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nvs.nim

Came across a tool last week that gives you the ability to create Video Testimonials, it's part of a Video Marketing Suite.

I was amazed by the statistics that are available in the backend. You can see which testimonial has the most positive influence on visitors, so you can use the best testimonials on your page (and if you want you can reward the person who recorded that video)

So you get the tool, but also the insights in which type of testimonials work best for you...

You can try it at http://www.bubobox.com but they'll have to do some SEO as well in order to get found I think...

nvs.nim

Thanks! Because excel didn't seperate the fields right i didn't have the column AF. But i got it now! Thanks a lot!

nvs.nim

It doesn't tell me what other pages are identical. Only that there are identical pages.

nvs.nim

I want to create a report of only de duplicate content pages as a csv file so i can create a script to canonicalize them. So i get something like:

http://example.com/page1, http://example.com/page2, http://example.com/page3, http://example.com/page4,

Because I now have to open each in "Issue: Duplicate Page Content", and this takes a lot of time.

The same for duplicate page title.

nvs.nim

As Martijn already told it's important to know if you want the advanced segments to segment those sections as landingpages (do people reach the website through that page) or do you want to see all visitors who reached those sections (without having to enter the site through that page)

Because this will give you another Reg.Ex.

nvs.nim

I think this one speaks for itself...

http://www2.warnerbros.com/spacejam/movie/jam.htm

nvs.nim

I'm having a discussion with a third party that's building a website for a client that I advised concerning his SEO.

The site went live 2 weeks ago and it's not getting indexed very well, so my client asked me what could be the problem.

I checked several things that could be the problem, like an xml sitemap that was missing etc. But there was another thing that I saw in the source code:

Can this be a problem for Google to follow internal links? I always thought that you should use the base href like this:

<base href="http://www.domain.com"> so without the trailing / behind the TLD

And even better using absolute instead of relative links, no?

nvs.nim

So if the site has a structure like this:

www.xyz.com/overview

and the filter on this page has several options like /?order= , ?brand=, .... I have to rel-canonical them al to www.xyz.com/overview

nvs.nim

Another way to find out that you did proper keyword research is to start up an AdWords campaign using your exact keywords and target the campaign in the UK.

This gives you valuable information about the actual search volume... Because you target the keywords [exact], every impression that is generated is an exact search for one of your keywords and will give you an indication of the search volume.

Everywhere you look Google is giving away coupons with 50, 75 or even 100€ of AdWords credit, so you don't even have to invest any money into it...

nvs.nim

I was thinking the same... going for a 301 even if the relevancy isn't 100% correct...

nvs.nim

Just had a discussion with a collegue about a page on our own website. We have some cases which are outdated. These pages receive some visitors but they arrive there when they search for the clients brand name, so for us they are irelevant.

What's the best way to handle these kind of pages? Is a 301-redirect to the showcase overview the way to go or do we make it a 404 and include the showcase overview in this 404?

nvs.nim

will do! How many moz-points do you have atm?

nvs.nim

2 weeks later the rankings have recovered and are getting higher step by step, so I don't think we got penalized... Thank god

Another lesson learned: be patient, and believe in your own seo-strategy

nvs.nim

Rel-canonical will be an immense job, would it be ok using robots.txt like this

disallow: /?order=

disallow: /?sortorder=

...

?

nvs.nim

Hi,

I just checked an seo campaign we started last week, so I opened seomoz to see the crawl diagnostics.

Lot's of duplicate content & duplicate titles showing up, but that's because Rogerbot is crawling all of the filtered pages as well. How do I exclude these pages from being crawled?

/product/brand-x/3969?order=brand&sortorder=ASC
/product/brand-x/3969?order=popular&sortorder=ASC
/product/brand-x/3969?order=popular&sortorder=DESC&page=10
/product/brand-x/3969?order=popular&sortorder=DESC&page=11

nvs.nim

Thanks for the answers & tips! It scared the hell out of me, because we were getting closer and closer to our objective, but it's true that it isn't the first time rankings dropped.

I will keep you updated on any changes next week.

nvs.nim

Last couple of days we read things about Google algorithm and some things about companies or people doing "negative seo"..

At first, nothing was wrong... if you play the game by the rules you won't get penalized you think... right?

Today I checked rankings for some sites we're optimizing, and I fell of my chair! A site that was building better rankings week by week just dropped heavily and we have no clue if it's the algorithm update...

Attached there are some screenshots, the first one showing the ranking for one of the most important keywords for that business, the others are link profiles & moztrust & rank for that root domain.

As you can see, link profiles are much stronger that competitors, but that important keyword is dropping in rankings...

We still have to do some on page optimizations (double title tags & some some canonical tags that have to be added, but that can't be the reason for this major drop??

Or am I missing something??? Any ideas? Are External Followed links growing to fast?

(The blue line in screenshots is the site we're working on)

rankings-may.jpg moztrust.jpg followed-links.jpg

nvs.nim

Thx for your response, the line break is only for displaying it here...

nvs.nim

Uploaded a Geo-sitemap last week and made sitemap_index.xml that includes the geo & normal sitemap.

Google Webmaster tools shows a warning for the geo sitemap, telling me that the geo tag isn't supported. This is how the xml looks like:

<urlset<span class="webkit-html-attribute"> xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"</urlset<span> xmlns:geo="http://www.google.com/geo/schemas/sitemap/1.0">http://www.mysite.com/locations.kml geo:format</geo:format>kmlSomebody, anybody knows the fix?

nvs.nim

weeks... just checked sitemap & robots.txt and there was indeed a problem with some pages that were blocked.... thx guys!!!

nvs.nim

No, the site is online for quite some time, and he told me Googlebot did crawl the page yet...

nvs.nim

A friend of mine asked me how long it takes before Google shows the right Title in the SERPs.

He changed the title of his homepage some weeks ago but Google still shows the old Title in the rankings...

I'm a Wordpress user and don't have this problem, when I change something in the title it doesn't take that long to see the changes showing up in SERPs

nvs.nim

Some time ago I struggled with the same problem, and after reading articles on the seomoz blog and questions posted here I went for subdirectories.

subdirectories still give you the ability to add those folders to Google Webmaster Tools and set regio for that folder. You can go with country specific domains as well, but you will have to build links for every domain, whereas you only have to do it once when you choose subfolders.

nvs.nim

 Using this code will track all the files you offer to download:    
/**
	 * Measuring GA Files
	 */	 
	var extensions = ['pdf','doc','docx','xls','csv','jpg','gif',
'mp3','swf','txt','ppt','zip','gz','dmg','xml'];
	var download_ga_folder = '/downloads/';
	$('a').each(function(){
		var _self = $(this);
		var u = $(this).attr('href');

		if(typeof(u) != 'undefined'){
			if(u.indexOf("?")!=-1){
				uext = u.substring(0, u.lastIndexOf("?"));
			}else{
				uext = u;
			};

			var ext = uext.split('.')[uext.split('.').length - 1];

			//check extensions
			for(i = 0; i < extensions.length; i++){
				if(ext == extensions[i]){
					_self.click(function(){
						pageTracker._trackPageview(download_ga_folder + 
                                                _self.attr('href'));
						return false;
					});
					break;
				};
			};
		};
	});

nvs.nim

In my experience posts often rank faster and higher,

Last week I posted an article on a blog of a client of mine, the domain is only a half year old, and it hasn't got many backlinks. The posts that I write for the blog are indexing within a couple of minutes and they tend to rank very high, even for search queries with high volume and high competition.

In this case are building a website about sustainable and durable renovation of houses, and one of the terms he wants to rank for is "bio ecological housing" (I don't know if this is the correct translation), and what we did is make a dedicated page www.website.com/bio-ecological-housing and then wrote some posts like "what is bio ecological housing", "5 benefits of bio ecological housing", "top materials for bio ecological housing"... and we include a strong CTA on those blog posts with a link to the dedicated page. That way we benefit from fast and high indexing of posts.

nvs.nim

Thanks for the advice!

will work with that. Gonna setup a Google Docs form and send it to the business owners.

nvs.nim

Hi,

working on a website of a retailer who has about 100 shops accross the country and every shop has a page on the corporate website. Some questions about content on these pages:

is it ok to add links to the brands they sell in those shops on every business-page? It's a link to the product listing they sell of that brand
I wrote a generic text about the business where I can replace city, street it's located, ... Is it ok to use that kind of text on the local business pages?
anybody some ideas I can write about on those loca business pages?

nvs.nim

Will do!

nvs.nim

Hi Robert,

Thx for your quick answer, I will make sure that in Google Webmaster Tools we say that the /be is for Belgium and the /nl for The Netherlands, but the duplicate content will still show up in our reports in SEOmoz, no?

nvs.nim

Does it show up in the rankings tab?

There is a crawl report and a rankings report, those are two separate reports. So if the crawl was today, maybe your rankings will be reported on wednesday.

nvs.nim

Hi,

Working on a website for a company that works in different european countries.

The setup is like this:

www.website.eu/nl
www.website.eu/be
www.website.eu/fr
...

You see that every country has it's own subdir, but NL & BE share the same language, dutch...

The copywriter wrote some unique content for NL and for BE, but it isn't possible to write unique for every product detail page because it's pretty technical stuff that goes into those pages.

Now we want to add canonical tags to those identical product pages. Do we point the canonical on the /be products to /nl products or visa versa?

Other question regarding SEOmoz: If we add canonical tags to x-pages, do they still appear in the Crawl Errors "duplicate page content", or do we have to do our own math and just do "duplicate page content" minus "Rel canonical" ?

nvs.nim

Hi Robert,

Just finished preparing the bulk upload, and we're using

www.website.com/entrepreneur-x for the different entrepreneurs.

Now let's hope that Google will verify it quickly.. Last time we did a bulk upload for a franchise business we had problems with the Business Name. It took us more than 2 months to get it the way Google wants it. Upload, waiting for 4 weeks, denied, changed the file, upload again, ...

We used the name of the Brand for all locations, but the listing was denied and we had to use the name of the local business of the entrepreneur. So if I have a business called NIM Coffee and I run a Starbucks here in my town, they wouldn't let me put Starbucks in the business name (maybe Starbucks isn't the best example, but I think you get what I mean, right? )

nvs.nim

Hi,

I'm preparing a bulk upload for Google Places and have a question about the url of every individual place.

The website is structured this was:

www.website.com/entrepreneur-X
www.website.com/entrepreneur-Y
...

But you can reach every individual entrepreneur like this as well:

www.entrepreneur-x.com
www.entrepreneur-y.com
...these URL's redirect to the pages listed above

and they use the e-mail address info@entrepreneur-y.com

Should I use www.website.com/entrepreneur-X or www.entrepreneur-x.com in the bulk upload?

I think it's best using www.website.com/entrepreneur-x because the other url is a redirect. What do you guys think??

nvs.nim

Thanks,

I'll see what we can do with the funny video idea if the client accepts on doin' it I will show you the result

nvs.nim

Thx,

We also have analysed a lot of his data of past 8 years, so we can probably get something out of that as wel, maybe we can compare data in industry report to data about his business

nvs.nim

Just gave it a quickscan, reading it will be something for tonight, but love the pic you used in the post. Sooo cute!

nvs.nim

That really is a problem that should be fixed as soon as possible, and it looks like the goodwill of the hosting company isn't very big...

What hosting company are you using at the moment?

I know there are some great ones out there that will even provide you a service that they move your blog to their hosting platform FOR FREE, so the only thing you should do is get an account with this type of hosting company.

I'm pretty happy about the service at Certified Hosting, and they offer packages with unlimited bandwith. I know there are some downsides on the cheaper packages (such as to many sites on same IP) but I really love their fast service and if price isn't an issue you could go for a more expensive hosting package.

Hope you get your site bakc online as soon as possible!!!

nvs.nim

Hi,

I'm working on an account where we are optimizing SEO, SEA and Conversion. The business is a very local car rental company that competes with Hertz, Europcar, ...

I already posted a question about it here http://www.seomoz.org/q/very-fluctuating-rankings

The lack of time made it almost impossible for this business to start bloggin', but we're about to change that in 2012 and I already came up with some ideas for some articles, but still looking for that big fish that will get those good links.

Maybe an infograph, but what data should we cover?
Any other suggestions on articles that are linkworthy are welcome

nvs.nim

Hi Natanael,

I think it's important for you to tell the right things to the right people in this case.

When you talk to the journalists, you should explain them things on keyword research (without turning them into keyword stuffing monkees) and on-page optimization like using h1, bold, alt-tags. You should also show them how to write titles and meta descriptions that are compelling so CTR in serps will be high even if you're not #1

Another important thing for the journalists is link building, they are the perfect ambassadors for a news portal, they can use their network in order to obtain quality links.

When talking to the webdesigner you should tell the front end developpers that Google is changing the looks of their serps and that they should follow these changes in order to get the maximum visibility in SERPs using snippets like rating and so on.

For backend developpers it's important that they make sure the content management system is capable of manipulating al critical elements. Manipulating seems a little bit creepy but what I mean is that you should have total control over for example:

title, meta & url
index, noindex
include/not include in sitemap
canonical
meta & title templates

Then make sure that they are aware every part is important in SEO. You can't drive your SEO solely on on page OR links OR tech, it's the sum of the parts

nvs.nim

Ouchh Painfull situation having your clients competing over the same keywords

Hope they don't find out about it

nvs.nim

Think you forgot the screenshot, but by what you are telling I can imagine that your site hasn't built up a strong trust and authority compared to the other sites, and that's why your rankings drop. They get indexed high because it's fresh news but drop because more authoritive domains start talking about same subjects and pass you in rankings.

The grade A you see in the control panel is a good thing, but it's only 1 element of SEO, you should really develop a strategy for your site to get quality backlinks.

I hope you can post the screenshot so I can take a closer look at it.

nvs.nim

Thanks,

I think you're right that people may be put off by the .nl We're experiencing the same thing for a webshop under a .nl domain but that has pages translated in french and german.

We do use PPC for driving relevant traffic to the website, so a redirect isn't in place here, and if we do change TLD we have to make sure everything get's done the right way.

I really hope those who are really into international SEO can contribute their opinions here, because operating in Europe still has some gray areas that aren't covered in the "standard" SEO blogs.

The thing we are facing here is:

a regional domain (.nl, .be, .de) can put off people, even if the website is translated professionaly.
a regional domain name makes it harder to rank in other countries of Europe. I see this everyday, living in Belgium and working in Holland, everyday I'm amazed by the big difference in search results for in Google.be and Google.nl
what about a .eu?? Is that the solution for companies operating in different European countries? At the moment we're planning some work on an existing .eu domain.

I read a Q&A here on SEOmoz that suggested adding the different subdirectories of the .eu domain to Google Webmaster Tools, so you can set a target country for every site you add in GWT. Can this be a solution? If so, what about #4?

does the location of your hosting have an influence? If it does the solution above with a .eu domain isn't good because everything will be hosted on the same server...

Let that be it for today I can go on and on, but I hope the ones with decent experience in international seo can share some interesting stuff here...

I really can't wait to get my hands dirty on those international sites, and tell you guys what things worked out!

Cheers,
Joris

nvs.nim

Hi Robert,

Thanks for sharing your point of view. I will give you some background information on the project.

There are 2 versions of the website each with another domain name, one in English, one in Dutch, but both versions have a .nl domain name. Should we change the domain name of the English version to a .com? Do you think that would have an impact on rankings in google.com?

The text on the English version of the website is written by a professional translation agency, so they are written correctly but they can be optimized a little bit further to really target those long tails.

What bothers me most is that sites like http://amsterdam-schiphol.airport-car-hire.net/ or http://www.airport-carrentals.com/cities/amsterdam_nl_ams/ are outranking the site we're working on.

I hope this details will help you, every suggestion is welcome

In january we start working on a case study showing what we did over the years and what impact it had on his website, I'll be glad to share it with you.

nvs.nim

Seems like you're going the black-hat way... (which is negative!)

Some words in your post make me worry about the long term succes of your efforts:

3,4 domains that I will buy with PR3
low quality text generated by spinner

-I know it's hard work : You think the things above are hard work??? Try real link building strategies, then you will know what's hard work!!!

I suggest you read some posts on SEOmoz blog to see what are link building techniques and strategies, and then work out a strategy for your website.

nvs.nim

For a couple of years we're doing internet marketing for a local car rental company in Holland that operates at Amsterdam Airport and competes with players like Herz, Europcar, Avis, ... We started with SEO, SEA & Remarketing. With an overall conversion rate of 13% the results are pretty good, and our client is happy Whieee

End 2011 we started with an evaluation of the efforts we did last year(s) and to come to new insights to work on in 2012. The SEA & remarketing campaings have a (very) possitive ROI, and they give us lots of insights where we should focus on doing SEO.

We identified longtail keywords with a high search volume but when monitoring these keywords in SEOmoz we see they are fluctuating. Some keywords gain ranking positions in google.nl but lose positions in google.com and vica versa. That's pretty frustrating, because we want to rank good in both

I was wondering what's the best practice for these longtails... Do we make specific landingspages that focus on these longtails, or do we focus on linkbuilding getting links with longtail anchor texts to the homepage of the website?

An example: last week we rose 14 positions for a keyword in google.nl but for the same keyword we dropped 4 places in google.com (while .com is much more interesting for our client)

Any suggestions are welcome!!

nvs.nim

When you set up your campaign in SEOmoz, one of the first things you do is choose wether you want the campaign to measure root domain or subdomain (like www, but in your case heartspm)

nvs.nim

As we all know paid links can harm your SEO efforts because Google doesn't like these type of links.

I was wondering, if paid links are bad, why does SEOmoz includes so many paid directories in the SEO Web Directory list???

nvs.nim

When I visit widgets.com the only thing I saw were advertisements... so I thought Content would be your main issue because with only a domain name you're not going to make it to the top of Google search results.

Then I went to your competitors website, but that just gave me an error page... maybe they block European traffic, but I doubt that..

Being a copycat can get you some results... maybe... but commenting on blog posts to get backlinks isn't the best technique to really get quality. If you use open site explorer, try to understand the metrics of a good backlink and only go after those. That's what I recommend, and then go on to build quality links yourselve, and not only on places where your competition is...

nvs.nim

Is reaching traffic x10 a realistic KPI???

I hope you did enough keyword research to see if it's even possible reaching 300 000 visitors with the content you have right now... SEO can be optimized but if people simply aren't looking for those things traffic won't grow so spectacular I guess.

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nvs.nim

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