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Sounds like you need to sort out a canonical URL issue.
In your .htaccess file, redirect /index.html to www.example.com. It's easy to 301 it but you may also have non-www and www issues. If you're not sure what I'm talking about, check out that link above and it might make it all clear.
This should stop the XML sitemap generating the two pages.
Google can read text in PDFs. However there is a huge amount of information useful for SEO that can't be added to a PDF. I would convert all PDFs to HTML and then 301 the PDFs to the new HTML content.
It's incredibly worth while doing.
Hi EndeR,
This might be the article you're looking for? http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-strategy-predicting-yearly-site-traffic
Use the anchor text "personalized birthday gifts" ... I've never heard or seen anything about commercial keywords damaging rankings. Do not stay away from using 'commercial keywords' as anchor text - this would be a disaster. When you say heavily, I guess you mean having all of your links with the same anchor text; while heavy usage of anchor text clearly correlates with good rankings, it's risky business (it's not particularly natural looking).
There is a trade-off between branding and EMDs. If you use an EMD then you have huge SEO benefits (at least for now) but with branding you'll have a memorable name that people become loyal to.
It's an interesting topic. I work with a range of local companies who we have generated large amounts of traffic through local listings. In many cases we have two results ranking on the first page of Google. However what you say about it being more difficult does appear to be true from my experience.
If you like, PM me your website URL. I'll take a look at it and give you some suggestions. It may simply be that you haven't been listed in Google Places for long enough - it does take Places considerable time to get its head around new listings!
If I read your first paragraph right, you have multiple ccTLDs for the same company? That will make your SEO efforts a lot more difficult and is only really appropriate in rare cases (Amazon for instance).
To make your life a lot easier, I would suggest using directories instead. i.e. domain.com/us, domain.com/au, domain.com/uk as more PageRank passes from the root level to these directories than from root level to the subdomain. Then it comes down to geo-targeting.
To sum up:
Directories > Subdomains > Unique Domains (purely in terms of SEO).
When you say you want to map the top level domains, do you mean redirect domain.co.uk to uk.domain.com? afaik, redirecting .co.uk to uk.domain would not retain any local UK SEO value directly - other UK signals may come with the redirect though.
Google wants the user to have the best possible experience when reading content, watching videos or looking at images. Think about the following variables:
There's more. You just need to think of what's best for the user and run with it. You can experiment as much as you like! I know far more about image ranking than video ranking but if you need any more details feel free to PM me.
If you have WordPress then there's a plugin that will do all of this for you in a couple of seconds. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/xml-sitemaps-for-videos/
You're really missing out if you're not on WordPress :s If you haven't got too many videos then manual building of a video sitemap isn't tough at all. Take a look at the source code for this video sitemap if you just want to copy and paste the structure: http://www.smemarketing.com/sitemap-video.xml
I would treat social links with a fair amount of caution and avoid getting caught up in the hype. While there have been a lot of great tests that clearly show some type of pattern - none of them have been scientific. Google mentioned that they look at social signals (but quite possibly, for the most part, on /realtime search) and Bing did openly admit they take them into account for web rankings. However the extent is not clear.
My advice is to embrace social media platforms for what they are and what they can achieve outside of SEO. In other words, stick to traditional link building strategies for the most part. However I would also advise to keep a very keen eye on social signal development.
My personal opinion is that there are holes in a lot of the signals Google use already. Why create thousands more by adopting social signals into the algo?
Despite my abundant skepticism, I'm sure that social signals will become very influential in the not too distant future.
You can merge Magento and WordPress together, there's almost nothing you can't do with WP. Your comment about noindex is a fair one, but if you wanted to noindex useless pages on another platform, you'd have to do more than just tick a box (Yoast robots meta - http://yoast.com/wordpress/meta-robots-wordpress-plugin/)
My personal opinion is that WP's growth is going to explode during 2011 when small businesses start clocking on to how great it is. It's just a matter of educating them about it!
Just want to clarify that completing your Google Places profile (on its own) does not effect ranking. Going from 91% complete to 100% complete will not have any direct benefit on results - however, by doing this you may be adding more relevant information that could potentially boost rankings.
Set up your Google Places page with whatever info is useful to a user - follow the guidelines and then build your associated URL as an authority. Sure, there are optimisation techniques on-places but a large chunk of ranking (from my experience) comes from your website's authority.
AFAICT there's no way to filter questions to the ones that you have answered. Is there any plan to implement a filter like this? I realise there are email notifications available but no easy way to just go back and check on your answers.
No doubt I'm just missing something here so if I'm completely wrong, please point me in the right direction 
Thanks very much!
Reducing the weighting towards exact match domains was always going to be inevitable given that it has been so incredibly overpowered for organic ranking. However I can't foresee an instance where an exact match domain would not be telling of the relevance of that domain's content. i.e. I'm sure Google & Bing will always take into account domain keywords when calculating rank.
Personally I think Mr Cutts sums it up incredibly well. It's branding vs SEO. And, as an SEO, I want to build a website that is getting as much organic traffic as possible and therefore I will always purchase EMDs. It's a serious question of long term goals and how you want to develop the website. Anyway, if you go with an EMD in the first instance there's no harm in 301ing to the new domain if you change your mind in the future!
There's no easy way around this. Your original site won't be affected but your new site will struggle to rank if the pages are all duplicate.
What you can do is add unique content to each page and simply integrate small sections of your content with the duplicate reviews and recipes. It's really not ideal though but it will give you a much better chance of indexing well.
However
If your reviews and recipes have their own URL then you can use a rel canonical redirect. This will transfer all PageRank to the new review and recipe pages without redirecting the user.
Let's say for example that you don't care about your original site ranking for reviews:
You have a page with a bunch of reviews down the bottom that are duplicate of the review pages themselves - whack a in the header and then for the individual review pages stick in a . That's of course if you don't want your reviews ranking on your original page - something that I would doubt to be the case if you're getting 20,000 visits a day.
If you do want any more info about the above then send me a PM.
Nick
You can have them all on your Google account. But you can't transfer them in the future (or at least the process is long and not guaranteed).
I strongly advise that you set it up on their account, or at least create a new account which you can then transfer ownership of in the future.
It's indexed for me on Google and it's indexed for me on Bing.
What is the exact wording when they are saying not indexed?
To add to what Wissam just said. You can see that the www version of the home page is not indexed in Google.
Gary has a point that considering offline marketing is important in many situations. Seeing .co.uk instead of /uk definitely gives a more local feel.
Great response anyway, to follow on from that:
If you want to use www.domain.co.uk in offline marketing then you may want to consider using a rel canonical redirect. It may be a bit more time consuming to set up (there are different ways you could go about doing this) but it may help from a conversion point of view. Probably minimal I admit, but people generally don't like being redirected.
Either way, I wouldn't worry about what domain they use as a linking source if your redirects are set up correctly.
This is going to require a social campaign with the aim of getting seo results. Article farms would probably be at the bottom of my list of places to submit. The article has to be unique and sitting somewhere on the client's URL.
So how would I go about getting the word out on social platforms? Well an easy option would be to approach the music legend's PR team, they will have access to very large networks of people. Spin the interview in a seriously good light and turn it into something that the legend in question will want publicised across the net.
Can you get the interview recorded? Will it be text based? Try and do both. A video interview transcribed into text will give yourself the best possible opportunity of attracting links.
Whatever you do, make sure there are serious prompts to share and link to the URL that the content is on. You're going to have to rely on this content going slightly viral - it's perfect link bait, just make sure people are able to link to it easily. Even if it's just social links, the more reach you can get the more chance a webmaster will find it and link to it. Have you got any experience with press releases? Do you have access to, or know anyone with access to any large, relevant groups on Facebook/LinkedIn?
I'd love to hear how you get on with this, Larry. It doesn't sound like an everyday opportunity!
I guess there's a fairly fundamental issue:
There are 110 Global searches for 'diamond mens jewelry'. Is there any reason in particular why you're targeting this phrase? (referring to title element)
Header tag issues too. You want to include keywords in the H1 (unless you're going straight for "mens jewelry" but this isn't consistent with your title element) and you ought to have H2 tags in there too. Alt attributes for your images wouldn't hurt either... And you nofollow'd your navigation links??!?!
I would be surprised if they purposefully redirected it. Have you been able to take a look at what's in the .htaccess file? If you copy and paste what's in there I might be able to see what's going on with it.
Also, if it is being redirected then it won't get crawled and so it won't have any effect. That could be good or bad depending on what you had written in the .txt file.
EDIT:
Just had a quick look at the site. It seems to 404 straight away and then redirect. Therefore I imagine the robots.txt file doesn't exist and they have it set up to redirect 404ing pages to the homepage. Something that I would advise against (it's useful to know what's 404ing).
It sounds like your question is about measuring the effectiveness of your SEO efforts more than anything. In this case, number of external links really isn't going to give much away. Here are some alternative metrics:
Search traffic excluding brand name
Increases in search traffic volume is strongly and positively correlated with SEO. Because you will always rank for brand name queiries and searchers will always find your brand if they are searching for it - these searches add noise which is why we exclude them when measuring SEO effectiveness.
Keyword rankings
You may be focusing on 10 to 20 keywords on your campaign. Measure the rankings and see if the pattern is increasing. However, this metric on its own can be misleading as keyword ranking may not improve while long tail (search) traffic is sky rocketing!
Absolute conversions
The end goal. Have you seen an improvement in the number of conversions? Use Google analytics to set up goals and measure the number of goals coming from visitors that found you through search.
Apologies if I've somewhat strayed from your original question - but I feel that you should not be measuring whether or not your SEO "efforts are fruitful" by monitoring new links.
Nick
You should definitely not be hiding the sub categories. This could land you with a nasty penalty.
It's a case of PageRank flow and what pages you want to prioritise. If you add more links to the home page, the PageRank that is passed to the deeper pages is weakened. A good rule to follow is to make it possible for a user to reach any page on your website within 3 clicks of the mouse i.e. Category > Sub Category > Product. If it took much longer you may want to think about giving the option of a shorter journey to the user from the home page.
Linking to sub categories from the home page totally depends on your conversion and SEO objectives. Personally, I almost exclusively link to 1st tier pages from the homepage and expand from there - that way I have the most PageRank passing to the pages I want to rank. Deeper pages will still get some juice but generally speaking they're not as important for me.
If you want to allow Google to crawl and index your pages easily - create a HTML sitemap (WordPress plugin does the trick in seconds) and submit your XML sitemap to GWT and BWT.
Hope this helps
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /
That is blocking every bot from crawling anything.
User-Agent: * = every robot
Disallow: / = every directoryHi Simon,
Assuming your client's website has been around for a couple of years or more, these links will have no negative impact. Low quality links won't ever get an aged site penalised - going around and removing them would be hugely time consuming and you're better off focusing on building better quality links instead.
Good luck!
Almost certainly not. I've never seen any action links index when checking back link profiles of anyone. I've created a fair amount of forms too. On the absolute possibility that I am completely wrong - the value of this link would be pretty minimal.
Better way of passing link juice?
You could only allow affiliates to come on board if they place a link to your website (perhaps give them a tiny increase in revenue share). This could be a text link or image link with alt attribute keywords. An image would probably go down better.
Now I have seen people add anchor to their 'modules' that they place on other websites. I would strongly advise against this though for risk of a Google ban.
It's not easy really. You'd have a hard time getting away with SEO anchored links so you're probably best just getting image links. All the ideas I can think of pretty much fall into the grey area and could have serious consequences for everyone involved. Sorry!
It sounds like it's just a simple case of deletion? In this case, set up a 301 redirect so that it points to the employee bios 'home' page. That way any links that were pointing to the removed page will have their 'juice' moved to a page that does exist. Although with the content not being the same, the amount of PageRank passed is dubious but still worth doing.
If you do a 301 then you wouldn't have to worry about updating HTML sitemaps. But Bing does openly admit that they hate untidy XML sitemaps (i.e. URLs that include 301s, 302s, 404s etc) so I would clean that up - and probably do the same for Google too while I'm at it.
Personally, as an SEO (with varying degrees of tunnel vision) I wouldn't want to ever delete content.
I think that's a great idea! Having a custom 404 for deleted employees would be great for branding purposes and general web 2.0 friendliness - I'm sure SEOmoz would agree.
However from a strictly SEO point of view, removing the content and replacing it with 404esque material wouldn't help. However my comment(s) is pretty much a moot point given that there is almost certainly no SEO value on this page anyway. But I guess I'm just a principles kind of guy.