitors and see what they are doing in terms of links and help / suggest / propose to build some natural / authority links.

That off-page is going to help the entire site BTW.

Earlier, it was the actual question that was hyperlinked. Now, as matbennett said, it's a button. The "Go to question" button.

I hope this helps.

Villas

Those are just warnings, something for you to look and make sure. SEOMoz or any other crawler is just a tool, drawing your attention to something that could possibly be wrong. I would suggest looking at your category pages for sure. The Sitemap, if you are concerned, you can make it Sitemap for YourSiteName.com and be done with it. As for your Wordpress Plugin pages, just add a deny in robots.txt to your wp-admin, wp-includes, wp-content folders. The crawlers have no need to go inside those folders.

I hope this helps.

Can you not just login to the Adwords account and grant it (Adwords) access to analytics ? That should work and not physically grant access to somebody else..or a person access to your Analytics. Does that work ?

James

From between the 2 options you have, clearly the sub-folder is a better option. Sub-domains are almost treated as separate domains, and therefore when you 301 redirect brandA.co.uk to brandA.brandC.co.uk, it does not help build brandC.co.uk, which is what I think you'd want.

If you do brandA.co.uk redirected to brandC.co.uk/brandA, it will build some trust on authority for your brandC.co.uk domain.

I hope this helps.

If you only have 50 or do redirects that you have a list for, I would advise a 1 to 1 redirect. Ie.

domain.com/index.php/red_widgets/ is changing to domain.com/red-widgets/

There's no point in redirecting /index.php/red_widgets/ to domain.com/red_widgets/ which you know does not exist.

It would be wiser to just setup redirects directly from /index.php/red_widgets/ to /red-widgets/ without another step in between. I know that might mean you might not be able to do regular expression, but since you are dealing with 50 redirects only, it's not a big deal.

Regarding the number of redirects, I won't worry about 50 redirects.

With what they are doing, can't they do with Read Only access ? Do they really need admin access ? If not, see this:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/tracking-sites-with-multiple-google-analytics-accounts

If you are just doing a redesign that does not entail any URL changes, I would suggest keep them as is.

On a side note, how are you ranking compared to your competition ?

You could potentially test 1-2 pages on your site, change _ to - and see if it makes any difference. And yes, you would need to do 301 redirects and that would pass most (not all) of your link juice. It can and still work fine. So before you do something like this on a large scale, test it on a small scale if you can.

It also depends on how much authority your site has in Google ? Do your breadcrumbs show up in Google SERPS ? And so on.

I hope this helps you come to the right conclusion.

LOL. That's funny

I second ASmallOrange.com, amazing support. Another one is ServInt.com

Both of them are great in support. I hope this helps.

You have some great points already from Alan, Robert and Phillip. I would identify your competition as well as understand your customer. See where your target audience is and where they are. Look at how your competition is presenting themselves and getting in the face of your customer. All that you need to do is to do a better job then them. It's easier said then done, but it's possible. Think how Startup companies get to become well known. They provide a better service then somebody else.

Yup, definitely. Submit it and forget it. If you get it, great. If not, don't stress yourself to it. There's not much you can do anyways.

As Robert said, it's definitely a good link. Also as Colin said, it's "very" important to submit it in the right category and the right title and description. Don't over optimize it. Keep it simple and descriptive enough.

I agree with the 302 solution. Makes complete sense for usability as well as for SEO.

You could also 302 it to another, more appropriate page during the time it would be down and then remove the redirect when you want it make it available again.

That makes sense, thanks for clarifying Mike. I was looking for a "local" plumber and I would obviously prefer somebody with a local number in my area, rather then a 800 number.

Let's say I am in Boston. I would prefer somebody with 617-xxx-xxxx that I'd like to call. If somebody with 800-xxx-xxxx or an area code that I am not familiar with in my area, I might not call them.

Considering that, if it's a global company servicing clients nationwide, I am sure it makes sense for them to invest in local numbers for each major city/state they service.

Thanks again. Thumbs Up

Chad

My opinion on this would be to use the 800 number as the primary number and if their is a secondary number field, use the local number. Think about it, if you are a national company, like a United Airlines or a Coast to Coast moving company, would you rather see a 567-453-xxxx number or a 1-800-xxx-xxxx ? As Mike said, they are convenient and that's what you want to provide to the user. If not, what's the point of having those numbers in the first place ?

Again, I hope this helps.

I would run a test. A/B test both the situations. See what the difference it. This varies so much by who you are up against, today and your competition could change on a day to day basis. So run this test every few days/weeks.

Run a small campaign to bid for position #1 for x amount of time.

Another campaign to bid for position 2-3 for the same x amount of time.

The cost vs conversions, ROI calculation will tell you what's better for you. If the numbers make sense to stay at #1 and you can afford to do that, why not ?

Just use a crawler like Screaming Frog, crawl your website and see if you see any errors / 404s that you are linking to. And you can identify what all pages link to it.

I hope this helps.