Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I would assume you are referring to site architecture. If this is the case then there are several good tools in market that are used by dev / designers to map out the site artchitecture or sitemaps.

Microsoft visio http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/visio/

Power mapper http://www.powermapper.com/

Smart draw http://www.smartdraw.com/

I have used smart draw for flow charts and found it lot easier to use.

Hope this helps.

Thanks

Sameer

Hey Vineesh,

I would suggest you should perform SERP analysis (http://seomoz.box.net/shared/g3vz0kxbbp) on the top 10 listings for your target keywords. It is quite possible that backlinks is not the only key issue here. There could be several reasons why your website is not ranking and some of these are

1. Authority of the domain

2. Authority of the pages your are trying to rank

3. Total number of backinks

4. Quality of the backlinks

5. Social syndication by users (mainly Twitter / Fb)

6. On page optimization

Identify the pattern using the statistical calculation mentioned in above linked excel file and focus on the gap.

Thanks

Sameer

I checked the header for both URLs are they are indeed giving me a 200 ok header code which means this is a page canonicalization issue.

Page canonicalization happens in cases where www or non www, .php or non .php , .asp or non .asp pages exist.

The solution to this is to do a 301 redirect of http;//search-engine-upgrade.com/default.asp to

http;//search-engine-upgrade.com using htaccess file.

Please this line of code in your htaccess file

redirect 301 /default.asp http://search-engine-upgrade.com

or you can the following rewrite code

RewriteEngine On

RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /default.asp\  HTTP/

RewriteRule ^default.asp$ http://www.search-engine-upgrade.com/ [R=301,L]

Google will automatically detect the origin of the keyword request based on the IP and will localize the result. The new local SERP is blended result which is a combination of local places, local directories, national / global listings, news , videos and other media.

The first step is to find out if a keyword search for "appliance repair" results in a locally influenced search results. If you are seeing the Google places listing for this keyword then move on to the next step which is optimizing your on and off page elements for the target keywords.

I looked at your Google place page and noticed that 100% of your website reviews are Google reviews. If you look at a recently conducted study by SEOMoz there is a bigger correlation between high local search ranking and reviews from third party review sites than Google place review. I suggest you should ask for reviews on other sites like yelp.com, citysearch.com, judysbook and similar.

Diversity of review is also important as much as the volume of the reviews.

I would certainly rate this strategy as grey if not black and avoid it. This is one of the area in search marketing where lot of sites tend to get away with but may soon face consequences. SEO / Link building companies mainly located overseas rely on this technique heavily.

It is definitely painful and unfair when a competitor with spam links ranks well for highly competitive keywords set while a professional SEO spends months working hard playing the clean game. However, the reward from white hat is unmatched.

One last thing that I would like to point out is links from website hosted on the same IP blocks are less valuable links from different IP blocks. This is same as the domain diversity concept.

Cache tags are associated with caching of the page for faster downloads .

instructs the browser to download the information from the local cache instead of getting information from the network server allowing decreased load time.

The exact opposite is  where the browser will not use the local cache and download the information from the server.

As a best practice, cache should be controlled through HTTP headers ("Expires", "Cache-Control: max-age" and "Last-Modified") instead of using Meta.

The other option is to use .htaccess code for caching of images and other content to speed up load time.

Directory submissions are a total waste of time. Personally, I would not use any software solutions that offer mass directory / article / comment submissions because these fall under grey area and search engines don't value these anymore like they use to years ago.

Local directory submission to websites like angielist, superpages, citysearch, yelp is certainly useful for local rankings.

We recently (Feb 2011) completed a major domain migration project where we moved Rackspacecloud.com to Rackspace.com/cloud. Both domains are high authority websites and moving over thousands of pages was a challenge in itself. What we learnt from the process was that authority of the domain matters a lot during domain migrations.

If you follow all the steps in the migration process to the T then chances are you will regain the ranks/juice pretty quickly (domain with higher authority regain faster).

During our migration we were able to transfer atleast 30% ranking to the new domain in about 72 hours. The new domain is now ranking for more than 80% of the keywords that the old domain ranked for. We also found that the new domain is also ranking for some of the top keywords that we were not ranking with the original domain because of the combination of massive link juice, proper redirections and new links.

It took 3 weeks for major search engines to index 90% of the new pages on the Rackspace.com/cloud site and during this transition we continued to receive SEO traffic through the old index pages. (some of the sub domains on the original website are not migrated yet)

The most important steps in the process are

• proper 1x1 301 redirection

• Web master tools update (change of address)

• sitemap updates

• request your top backlinked websites to change the TLD

• drive new links to the new site more aggressively

As far as the usability goes, short URLs are beneficial but I really don't see major difference between smallbusinessdoer.com and smallbizdoer.com.

Google will automatically pickup the reviews from other sites but you can increase the speed of sync by making sure your profile is an exact match on the review sites. It is highly recommended that you take over the ownership of your profile on each of the top local review sites and optimize your business information. We have tested this technique and it worked well.

Here are the details of the test.

Sample -

Business A - New Google Place account and exact matching Judysbook.com + Citysearch account (exact headline, address, and tel#).

Business B - New Google Place account and Judysbook.com + Citysearch account with a different headline but same phone number and address.

Business C - New Google place account and JJudysbook.com + Citysearch account account with different phone # but same address and headline.

Business D - New Google place account and Judysbook.com + Citysearch account account with different address but same headline and phone #.

Submit each Judysbook.com + Citysearch account landing page to Twitter and digg manually one time only after reviews have been added. (Spam free Twitter account with 2000+ followers and clean Digg account with 50+ followers and regular diggs)

Outcome

Google picked up the reviews from Judysbook.com for A and Citysearch account for B.

Note - Google only picked up 1 or 2 reviews for both A and B from the review site so there could be some special algorithm in place for selecting the reviews based on quality.

I will be writing a blog post on my blog on this study soon.

Hope this helps.

Sameer

As a standard practice, a webpage will not be considered duplicate if the content is 60% unique. However, having a "id" tag on the indexed pages is not a good user experience and Google certainly will not like too many pages will the id tags.

Here are three options that you can follow -

1. Go to "Parameter handling" in Site configuration settings in Google webmaster tools for your website and add "id" as on of the parameter. There is a good chance that Google will read this and ignore all the pages on your site with the parameter "id". We have tested this and found to be successful for ton of the parameters we use on our website including campaign tracking codes.

2. Continue using rel canonicals for duplicate pages so Google bot may not index it.

3. Make changes to your site code to each time a user creates a new page it will be created as a seperate url without any "id" parameter (similar to url shortners like bit.ly). This will allow you to tap in the UGC easily.

Thanks

Sameer

I have seen similar services and I don't think they can do anything but help the backlink page get indexed in search engines by using social media updates or submitting the page to digg.com through a authority digg account. You can also tweet your back link page using a spam free social account but don't overdo this as this will be considered a grey hat. If the content is interesting or has virality potential then it could go viral automatically.

Here are few things you can do to optimize your existing back links -

1. Followup with all your back link source and request to update the backlink to your actual pages instead of 301 version of the page.

2. Request your backlink provider to update the anchor text on some of your links.

3. Build organic backlinks to the page your link is hosted on. The argument to this technique could be why not build new links to your own website instead of building links for others but since we are talking about optimizing your existing links this could help as well.

4. See if you can get the webmaster to move your link close to relevant content. i.e. moving a blog roll link to a relevant blog post.

5. Find our all the backlinks linking to a 404 page on your site and either 301 that page to a relevant page on your website or request webmaster to update the links.

We recently went through domain consolidation of two high authority corporate websites. Based on my experience, combining all the media sites into one would be a wise decision for brand positioning, usability and seo. Domain authority continues to be one of the top search ranking factors and building the authority of one domain is lot easier than building authorities of multiple domains.

There could be instances where you may want to keep content / software on separate domains i.e. a startup investment, brand new software or an acquisition.

Having separate domains may have advantages in short term but having a one domain in longer time is highly suggested. (think Google)

Hope this helps.

Thanks

Sameer

Yes. Translated content will not be considered a penalty as long as long as you launch the site on a domain with proper local TLD and add locally targeted content then you should be ok. Additionally, you may want to consider hosting the website with a local hosting provider.

This should also apply to an English language content modified for UK audience since UK English is technically considered different than the US. We have multiple English language international websites hosted on local TLDs that rank locally for the respective keywords.

Google has become much smarter in terms of detecting the geo local elements and it should serve the appropriate site on the SERP without causing duplicate content issues.

Paid directories are not beneficial the way it used to be long time ago. Any paid links is a serious no no even though the case that directory services provides is that they don't charge for links but for resource required for manual inclusion.

There are some exceptions to high quality directory such as Yahoo. One should always ask the question if this directory provides a benefit to the user and if the answer is no then a backlink from this site is worthless for both traffic and seo.

I include the following clause in a legally binding contract for both web design and seo to make sure the client understands and agrees to it. (Please contact your legal advisor/ attorney for the exact clause. I am not a legal advisor and the suggestions presented here are for information purpose only)

--- SEO company is not responsible for changes made to the website by other parties that adversely affect the search engine rankings of the Client’s website.

--- SEO company is not responsible for the Client overwriting SEO work on the Client’s site or requesting webmaster / designer or developer to make changes to the Client's site.

As far as partial SEO goes, you may include another clause in your contract that clarifies that the client will not be able to get any significant results from a partial or selective SEO.

However, you could enhance your portfolio by adding a partial SEO module and offer this as value add with design at no cost. You can use this to sell the benefits of complete SEO and additional services such as link building.

Best

Sameer

I am seeing the same issue. This appears to be a bug with the search segment. I just added a question about this in the GA discussion forum. Hopefully we should be able to resolve this.

Hello Spencer,

I recommend two tools

1. Xenu link sleuth (http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html#Download)

2. Gsitecrawler ( http://gsitecrawler.com/en/download/)

Both will report all the linked pages throwing a 404 error and other status codes including "forbidden request", "no connection", "no such host" and more.

Hope this helps.

Sameer

Rodney,

Google spiders not only reads the anchor text on the link but also take into consideration ton of other factors including the text around the link, website url, domain name,  domain authority, page authority, title tag and several on page elements to decide the worthiness of a link.

"Keyword 1 Keyword 2" anchor text definitely has more weight than "Keyword 1 Keyword 2 another word" or any other variation but that alone is not enough to rank for the keyword.

I have seen direct improvement in keyword rank due to exact anchor text vs anchor text with extra words but too many backlinks with exact anchor text will be considered a forced attempt to gain ranking and Google could disqualify the link juice completely.

Google is already beefing up their algorithm to disqualify paid and farm links. One of the most common themes in all paid links is the exact anchor text so it will be easier for Google to identify a set of exact anchor text links on a website with dofollow.

Always try to use anchor text variations in the link building campaign. There are far better chances of rank improvement with an organic link building strategy compared to a forced anchor text tactic.

Hope this helps.

Thanks

Sameer

As long as you launch the site on a domain with proper local TLD (.de in your case) and add locally targeted content you should be ok. If possible try to host the website in the same country you are targeting.

Google has become much smarter in terms of detecting the geo local elements and it should serve the appropriate site on the SERP.

As far the mixing languages goes, it would not be a wise thing to do because it could impact usability. Is there a specific reason on why you are translating only a few pages in German? I could relate to an example where one of my customers mixed English with a local language on the local TLD website. The bounce rate went to the roof and users did not like it. They complained about this on the support chats and web forms. The issue was fixed and the bounce rate went down.

What analytics tool are you using?

In Google Analytics you can use onclick function with pagetrackview to track all the link clicks (internal and external)

onclick="pageTracker._trackPageview('/yourfile.pdf')

You can add this line to the GA code and track one URL as well i.e onclick="pageTracker._trackPageview('/URL.html');

Omniture onclick syntax is as follows using s.prop (property / traffic variables)

<li onclick="geturl('http: www.yourwebsite.com'');onclick="s=s_gi('nameofyouromniturereportsuite');s.prop1='Name" of="" hte="" file="" for="" reporting';s.tl(this,'o','name="" the="" reporting')"="">Anchor Text of the file</li onclick="geturl('http:>

Coremetrics has event conversion metrics that can be used to track downloads and link clicks

cmCreateConversionEventTag ("Event ID","Action Type","Event Category ID","Points");

Event id = Name of the file

Action type = 1 for event initiation and 2 for event completion

Event category id = Name of the group / page

Points = lead scoring points

Have they provided you a report showing all the links from each page that are linking to a 301 link instead of directly linking to the destination page? I would not take their words unless they show you reports.

301 in the internal link structure should not directly impact the ranking so as to down grade rankings but it could impact your page rank juice flow. The concept is similar to having multiple hoops between origin and destination page. If you have a link on the page that is pointing to a 301 version instead of direct link then chances (based on page rank juice flow math) your are not allowing a complete flow of juice through those links.

Here are some great posts from Rand on page rank juice flow

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/determining-whether-a-page-site-passes-link-juice

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-science-of-ranking-correlations

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-the-juice-is-loose (although controlling page rank is not a good practice anymore but this post is highly educational for anyone to understand the page rank flow)

Hope this helps.

Thanks

Sameer

On average, how long does it takes to recover 80% of the rankings if two high authority domains are combined without chaging any content? I totally understand that each domain is different and search engines can treat them differently but if all the steps are followed to the T what are the chances?

Traditional online directories are losing its value in the eyes of search engines and a good example is DMOZ. Even though DMOZ was one of the most popular directory before 2009 (it still has some value) it is not the best link source.

Local search prominence has allowed local directories to become stronger than a regular web link directory.

The question a user should ask before investing in directory link building is

• are users going to appreciate the availability of this directory? Is this going to provide benefits to the end user?

• Is this a vertical directory within high authority website or is this just a collection of links?

• Is the directory locally targeted (think yellowpages.com , cityguide.com) (applies to local ranking)

If the answer to these questions is no then clearly this is not a good source for getting links.

Sometimes the internal redirection issues will not show up on OSE. OSE data is not real time so it will take couple of weeks to get the most updated one (as per the last I heard from Rand in one of the webinar).

I generally use Xenu link Sleuth to identify all the redirection and page not found issues. Another tool that we use which is more advacned is Gsitecrawler.

There has been several debates on the topic of the geo location of hosting provider and the impact on SEO and rankings. As a best practice, it is recommended to host in the same country you are targeting but are there any studies available that confirms the web hosting providers location influences rankings?

I totally agree with Casey. I have be pushed to build keyword focussed microsites but unless you are willing to put efforts in building a content rich site registering domains with keywords is not useful.

A good example of content rich site used for seo purpose is http://www.privatecloud.com

The site is owned by EMC and is definitely designed well and updated with high quality content. Some of the content on this site is duplicate but it is done properly while giving credit to original link. A right mix of good quality content, regular updates, clean design and keyword rich domain has helped the site to be on first page for a competitive keyword.

Best practice is to add new content and create new title and meta for these pages instead of changing title for the same page constantly.

Changing title too many times in short span can confuse the search spider as title is the first piece of content crawled by spiders. By changing the title too many times you may cause the search spider to think that there is something unnatural about the website.

Font size impacts user experience and may impact SEO in certain cases. Providing users multiple font size options to choose from i.e small, medium, large helps user experience. Search spiders do look for usage of bold, italics and H1 tags on a web page. Better user experience generally lead to better SEO.

Key word in the url is important but it is not the only factor that will decide the rank for your target keyword. You can use golf-club or club but here are few other things that should be inline in order to rank for golf-club.

1. Authority of your domain.

2. Quality and quantity of the incoming links to your main domain and the target page

3. Relevance of the on page content on the golf club page. ( LDA score)

4. Title tag

6. Anchor text of the backlinks to the target page.

and several others.

Since you already have the word golf in your domain adding the keyword again in the url will not make a signficant difference as long as you target the page content for golf clubs. The key is it have original content and organic backlinks.

Hello Neil,

Since advertising banners hoardings are paid ads as a general rule even if Google is able to somehow read the urls we can right away disqualify the SEO benefits. Plus, there is no flow of link juice from these image ad links.

Google book is definitely interesting one. Google books are a scanned image of the actual book so the links are not an actual link that could pass the link juice. Google also provides an ebook version of some books and the links on the ebooks are highlighted like a regular link but these are not clickable. It could be possible that Google will soon enable these links and link page rank juice will flow from these links the to the destination site. The only issue I see here is since these are hosted on Google is could very well be a nofollow so it could be given similar weight like a brand or social mention if Google decides to use the links for SEO ranking.

Your most recent Google cache is showing the target as Toronto,Ontario confirming your concerns.

The challenge you are facing is similar to sites like Yellowpages.com, superpages.com and any other location targeted sites may face. The way these sites have worked around is by adding relevant static content to the website.

By adding relevant content to your home page your will be able to minimize the location targeting effect. Plus, search spiders already know that you are not limited to the location of IP because they have indexed multiple pages from your website.

I also noticed that your home page outbound link to content ratio is upside down. You have too many links on the homepage and extremely limited content. Additionally, the text blurb on the top is not user friendly and stuffed with too many keywords. You can easily replace this text with user friendly static content such as your website USP.

Ryan answered this question pretty well and I would like to add few points to it

1. As long as your site architecture is organic and designed for the user you should not be too concerned about page -keyword targeting.

2. Avoid have too many links on the page. Typically, there should not be more than 150 links on a page.

3. Make sure to have equal balance of content and images on the site.

4. Backlinks with good distribution of anchor text.

Sean,

Is there a blog or forum or any form of UGC system in place? The title issue can be resolved by adding a forum/blog since all the titles for each new page will now be the QA text or blog titles with unique content.

I don't think excessive usage of full name + text in title is a good practice because it does not look natural. Google is smart enough to show pages on the website as long as the domain name or the site content shows a match or correlation to the celebrity name.

You could also create new pages related to the industry, lifestyle, hobbies, favorites, and many other aspect of celebrities life and each could have titles with or without his/her name depending on the keyword you are trying to target.

Thanks

Sameer

Local ranking factors has a lot in common to regular search ranking factors including quality and quantity of links, content LDA score, and several other metrics.

However, there are lot of other metrics that Google generally looks at to rank a site locally.

• local place page with correct information ( address, correct category, phone # , map icon)

• Profiles on local directories ( superpages, citysearch.com, angielists ..)

• Local citations (links from local directories and sites like chamber of commerce, BBB, local small business groups)

• reviews (Google and other local websites like Yelp, citysearch, judysbook)

Here is a link to a website that provides extensive research work on local ranking factors.

Here is another links to awesome SMX Seattle 2011 breakaway session on local ranking factors.