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the subdomain vs subfolder issue was more a question of 'which will Google Places/Local" prefer rather than a question of SEO value.

I just have a feeling that Google may see the subfolder landing pages as an attempt to game the Local listings

Any thoughts?

Hi Mozzers!

If I have a website that has a separate office in each state that they wish to rank locally for eg: "service CityA" "service CityB" etc

Would it be best to have a separate subdomain for each major city (unique content on each) with the office address specific to that city? Then there would be a separate Google places listing the subdomain as the website.

Or should we just use subfolders? Would Google Places accept the subfolder as the web address?

thanks!

We are redesigning our website and want to present a fair amount of text within jquery sliders.

Will google crawl this text or is it treated the same way as actual script?

Perhaps there is a way to just have the text as plain html but use jquery to display it?

Come on, lets be honest for a sec, most SEOs are in the grayhat area - as essentially linkbuilding is a greyhat practice.

If you are getting links any other way than by creating great content on your site then you are involved in some shade of grey.

ethics has nothing to do with being blackhat, whitehat or greyhat - the only ethics involved is being honest to your clients, and letting them know the full scope of risk for various tactics - if a cleint requests blackhat techniques then I will provide them but only after explaining the risks and putting in place risk mitigation strategies - such as mutliple sites as mentioned above

a good tactic, you can also use these satellites as link laundries. You can indulge all your black and grey hat whims with the disposable sites - because being naughty is just more fun.

The sites that don't get blasted by Google can then be used to dominate the serps and link to your main website (be sure to keep your client's main sites as well as your own whitehat only - it is just plain wrong to use clients as guinea pigs).

I call this technique building a link mountain - the higher it get the whiter it is at the top - but the bottom may be black as obsidian

SEO is such a grey field that sometimes the amateur may be right and the 'guru' wrong. Even the troll may accidentally get it right.

Your experience is what will tell you something is wrong - listen to all the responses and then judge for yourself. And remember that the best way top learn is by making mistakes. If you are unsure run a test and see - just be sure to let the rest of us know how it goes - it may even earn you a couple of links.

If you see blatantly wrong or bad advice then why not comment and let the people know its wrong so others dont suffer

use youtube and other video sites (dailymotion, vimeo, metacafe etc) to host your teasers and then have your main content on your website.

It also wouldn't hurt to run an outreach campaign to relevant blogs encouraging them to embed the youtube clip.

Lastly post the video etc on your facebook page and try and promote that too

the moz tools track exact match traffic.

If you want borad match traffic use google analytics or wp dashboard and manually add the stats to your reports. This can be done quite quickly in excel.

you have lots of options:

Affiliate offers from amazon, ebay, clickbank etc

Chitika ads - contextual, cpc, cpm, popup, popunder

Infolinks - contextual ads

Clicksor ads - contextual, cpc, cpm, popup, popunder (clicksor accepts adult sites)

Adbrite ads - contextual, cpc, cpm, popup, popunder

If you have high enough traffic levels you can sell adspace via sites like buysellads.com

I have had the same issues, I think it is often the bot's problem

Just to be certain check your links are correct and manually test them. Also ensure your sitemap is up to date and that you are not blocking the crawlers with metarobots, robots.txt, or some weird stuff in htaccess.

I have found that renaming pages or moving them will often cause 404 issues with crawlers

Gian is pretty much right. Linking C blocks is a useful metric to know. Websites on the same C-block IP address are likely owned by the same person/company and will give less weight.

For best results your linking c-blocks should be as close to your linking root domains as possible. Diversity is the key. Otherwise you could just buy 1000 root domains, host them on the same server space for very little cost and dominate the search results.

Has anyone have experience doing seo for the baidu search engine? I have a client who wants to target businesses in china so we are exploring options for PPC and SEO. Any ideas or tips would be much appreciated?

I was thinking of getting a bi-lingual mini-site made that would catch leads from seo and ads. Can anyone suggest any chinese PPC/seo freelancers?

Just use an SEO plugin and canonicalize allt he archives and categories, don't use no-follow as it is a will suck away your pagerank. If you must you could also use the metaname robots and set it to follow, noindex

btw I think Pashmina should win an award for cutest SEO on seomoz

the google bot cannot watch and understand videos so just alter the filename and title and description - look at youtube for example

your backlinks will suffer. You need to go and 301 each of the http pages to the https ones. That being said 301s do not pass 100% of link juice on and many people will continue to link to the http pages.

Do you really need every page to be https? why not just have the key data exchange pages as https and the rest as http?

it is time for you to spin your content and try and make the sites distinct from each other. Try it then ping the sites. If nothing changes after a month you will have to write a love letter to google.

This is a question I have struggled with and although i cannot prove it I would say yes.

I was making blogs to funnel pr and traffic to my main site. I was using a pyramid link strategy and at the bottom tier (yes they were spammy profile links but hey) I used my target keywords as anchor text all the way up. The result was a continual increase in rankings over time - since I kept blasting links to the bottom layers.

I did SEO for another of my sites the same way and this time used generic text on the bottom layers. It was easier but the progress in ranking was a tenth of the other site - both sites were in the same niche and had good onsite seo etc.

This observation led me to believe that Google uses incoming Anchor text to determine relevancy - perhaps they take the most common incoming link anchor text and tag that webpage with it to help classify it for relevancy. Onsite factors would be more important but I believe Google may use incoming anchor text to tag pages for relevancy.

Thanks for the input guys. I have taken your suggestions on board and made some additional optimizations and edits as well. I will let you know how it goes.

Ryan does (harshly) make some decent points although I am already very familar with all the stuff listed in the seomoz seo guide....

No onsite changes were made in the last few months at all and no blackhat linkbuilding has been done.

Inspired (and annoyed - haha) by Ryan response I decided i would actually go through and do an onsite audit of the page and did find some disturbing things...

The biggest was that large chunks of the content appear on multiple other websites. I am also concerned that the actual content may be seen as having overused the term 'facebook' and also the xml sitemap was broken..

Do you guys think these factors could be related to the sudden drop for this page (no other pages on the domain are having issues)

updated with url and kw

the site still ranks for its domain name and ranks in the top 10 for other queries - it is just this one keyword that the rank has dropped for - unfortunately it is the websites money keyword

A page of mine  (http://loginhelper.com/networks/facebook-login/) was ranking in the top 10 for keyword (facebook login) and has been for at least 2 months, moving between 5th and 10th.

Suddenly in the last 3 days the rank for the keyword dropped from 7th to 46th, yet none of the other keywords have been affected (they target other pages) and their ranks have continued to improve.

I am trying to figure out what caused this sudden drop in the ranking of 1 page (the page has quality mainly text based content and isn't in the least bit shallow or spammy)

I have been thinking perhaps a crawl or server error may be to cause leaving the page temporarily unavailable or with a big load time... Otherwise what could cause one page to drop so much so quickly whilst other pages improved their rank?

Our policy at the moment accomodates and gets results for everyone, I think we even have a $170 client

It is frustrating though because of the increased admin load (reports and client contact etc). It is annoying when a client will spend $5000 on a radio campaign but thinks that a similar value SEO campaign is too risky or not worth it.

I enjoy working with small businesses from a personal aspect but I feel it is not the best for my business financially

I was browsing around other SEO websites and seeing how they charge upwards of $2500 a month...

In Australia things are a little different, many potential clients gasp in shock at the prospect of paying just $500 a month...

Because of this it seems all the SEOs in Aus have taken to undercutting each other to the point where you can get 'guaranteed' 1st page results for just $200 a month - its become a necessity of doing a guarantee and having a low price just to compete...

How do you find clients that actually have decent budgets? Most of the clients I have so far are from referals from web developers or from my participation on business forums etc. I have thought about trying a telemarketing campaign or a direct mail campaign to try and snag some lawyers, and cosmetic surgeons etc

Has anyone had experience with these methods or can offer any other suggestions to snag clients with deeper pockets?

the seomoz crawler is very conservative and will take a while to pick up on links. This has both good and bad aspects. Don't worry though you can always check in Google's webmaster tools for backlinks to your site.

It usually takes 1-2 months for the mozcrawler to find links to my sites. If you are impatient you can try pinging the links with something like pingomatic.com although i am not sure if the mozcrawler listens to those signals or not....

One of 3 options really:

• they have good contacts who will publish links for them (who you know goes a long way)

• they bought the links (not that uncommon and really isn't paying someone to linkbuild essentially the same as buying links?)

-they lied to get the links

-they have the most amazing and linkable content ever, they are the new lol cats (unlikely though because of the anchor text)

-the company may have hired an offline pr firm to stir up controversy and get editorial articles. I have heard of people creating fake news stories etc just to create a buzz and get attention which converts into links

-maybe you misread the links and they are just from scrapebox or xrumer?

get the link, why wouldn't you? Unless you it overly difficult to get and there are other (better opportunities)

most of the time comments are good if you are willing to moderate them as it draws users into your site more by providing a means for interaction.

It really depends on the purpose of your website: if it was an informational site or review site then comments would be great. If it was a business's website then comments may not be a good idea as they may take off the professional edge unless they are constrained to a blog section.