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Figured it wasn't marked up. I'll get it coded in RDFa, thanks.

Having trouble getting star ratings to appear in the SERPs. Here's the 'marked up' HTML that a designer implemented into a website, I'm pretty sure it's missing a bunch of stuff:

Read the reviews

5

Any help much appreciated!

I'm guessing your domain name was new. It took from November until May for this new website to settle down in 1st. Very common for new websites, in fact it's almost inevitable and can last from 1 week to 6 months:

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(Apologies for the length! It didn't look this big in the editor!)

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

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.

Hi all,

If you were to have links that were randomly generated on each refresh, how would they be treated?

I would imagine that they are treated normally and isolated to each crawl. So Google would just see the link structure changing from crawl to crawl and therefore give no long term value to these links. Any ideas?

Thanks for your responses!

Nick

Hi all,

I'm about to begin the process of chopping up a 1,000 page website into separate sitemaps. I'm going for a three tiered approach so that I can check indexation on each level for:

Category, Subcategory, Product

What's the easiest way to create three separate XML sitemaps for this?

Thanks,

Nick

Hi all,

Just a simple question. What's the disadvantages/advantages to using this URL structure for an ecommerce site:

**Category structure: **/category

**Subcategory structure: **/subcategory

**Product structure: **/product

Compared to the standard: /category/subcategory/product

Thanks,

Nick

That would definitely be news to me. I have a bunch of EMDs that rank well and I've built links using the same anchor text. If your website name and therefore your brand name is "Personalised Birthday Gifts" then you can bet you'll get natural links with that in the anchor text.

There's no negative effect to using exact match anchors for exact match domains. Only positive.

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /

That is blocking every bot from crawling anything.

User-Agent: * = every robot

Disallow: / = every directory

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.

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.

Thanks for your input guys. Keep them coming, I'd love to hear any suggestions no matter how obscure!

Hi mozzers,

I'm busy writing an ebook that's going to be published around July time. The book focuses on SEO and Social Media with it culminating in a look at how they are becoming more and more overlapped.

The book is going to be targeting traditional business people who have very little (or no) inbound marketing experience. Any thoughts for a title would be great! Be as whacky or as reserved as you like, it'd be great to hear any ideas you have

Nick

Yep, if you add a robots.txt it won't redirect. But I would look to remove the 404 redirect as well. It also looks to me like a meta refresh as well which has potential SEO problems. I would much prefer a 301 if they are really keen to redirect 404s.

The main reason for not redirecting 404s is that it stops you from seeing broken links on your website. Imagine you have a discreet link to a services page that is broken - you wouldn't be able to pick it up with link checkers like Xenu and it could go unnoticed for months if not years. Might be worth suggesting to them that they remove it.

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).

If you are really keen to rank for Dr X then you'll be able to. Google isn't perfect, it does rank crappy sites for keywords that are almost irrelevant. However this is often the case when competition is low and no one has signalled Google to tell them what their content is about.

Feel free to PM me with your site details James, I might be able to help you out.

How were you able to transfer ownership of a Google Places local listing? As far as I was aware it involved a process that could take months to complete. So would be great to hear your way

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.

I'm a little confused. "dr. elizabeth eads" has no search traffic and is almost certainly beatable from an exact match title element and two or three anchored links.

When a search term's competition is so low, it makes it a lot easier for one website that Google deems as the most relevant to result in multiple listings. Are there any other examples you have?

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!

Is it rude of me to bump this question? I would love to hear a response even if it's not from the Moz team!

I wouldn't be comfortable 301'ing those pages like you said. I want my users to be able to navigate through earlier posts rather than just being redirected to the blog homepage. Perhaps you mean rel canonical redirect?

Thanks Dan. I would robots.txt the pages but I still want the links on those pages to flow PR - so I really need to noindex,follow them but WordPress is being difficult!

As for SEO differences, you're probably right. I think I just prefer the look for dynamic URLs than /dir/page

At the moment I my blog is paginated like so:

/blogs > /blogs/page/2 > /blogs/page/3 etc

What are the benefits of paginating with dynamic URLs like here on SEOmoz with /blog?page=3

This sounds like a great idea. I'm certainly interested in seeing how you handle the Xenu data if you're willing to share!

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.

Hey Brent,

Bing and Google won't see a 404 if you redirect. There also wouldn't be an issue with duplicate content - what exactly are you referring to here?

Speaking of 404s... your avatar is doing one.

There's always a way. Perhaps I would unlink it from the employee bios and whack on a noindex,follow meta tag to ensure it still passes rank if it was being linked to. This way users would never find it.

But more often than not I would just 301 unless for some reason there was a bunch of PageRank that would get lost in a redirect to an irrelevant(ish) page.

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.

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!

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.

name='robots' content='noindex,nofollow' /> before the and mix that with an obscure page URL. It'll never get found.

What you could do with the robots.txt is disallow a directory like /admin/ but then have the login page @ domain.com/admin/obscure-login-url. If you do all of that then you're pretty damn safe in the knowledge that no one will ever find your login URL.

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.

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

The social media icons in your footer are passing PageRank.

I guess my question is. Why?

Unfortunately you'll have to update your XML sitemap when you add new pages (there are technical ways of automating the update). Unless of course, you use the WordPress plugin - in which case it does this for you automatically. It's a bit of a pain but there are free XML sitemap generators that will reproduce a new file - but I would wait until the site is pretty much complete before creating the first.

As for visualising link juice, take a look at the MozRank of the homepage using the tool bar and then have a look at 1st and 2nd tier. You can see that MozRank splits up evenly between pages (unless skewed by other links). Although if the pages are new and SEOmoz hasn't crawled them yet, then this won't show.

Just remember that if you have 1 internal link on your homepage then all available PageRank will pass through it, the more you have the more diluted this PageRank will be.

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

Google wants the user to have the best possible experience when reading content, watching videos or looking at images. Think about the following variables:

• File size
• Video length
• Bit rate
• Frame rate
• Title
• Decsription
• Tags
• Reviews
• Embeds (speculative)

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.

Great idea Donnie. This comment may well have changed our initial SEO strategy. I'm guessing you've got experience in this area - can I be nosey and ask what your testing process is?

Many thanks!

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??!?!

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!