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Looks like this page is a duplicate and is hijacking the rankings (I searched for "Atlanta's Premier Landscape Design & Custom Pool Company"). Set a canonical link on the homepage and see if that helps your rankings.

DA is determined  mostly by the backlinks to your site. The higher quality (sites with high DA) and quantity of backlinks to your site, the greater your DA.

As far as I know, there are no backlinks that would negatively affect your DA.

You are accurately describing the images - definitely not spam. The more descriptive you can be, the better (which would also differentiate the file names).

Having files named pizza-buffet-pizzeria-best-pizza-buffet-1.jpg would be spammy.

Ah. That's probably just an error. The same page should load at http://brandname.com/folder/article1/article2.

I would remove the extra /, update all the links to the pages and set the proper canonicals.

Site is well optimized and has 25k+ pages indexed in G. Looking at his backlinks, he may not have many links but a few of them are very good (italymag, gohome.it, comproperty)/ Backlinks from .it domains are a huge plus when trying to rank internationally.

I don't know what your site is but you can probably get those same backlinks fairly easily. Just generate content and optimize your website for your terms and you should be able to outrank him.

Yep, what you have is good. The image names/alt should be keyword friendly and describe the image. It would be better if you described it even more i.e. pizza-buffet-marriot, pizza-buffet-hilton

Double slashes means that if you are on a https page, the links will be https. On http pages, links will be http. Its most commonly used when you have a sitewide include and want some pages to be https compliant without sourcing the https on http pages.

As long as there isn't a https AND http version of the same pages, you should be fine.

Try this. It uses the web.config file which is accessible via FTP.

Yep, my bad. Pages seem to function under their own permalink rules (not sure why, I think most people would prefer the same permalink structure for posts and pages.)

Did some quick research and looks like many others have the same issue and the only solution is to try out the available plugins.

You can change the .htaccess code to append .htm to the url but WP won't be able to locate the proper post unless you change the settings in the db as well (which is what I assume the plugins do).

Hmmm, seems to be working for me. I had /%category%/%postname%/ as my permalink and changed it to /%category%/%postname%.htm

End result was all the posts/pages had .htm added to the url.

Latest version of WP? I'll test this out on another WP site I have and see if I get the same results.

Update: Yep, worked on my other site too. Not sure why you're experiencing problems =/

Go to your WP dashboard > Settings > Permalinks > Custom Structure > Enter /%postname%.htm

Then for each post/page you make, just edit the URL to match your previous site's structure.

Sure - not sure how they do it but an easy way would be to generate a random number from 1-100 and then show the code based on what appeared. So if you want the author code to appear 80% of the time, you would do:

$num = random(1-100)

if $num <= 80, show their ad code, else, show yours.

You can scramble the adsense code via a javascript obfuscator.

Well there ya have it. DA is mostly based off the authority and quantity of a sites backlinks.

There are a number of sites who do things similar to this - search for "adsense revenue sharing" Why would you want to hide the code?

Your best bet is to replace all adsense blocks with their ID on their posts. You can make it so that their code shows up a certain % of page loads and yours for the remaining.

In general, unless the blog is gets a lot of traffic and the writer has many posts, they probably wont make much.

Add both sites to GWT, then go to: Vanity Site > Configuration > Change of Address > Select the new domain

Give it some time and G should replace the vanity url to the new domain.

No backlinks? Blocking crawler?

Don't stack 301s. i.e. Don't redirect to another redirect. Update all your current redirects to point to the final pages. In general, you shouldn't worry about too many redirects.

I haven't watched the webinar but if you are currently doing well in rankings, I wouldn't change the permalink structure. I also think that WP automatically sets up redirects when you change the permalink structure (from my experience, would like someone to confirm though).

Don't think its a big deal but I think the best alt text would be the language represented by the flag, in the language of the page.

i.e. English site would have alt text to "Translate to Spanish" "Translate to French"

Spanish site would have alt text "Traducir a Ingles" "Traducis a francés"

If he is an aspx developer, send him this. Thinking about it, its better than the jquery. It would go to the url you set, read in the html outputted, and echo is onto the page.

this one

Is there a way to have the text in the source code readable by search engines but not showing on the page?

Sounds like cloaking. What exactly are you trying to do? There are many ways to include an external page and have it appear in the source.

Look into using AJAX/jquery to read and echo a page's content. You should also look into hidden divs that you can toggle (using something like jquery)

They could have set those up just in case people make typos when trying to reach the www. version. I would set up 301's from all of them to either the www. version or non-www version (check to see which is a better backlink profile).

Is there a better method to present tags than the wordpress tag cloud?

Yes, categories. If anything, the current tag cloud is annoying to use (different sizes, ugly text, repetitive tags). Organize them into several categories that describe the topics accurately and cause minimal overlap.

Also want to mention that your navigation dropdown links is causing the majority of the problem (each section has several links under it). Once again, think about consolidating these links if possible.

They are smart enough to figure it out. Just did searches to "mt kilimanjaro" v "mt. kilimanjaro" and the results returned were identical (meaning they consider them identical).

However, a search for "mount kilimanjaro" produced slightly different results so "mount v mt" usage on site may affect rankings but a period wont.

The reason is that the instant search is looking up "duorol blinds" and not just "duorol". You can see the query box adds in the gray text "blinds" which means it is including that keyword in the query.

Likewise, if you compare the instant search results to the results for "duorol blinds", you'll see they are identical.

I believe the the standalone keyword "duorol" is not popular enough to be a suggested search and the instant search automatically adds "blinds" as this is more commonly searched.

Cheers,
Oleg

301 Redirect is the way to go. To make a whole new site for the purpose to getting visitors to the new site is a waste of time and resources.

Instead of doing a sitewide redirect, see if you can match up relevant pages and have them 301 to their equivalents.

For bonus points, have an outreach campaign and contact the webmasters who are linking to asample.com and tell them you've changed domains to example.com and offer them a new page they should replace the link with.

Very interesting. I have not considered this at all but I don't think it's worth your time to change your images to include optimized image meta data. If there is an effect, its miniscule.

But that does give me a great reason to run an experiment

1)Is having 2 a problem

Nope.

2. Will they ignore the old site map or can we delete and if so when can we delete

They'll look at both. As long as the new one gets crawled, then you can remove the first one (as long as all the links are there)

Yep, no need. Won't hurt if you do (will probably get crawled twice or one will be ignored) but for the sake of keeping GWT sitemap data clean (pages submitted/indexed), don't duplicate the links.

Cheers,
Oleg

You can just keep them separate and submit both sitemaps to GWT. That's your best course of action.

Interesting... what are the other urls/keywords that have been affected? Maybe we can find a pattern.

I wonder if its a language filter causing this...

For an SAB (Service Area Business) with a hidden address -

Can you have more then one listing?

You need an address to get listed in Google places. Consider getting a PO box.

>Can you use a free Google Voice number?

Yes, you just need to disable screening so you can verify over the phone (or choose postcard option)

Can you forward the number to a main number?

Yes

Can the listing be in an office building? Such as a rented space...

Yes

For a non SAB listing with the address visible -

Can you use free Google voice numbers for each listing and  forward them to one main number?

No, 1 main number may only have 1 GV forwarded to it. There are workarounds with multiple forwarders though.

According to mozcast's big ten tracking, the strongest domains seemed to have increased their percentage of page 1 results on 1/8/2013.

I feel like the trend of big brands dominating the smaller sites has been going on for a while now with no changes in sight.

Day Care in Metro Atlanta | Child Care Atlanta Area | ABC Childcare Company

Primary Keyword | Broader | Brand

If the title is too long: Primary Keyword | Brand

Just make sure the title fits in the serps (test with this).

Edit: As Tom suggested, definitely do your keyword research to see which terms are worth ranking for (what gets searched in general + what do you receive traffic for). That should tell you what your primary keywords/locations are.

Used to be huge, pretty sure most of them have been discounted greatly. Case in point: Google ignores links from updowner (which is one of those whois/site stats sites). My guess is that they do the same for all of those types of sites.

But you have inspired me to run a test to see how effective they still are

Process is fairly similar... search for your target keywords and do competitor research (check their backlinks and on page optimization). This will let you know how difficult it may be to rank for a specific keyword.

In general, local business rankings can be greatly improved with proper on-page optimization, places page optimization and being submitted to all the major business directories (check out yext.com and getlisted.org)

Best of luck!
Oleg

If there are absolutely no differences at all between Belgium and France French, then I would just go with the language in the url (/fr/).

However, if there are pricing/location/banner/any differences between the two pages, I would split them up (/be-fr/ and /fr-fr/ - having both variables in one 'folder' be better than additional another subfolder).

"www.webshop.com/fr/french-product-name Would this have the potential to rank well in both the French speaking part of Belgium, as well as France?"

Yes

Ah, in that case the main factor is: how are all ranking currently? If they each receive traffic for their respective local keywords, it would make sense to just keep them as is (don't fix what ain't broken).

However, if you feel they aren't getting the rankings they deserve, you should combine all the sites into 1 and consolidate the authority. As long as you set up 301 redirects correctly, you should be able to transfer your rankings and even improve them (if you set up your internal linking structure correctly). Just know you will most likely lose rankings for around 2 weeks.

Something to keep in mind: it's much easier to maintain and improve one website over three. If you plan on generating new content (as you should), having 1 blog with kickass content is far better than 3 mediocre ones.

Best,
Oleg

I believe submitting to http://www.google.com/local/add/ auto creates a Google+ profile for the business.

Would like to get second opinions though.

The fact that its for 1 keyword and 1 page leads me to believe that it is penguin. The refresh came on Oct 5th but could be related. Doesn't look like it has any problems with its backlinks so that leaves on page. I ran some keyword density analysis on the site and you have very high percentages for your content.

I don't usually recommend this but you should try decreasing the number of instances of your target keyword. Not by much (3 or 4 instances) but just replace several instances of "sex addition" in your body content to some synonym/different variation e.g. "addiction to sex", "the addiction", etc.

If you decide to take my advice, PLEASE let me know if it worked. This is a really interesting case

Edit: ran copyscape and see a bunch of results. I know that you are trying to quote a respected source but maybe G is taking offense to that? Although it generally shouldn't penalize you for quoting a small portion of your pages content, G could be treating this differently for one reason or another.

Are they all related? SEO aside, would it make sense to combine them all?

If they are all similar and target similar keywords, it may make sense to combine them all and consolidate the authority. Tough to judge without knowing more info.

If you like, you can PM me the links and I can take a look and give a better suggestion.

Cheers,
Oleg

How about you create dynamic links that are rewritten which redirect to the one main page and just swaps variables.

I.E.

Link shared = site.com/username --> which is actually site.com/user.php?u=username --> sets a cookie with "referral = username" ---> redirect to main "Registration" (or other) page ---> check/read in cookie and apply variables as needed.

That would solve the duplicate content issue while keeping track of referrals.

Cheers,
Oleg

Well each of those sites links to your twitter as well so its a nice two-for-one.

But add you twitter link to author bylines (guest blog posts). Whenever you are mentioned online, ask for a link to your twitter (think interviews).

When you say "link to twitter account... from somewhere specific", I think twitter directories.

You will have a much easier time ranking if you provide unique biographies instead of scraping something that already appears on several websites. Like you said, those sites are huge and have a lot of authority so they will rank and you wont.

However, if the scraped bio is just a portion of the page and the rest of the page is unique, valuable information, that would help offset the copied content. Next time a panda refresh comes around, you'll know if you got hit with a duplicate content penalty.

-Oleg

Yep, check this out

Overlay pop up would be the way to go. Keeps users on the page and is just much cleaner. There is no problem with Javacript overlays for SEO (unless you are trying to rank for "select your country")

My suggestion is to just capture the visitors country via IP and auto-select the country for them. Then you can have a drop-down or "click to change country" icon somewhere on your site that would let users fix any erroneous autoselections.

Cheers
-Oleg

No screenshot attachment

Traffic dropped totally on April 20 to onwards.

That's penguin alright. October was a penguin refresh so you might have gotten hit again.

For everything you need to know about Penguin, read part 1 and part 2 of Steve Webb's awesome coverage.

As long as you force all pages to https and build links to the https version, it's nothing to worry about. From memory, Matt Cutts said either one is fine.

If i had to guess... Your site forces https while OSE only looks up http (as represented by the 301 code in the "HTTP Status" column).

I wouldn't worry about it.