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Hi, In an attempt to reduce the latency of our site, we are planning on late-loading all content below the fold via AJAX.  My concern is Googlebot won't see this content and won't index it properly (our site is very large and we have lots of content). What is good for our users is not necessarily good for bots.  Will late loading AJAX content be read by Googlebot? Thoughts on how to balance speed vs search engine crawl-ability?

Does anyone have a way to quantify the value of link building efforts?  I am trying to devote resources to improve our link building initiatives but is there any way to correlate it to page rank etc?   I know you can't tie it down directly but any rough gauge or studies in the past that people may be aware of?  Any thoughts on how you would tackle this question? I need to demonstrate the value it provides in a slightly more scientific manner than saying "it just helps". Thanks,
Nic

Hi, Our site has a very high domain strength.  Although our site ranks well for general search phrases, we rank poorly for image search (even though our site has very high quality images). Our images are hosted on a separate CDN with a different domain.  Although there are a number of benefits to doing this, since they are on a different domain, are we not able to capitalize on our my site's domain strength?  Is there any way to associate our CDN to our main site via Google webmaster tools?  Has anyone researched the search ranking impacts due to storing your images on a CDN, given that your domain strength is very high? Curious on people's thoughts?

I know ideally you should have as clean as possible url structures for optimal SEO. Our current site contains clean urls with very minimal use of query string params.  There is a strong push, for business purposes to include click tracking on our site which will append a query string param to a large percentage of our internal links. Currently: http://www.oursite.com/section/content/ Will change to: http://www.oursite.com/section/content/?tg=zzzzwww We currently use rel canonical on all pages to properly define the true url in order to remove any possible duplicate content issues. Given we are already using rel canonical, if we implement the query string click tracking, will this negatively impact our SEO?  If so, by how much?  Could we run into duplicate content issues? We get crawled by Google a lot (very big site) and very large percent of our traffic is from Google, but there is a strong business need for this information so trying to weigh pros/cons.

Hi, A large website may link to us but via their internal redirect mechanism.  So it would be somthing like this: [If you select the link, it eventually goes to our site but not from the original page.  These links would be placed on lots of pages, but since they would all "pass through" the "redirect" page, it seems not as beneficial from an SEO perspective. Is this reasoning correct?  Would google still follow the link and see where it ends up, even though it is via multiple pages? Ideally I'd prefer direct link but how much better is it than the redirect as listed above?](/redirect/rd?site=www.oursite.com/page&trackingparam=111111)

Hi, We have a few pages that from an SEO perspective have poor URLs.  We are planning on changing them (and 301 redirecting) the old page to the new page.  I heard in the past, this can temporarily negatively impact your SERP rank etc.  Since the old URLs are bad, even if there is a temporary negative hit, changing them in the long run it is better, but curious if anyone has any experience on what to expect.

Hi, We have a page with some good "keyword" content (user supplied comment widget), but there was a design choice made previously to late load it via JavaScript.  This was to improve performance and the overall functionality relies on JavaScript.  Unfortunately since it is loaded via js, it isn't read by Googlebot so we get no SEO value. I've read Google doesn't weigh <noscript>content as much as regular content.  is this true?  Once option is just to load some of the content via <noscript> tags.  I just want to make sure Google still reads this content.</p> <p>Another option is to load some of the content via simple html when loading the page.  If JavaScript is enabled, we'd hide this "read only" version via css and display the more dynamic user friendly version. - Would changing display based on js enabled be deemed as cloaking?  Since non-js users would see the same thing (and this provides a ways for them to see some of the functionality in the widget, it is an overall net gain for those users too).</p> <p>In the end, I want Google to read the content but trying to figure out the best way to do so.</p> <p>Thanks,</p> <p>Nic</p> <p> </p></noscript>

Hi, Our site has a fair amount of related/similiar content that has been historically placed on seperate pages.  Unfortuantely this spreads out our page strength across multiple pages.  We are looking to combine this content onto one page so that our page strength will be focused in one location (optimized for search).   The content is extensive so placing it all on one page isn't ideal from a user experience (better to separate it out).  We are looking into different approaches one main "tabbed" page with query string params to seperate the seperate pages.  We'll use an AJAX driven design, but for non js browsers, we'll gracefully degrade to separate pages with querystring params. www.xxx.com/content/?pg=1 www.xxx.com/content/?pg=2 www.xxx.com/content/?pg=3 We'd then rel canonical all three pages to just be www.xxx.com/content/ Same concept but useAJAX crawlable hash tag design (!#). Load everything onto one page, but the page could get quite large so latency will increase. I don't think from an SEO perspective there is much difference between options 1 & 2.  We'll mostly be relying on Google using the rel canonical tag. Have others dealt with this issue were you have lots of similiar content.  From a UX perspective you want to separate/classifiy it, but from an SEO perspective want to consolidate?  It really is very similiar content so using a rel canonical makes sense. What have others done?  Thoughts?

Hi, Part of our site displays localized results based on the user's IP (we get the zipcode based on IP).  For example a user in NY would get a list of NY based stores, while a user in CA would get a list of CA based stores.  So if CA Googlebot comes to our site, it will get results based on Mountain View CA.  Given the pages are generated based on your zip, I'm not sure how we'd indicate to Google that we have results for lots of locations and not just the Googlebot IP locations.  (users can change their zipcode, but by default we use geolocation). Our landing pages contain localized content and unique urls with the zipcode etc, but it isn't clear how Google will find results for KY etc.

Hi, If a user comes to our site from a mobile device, we redirect to our mobile site.  That is www.mysite/mypage redirects to m.mysite/mypage.  Right now we are blocking robots from crawling our m. site.  Previously there were concerns the m. site could rank for normal browser searches.  To make sure this isn't a problem we are planning on rel canonical our m. site pages and reference the www pages (mobile is just a different version of our www site). From my understanding having a mobile version of a page is a ranking factor for mobile searches so allowing robots is a good thing.   Before doing so, I wanted to see if anyone had any other suggestions/feedback (looking for potential pitfalls, issues etc)

Hi, We have a main www website with a standard sitemap.  We also have a m. site for mobile content (the mobile site only contains our top pages and doesn't include the entire site).  If a mobile client accesses one of our www pages we redirect to the m. page.  If we don't have a m. version we keep them on the www site. Since we already have a www sitemap, is there much value in creating a mobile site map?  The mobile site (although missing all pages) is pretty robust and contains most content people are looking for. Will the mobile sitemap help for Mobile searches (more so than our standard sitemap)? I'm also planning on rel canonical the m. pages to the www. pages (per other suggestios on SEOMoz) Thanks

Hi, We have a main www website with a standard sitemap.  We also have a m. site for mobile content (but m. is only for our top pages and doesn't include the entire site).  If a mobile client accesses one of our www pages we redirect to the m. page.  If we don't have a m. version we keep them on the www site.  Currently we block robots from the mobile site. Since our m. site only contains the top pages, I'm trying to determine the boost we might get from creating a mobile sitemap.  I don't want to create the "partial" mobile sitemap and somehow have it hurt our traffic. Here is my plan update m. pages to point rel canonical to appropriate www page (makes sure we don't dilute SEO across m. and www.) create mobile sitemap and allow all robots to access site. Our www pages already rank fairly highly so just want to verify if there are any concerns since m. is not a complete version of www?

Just curious on how sites do this? If you search for a video (perhaps Green Lantern Trailer), you'll see the YouTube results in Google/Bing listed as YouTube - ‪Green Lantern Trailer but when you go to the page, the actual title tag displayed is ‪Green Lantern Trailer - YouTube I've seen other sites do this too.  I'm just curious what they are doing (I don't see any other title tags in the html)?  I thought your title tag is what is displayed in SERP? Thanks,

Hi, I am trying to improve our rankings for pages with photos/images.  For the title is it benificial to include keywords that are almost identical in nature? For example: "Brad Pitt Photos and Images" In Google trends photos and images are both commonly used words so including both seems like it would help.  When I search for each one separately in Google (Brad Pitt Photos vs Brad Pitt Images) different sites are returned (except for the ones that include both image and photos keywords).  I had read that Google knows that Images and Photos mean the same thing, but the search results do vary.  I know stuffing all related combinations isn't good, but selective phrases seem to make a difference. Just want to verify if this makes sense. Thanks