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That's an incredibly tough question and all I can think of right now is that you can't sell a WordPress web design as a bespoke CMS. A lot of businesses want a bespoke CMS that costs infinitely more than WordPress and with less functionality. There really is nothing to dislike about WordPress unless you hate using MySQL.

There won't be a penalty. But the question of whether or not the text is visible to search engines depends on how it pops up i.e. title attribute? JavaScript? AJAX?

'Post response' deleted my answer. I'll try and remember what I said!

I think Rand's WBF was focusing largely on new websites with link portfolios that consisted almost entirely of 1000s of 'dogdy links'. Provided that your website is aged (and it sounds like it definitely is) and that you have a mix of natural and 'artificial' links then you have nothing to worry about.

While I don't know, I would imagine that Google takes far more kindly to image links than text links; simply because text links have much more weight and therefore more power to manipulate.

Anyway, you have a totally legitimate link building strategy and I would suggest that even if your site was brand new there wouldn't be an issue.

Million dollar question.

However, I've found (quite unsurprisingly) that text-based content is at the bottom of the pile. Imagery and videos are the best way to get people linking and talking about you. Create or embed interesting/funny/shocking video and imagery to attract links and follow it up with content for the SEs to read and appreciate!

Nick

Hi Gianni,

There are a ton of reasons why your website might have slipped down the SERPs or dropped rankings. It's almost certainly not because of your image.

If you want, you can PM me your URL and I'll have a look.

Nick

Hi EndeR,

This might be the article you're looking for? http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-strategy-predicting-yearly-site-traffic

I always list the root domain URL for Google Places. If Google decides that another URL is more appropriate then they will change it.

How long have you had Google Places set up? It does take some time to rank. You may also want to consider changing the title element of your home page to reflect 'self storage toronto' rather than 'toronto storage'. If you would prefer that Google ranked /toronto-self-storage for 'self storage toronto' then there are ways to try to trigger this.

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!

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!

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.

But I've subscribed to questions that I haven't answered...

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

I recently asked a question about viewing the questions I have answered already: http://www.seomoz.org/q/where-can-i-view-all-of-the-questions-that-i-have-answered It turns out the link was right under my nose (but it appears a lot of people were having this issue).

I'm now having the problem of not being able to see where I can view all the Q&As that I have subscribed to. Again, I may just be missing a link that's right in front of me but it certainly isn't obvious.

Any help much appreciated!

I think this is one for the Moz staff. Sorry! I couldn't find anything and Linkscape actually returned 0 internal links when I queried http://www.sandcslatter.com. At which point it stopped reporting for any other URLs including my own.

Can you link me to any of the websites with the apparent "1 internal link"?

Great stuff. That's made things a lot easier and I'm glad I'm not the only one who had this problem!

Hi Nikki,

How long have you been having trouble? My tool bar, OSE and Linkscape have been broken for a few hours but I put that down to a problem at my end.

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!

Hi 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!

I find the w3 validator to be more of an accolade than anything else. You're right about them not influencing rankings - there's so many practices that don't validate but actually lead to an unchanged or even improved UX.

IMO, getting w3 validation is like getting MozPoints, except MozPoints are worth something But that's not to say I'm knocking anyone who does follow validator guidelines - fair play to them!

Apart from everything mentioned already - bubbl.us is a great free online tool that lets you save and export your visualisations.

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.

.co is the ccTLD for Colombia. It was packaged up by Godaddy as a TLD for 'Companies' 'Communities' 'Corporations' and other things that it doesn't represent. Buying a .co ccTLD and trying to rank in Google.com is like buying a .au ccTLD and trying to rank in .Google.com. If I had the choice between .info and .co I would go with .co for branding reasons and .info for SEO reasons. Why for SEO? Because I've seen and worked with companies that have acheived with .info but yet to do so with .co. Search "William Shakespeare" for example and look at the .info outranking the .edu's.

If I want to rank globally I'd have to pick gTLD over ccTLD but I definitely feel like I'm going against the grain here! Who's with me!?