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-          Would you host on YouTube and simply insert the embed code in to the page.  Would any alternative site (or even self-hosted) be preferable?

Self-hosted is preferred but keep server costs in mind. If not, youtube is usually the way to go.

-          Should I be padding out either side of the embed code with a description of the video and an annotation on OUR site?

Ideally yes. A part of video SEO is it's context.

-          Does Google actually look at the link and ascertain the relevance of the video file to the actual page?   If it does this does it gain anything useful that could help on-page SEO?

Videos can reduce bounce-backs, increase backlinks (people tend to link to them more), show a rich snippet in SERPs, improve conversions (if done right). Google can't watch and categorize the video but does it instead on the page's content, surrounding text, and backlinks.

Manual link outreach > guest blog posts > directories

Manual Link Outreach - find other websites in your industry, give them a reason to link to you, contact the webmasters and convince/entice them to. Hardest to do, best for SEO.

Guest Blog Posts - Find related websites that publish content, offer to write an exceptional piece of content for them, have link to your site. Medium, great for SEO.

Directories - DMOZ, BOTW, YDIR are the big ones. If you want to do directories, stick to niche specific and/or local directories. Easiest, okay for SEO.

Definitely hit up all 3 and budget accordingly. Variety is key.

Good luck!

It is indexed.

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aprofitok.com

Yoast WP SEO plugin has the ability to set a publisher URL for the site and each author can have their own G+ author link set up. rel=author/me setup

For the "about the author" at the end of the post, that is done via themes or you can install a author bio plugin.

Welcome! Lots of great info and people floating around here, I'm sure you'll learn a lot!

SEO-wise, 1 long page

Conversion-wise, probably per service/product (x related testimonials would appear on the x service page, y testimonials on y service page, etc).

There is no reason to make 5 testimonial pages for the same service instead of just one.

You need to claim the old page and either remove/edit it with the new address.

There is a feature on each page to "edit this business" which has the option to let G know that the address has been moved. You should definitely do that foremost.

Personally, I find G places/+ very quirky and erratic - showing random business titles, different address formats, etc. even after I correct everything. You can also post in the G local forums with your issue.

>I Googled many two word searches reversing the word order and I got the exact same search results suggesting order does not matter

I'd say this is the main factor - sometimes they get treated the same, sometimes differently, depending on the keywords. If your keywords return the same results regardless of order, you should be good with either order.

Keep in mind that the exact match domain (EMD) SEO bonus was reduced by some recent algo updates.

Honestly, best thing you can do it replicate the content/page on your main site, 301 redirect and canonical (or just canonical).

main site probably has more authority, will gain more authority and if the goal is the rank the main site, you need to put as much (linkable) content on it as possible instead of splitting it into two sites. Plus, .info's are just worse =/

An widget.com/info/ with all the info based articles would be easiest to add while keeping the "info" related stuff separate.

Cheers!

New pages don't have any authority right away so the penalization is more noticeable, while your old articles have links/are more established and rank better than new ones in general (my guess).

I used OSE as well - http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/anchors.html?page=1&site=richclubgirl.com&sort=domains_linking_page&source=phrase&target=domain

Your best bet is to use the disavow tool.

Have you ever experienced a traffic drop? If yes, see what day that happened and if there were updates around that time.

Do you have GWT set up? Sitemaps submitted/updated with latest posts?

They are considered completely separate entities that have nothing to do with one another.

Ideally, widget.com/blog/ is the best place to run your blog.

Usually you should outrank those site but I think you might have been penalized / hit with negative SEO =/

I clicked around your backlink profile and it looks like there are a lot of links with pharma anchor text (viagra in the philippines, tramadol 50mg, etc). I would recommend a backlink audit and removal of all of those negative links and see if that bounces you back up!

Cheers!
Oleg

Do they deserve their own pages or can they be combined into one? If they are so similar that you can't explain them in different terms, you are probably better off combining them into one page.

The question: does anyone have a guess as to what is making it perform so well?

You have a stronger link profile but I think they are winning the SERPs because they post "Recent" links on their homepage that link to news and user submissions. This in turn lets crawlers syndicate the latest submissions quicker, their homepage is crawled more often, and they rank quicker/better because of the Query Deserves Freshness (QDF) factor.

I recommend you try doing the same thing and see if that helps you.

--

I also only found 5 instances of your articles being sourced - https://www.google.com/search?q=site:accidentin.com+intext%3Afindmyaccident.com

What kinds of kw are they outranking you for? Do you have a rss feed or how are they scraping you content?

--

In general, scraper sites are not supposed to do well and will probably lose value but I've seen several examples where they are performing really well.

Cheers & Good Luck,
Oleg

Is Google suddenly ignoring rewrite rules and redirects?

Shouldn't be.. pretty odd. You can try blocking the crawler from accessing the old .jsp pages if they all follow a format (below code is if every page starts with /xref_)

User-agent:*
Disallow: /xref_*

Looks like you don't really need a RewriteRule line there.. just a redirect would do the trick

Redirect 301 /xref_interlux_antifoulingoutboards&keels.jsp /userportal/search_subCategory.do?categoryName=Bottom%20Paint&categoryId=35&refine=1&page=GRID

But I don't think that is the problem since its still sending a 301 response code when you visit the .jsp file.

One thing that may help is adding canonical tags to your current pages - make sure you utilize rel=canonical as well as rel=next/prev for your paginated pages.

Overall, I'm not sure =/ Try posting/submitting it to G, could be a bug.

Arrows, Colors, Whitespace, Images

A combination of those usually gives the best direction cue to visitors.

People are attracted to images/colors so that is where the eyeball jumps first. If you have a loud page, people's attention is going to jump all over the place (which is when arrows come in most handy).

If you have a clean page (lots of whitespace), any graphical/colorful element is going to pop and attract attention.

Best advice I can give is to Always Be Testing. Set up experiment after experiment to optimize the visitor flow.

Cheers & Good Luck!
-Oleg

I've noticed a lot of incorrect and misleading information on our company Wikipedia page.

That just about answer's your question. YES! This is reputation management 101. The key is just not to turn your wikipedia page into a sales pitch. Whatever changes you make, you absolutely need to cite. The key to not having your edit's reverted: BE OBJECTIVE. Stick to the facts and nobody will mess with your fixes.

If you start talking about how "is the #1 yyyy company in the world as rated by www (which happens to be owned by yyyy)", you better believe that an unhappy customer/competitor may start a ruckus (and rightfully so). Just be fair, objective and scientific about the way you make changes.

Keep in mind that there is a conflict of interest and any changes will be scrutinized by the public so you really don't want to add fluff or seem really PRO-yyyy.

Keep your changes short, concise and don't completely change the article from the get go.

No sources but you should read the Wikipedia rules for organizations

It's because you are blocking crawlers in via your robots.txt file - http://images2.spies.dk/robots.txt

Just make it blank and wait for your images to be indexed. Should appear in search after that.

CDN is used to improve page load speed. Since this is a minor (but still considered) part of SEO and SERPs, the only time you would really see a change in serps from implementing a CDN is if you had a REALLY bad load speed which was drastically improved.

However, good on you for improving visitor experience

Read this post by Matt Cutts on nofollow and pagerank sculpting

Essentially, you still divide your link authority between the total number of links on the page (including nofollowed links) and only pass authority to the followed links.

So you still pass just as much authority to the links that are followed while reducing the authority to the newly nofollowed link (which doesn't fix your situation from what I can tell).

You can possibly noindex the duplicate pages? I'd have to see specifics before I can say for sure.

Best course of action is a navigation restructure (maybe even site if each product is a post (timely)... should at least be a page(timeless)).

Good luck!
Oleg

We recently upgraded our CMS which now includes automated sitemaps (not sure if this impacts news sitemaps, though).

How did it work previously?

Did traffic go down in general? I know there G changed the way analytics interprets image/product based searches and just changes how they were categorized (still receiving the traffic, just labeled differently)

I also recommend posting your issue here and seeing if a rep can help get it resolved.

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Instead of removing links, just focus on building new links.

The only time I would remove links is if you were affected by Penguin or a manual penalty (i.e. a large part of your backlink profile comes from shitty sites). Receiving a link from a irrelevant site wouldn't hurt your rankings unless you do it en mass. Removing those links may hurt your authority.

Cheers,
Oleg

302 = temporary redirect. When the crawler landed on your page, it was redirected to another URL.

[NO STATUS] / [NO DATA] - try running it again? If it still shows up, you may be blocking crawlers, try fetching your site as G - also check your robots.txt, htaccess and meta tags to make sure you aren't blocking it from there.

My question is: is only the address sufficient?

Yes, what Rand posted was theoretical and just posting the address would theoretically give you a boost as well (just thinking from a crawler POV). I would add a link where you could since that is still the best way to earn a citation.

How much of a boost would 20 or so cocitations a month give to a medium competition local search term in G places?

Current rankings? Authority of your site? Authority of the cocitations? Relevance of content w/ cocictations? Even if we knew all those, there are too many variables to say for sure. Only one way to find out

Looks like you're filters work via POST method so you don't have much choice. There are no URL parameters you can block. rel="prev/next" is the way to go to index all images and pages without duplicate content.

You're welcome!

Just to add some more credibility, the new Matt Cutt's video supports my initial statement.

Hope everything went well for you!

Yes, you can add that to your robots.txt file and it should slow down the crawl rate. I haven't tested it myself but have seen many instances of it. Let us know how it works out!

Nope, that's exactly what you should do.

Don't think there is a difference SEO-wise, just styling wise (inner tag style would override the outer tags style).

I would like some second opinions though.

Best way: manually going to the sites and finding contact info (name, email, contact form, skim the about me)

Scaled method: this is a really neat free tool and you can also check out buzzstream (which also gives social links so you can outreach through there first, then email for a better response rate)

Cheers,

Oleg

You can post the link here for everyone to see. Or you can shoot me a PM and I'll take a quick look.

Just test on a demo server before going live and back everything up. There shouldn't be much of a difference between transferring homepage v other pages (although without knowing a specific CMS, I can't give any specific tips).

Make sure canonical urls are correct and run a crawler to test for broken links.

Did some more research... those aren't valid name values - see this.

DC.title = <title>your title here</title>

author =

language =

copyright - no longer valid, just place it into your footer as regular text

reply-to - not sure what this does

cache - must be set via htaccess/server side. and http-equiv is no longer valid

Cheers

What error is given? Those are still valid HTML5 tags - see this.

Only difference I see is self-close in your code.

Nope, won't cause any problems. The xml sitemap is what you will submit to G and search engines while the HTML one is for your site visitors who want to see all your pages (although it will be crawled and indexed as well).

Few notes,

• They have the term "marriage counseling" in their URL which improves their rankings
• They have more content on their website (each of their services has a lengthy, unique page of content)
• Your content is very similar to each other (8/10/12/14 week marriage counseling content has a lot of overlap)

I would try to create more unique content pages for your site and see if they improves your rankings. Aside from that, keep building strong backlinks. Check out their profile and see which links you want and can get - then do it!

Cheers,
Oleg

Follow & Connect

Excellent analysis! #6 and #7 are the big ones. Make sure your site is seen as relevant and get links from other relevant sites.

In GWT > Optimization > Content Keywords - this table will give you a gist of the kind of keywords on your site. If its not what you were expecting to see, you need to change your content.

If the current site is getting a lot of traffic and the new site would be a drastic change from the current site, I would look into hiring a coder to fix the hardcoded urls issue.

Everything you mentioned is plausible if not probable including negative SEO impact, loss of domain authority/ranking and issues with branding.

If the new site is going to be on different pages, make sure you 301 redirect the old pages to the new subdomain/domain. Aside from that, can't really do much =/

Good luck,
Oleg

Follow & Connect

You lose some juice with a 301 and there is usually a 2 week period where you drop out of SERPs for that page. However, the rankings usually come back strong after that.

A note about rewriting pages in general: I've rewritten old pages and seen improvements in SERPs. The risk would lie in how big of a content change occurs - if you have a page about dogs and rewrite for cats, you won't be rankings as well for dog terms. The benefit of rewriting over creating a new page is that it already has ranking power and can rank more easily for new terms.

Since #2 is the one that is getting shared/linked to frequently now (and I'm assuming a better domain name), I would slowly redirect the pages from #1 to #2. Try it for a few pages and see what kind of results you get. Just give G 2 weeks to update your rankings.

Cheers,
Oleg

Follow & Connect

Pretty important - read https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2409437

"Googlebot couldn’t access your site because the request timed out or because your site is blocking Google. As a result, Googlebot was forced to abandon the request."

If G can't access your site, it's not going to end well.

I see you on page 4 on google.ca for the term - http://www.google.ca/#q=human+resource+books&start=30

Not in top 100 for .com

Sooooo. the .ca domain is definitely helping you rank in G.ca so you are appearing in their SERPs. For the .com results, you will see that the competition isn't very easy. Many books.google, amazon and publisher results means that you need to build plenty of high authority links before you can expect to see any rankings.

The .ca domain is also hurting your changes of ranking high on the .com (international) search results.

That would be redundant. If anything, maybe offer the option to hide the transcript (for people who don't want to read it and it gets in the way). Otherwise, just make sure you mark it up with all the proper mark up.

Text in hidden divs is indexed and included in SERPs. The content is still on the page just in video form - I don't see a problem with adding the transcript for SE to "read" the video. I would recommend also offering the option to view the transcript via click for visitors - some people may not have access to sound or prefer reading.

Also be sure to use Schema markup for VideoObject - there is an attribute for transcript that you should apply.

Check out their official guide and link up your G+ profile via option 1 or 2.

You can then check to see if you did it successfully via GWT or the Structured Data Testing Tool - should see your profile pic show up.

Download Screaming Frog spider and crawl your website. That should help you find if/where you reference 404 pages.

Cheers

That is the most likely case. It could also be that she has author markup on the contact page which takes preference over the homepage if she is connected via G+.

But if you can't replicate it and incognito shows the homepage, I wouldn't really worry about it.

I've run into the same problem a few times. Change link structure > update all link references EVERYWHERE > double check to make sure no old link references exist > remove the 404 errors from GWT > they come back a week later citing the link on pages that DO NOT have the link =/ Very frustrating since I like seeing a nice 0 in the errors section.

The only way to fix it (from my experience) is to set up 301 redirects from the old pages to the new ones.That way there is no 404 code and G will pick up that the old 404 page is actually a new, existing page.

Good luck!

Do you mean preventing your account from being hijacked? - Have a strong password. Maybe enable geolocation (in case account gets hijacked, can use it as evidence).

Not sure how else phishing/spamming fits in with twitter.