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I have been struggling with the google updates but recently we started a new project and by using guest blog posts we were able to achieve a top 3 ranking. It delivered traffic and sales so SEO still works. This is my understanding of the current situation - 1. Generic Keywords (forget it) 2. Go niche and long tail (but thats been the case for a while right) 3. Using related searches 4. Incoming links using brands and a wider range of phrases and urls. 5. Content thats sharable 6. Google plus buttons etc This is my current understanding I would love to hear your thoughts.

One of my clients received a letter from another seo company touting for business. I would be interested in hearing what your opinion is on this fellow SEO providers. Letter attached - > letter.jpg

We had a call this week from a company who have been using a SEO company providing link building services. The back links they have been generating are seriously dodgy back links ! www.jumpforfun.co.uk Here are some examples of the back links - http://www.utc.fr/interactions/?FORUM-DEBAT-quel-s-role-s-pour-les http://mad.blogtv.uol.com.br/2010/03/12/homenagens-ao-grande-cartunista-glauco http://medical.gate2finance.com/node/67 Yes a seriously dodgy back link profile ! He received the following email from google via webmaster tools - Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.jumpforfun.co.uk/, We've detected that some of your site's pages may be using techniques that are outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines. Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes. We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you've made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google's search results. If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request. If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support. Sincerely, Google Search Quality Team I mentioned to the client I would speak to the community on SEO moz to the owner of the site and see what opinions other SEO's would have on solving this issue.

Always looking for easier ways to identify new clients needed SEO help. I wondered is it possible to find newly registered domains ? Could an api be made to pull out domains listed via date registered.

I am looking for some help an inspiration on a quality email for sharing content. I don't want it to be in your face please share my article but at the same time I want people to act upon it 🙂 Thanks for your help guys and gals 🙂

Does anyone else find the sent message screen annoying on SEO Moz ? If you send a private message you are greeted by the landing screen that you have to click again to remove . Why ? Can it be removed if enough of us agree ? 🙂 Power to fellow SEO's

My client site http://www.tshirtsubway.com has a ABC quick find selector on the homepage of the site and throughout the site and as a result is is showing an error of to many links on the SEO moz error crawls reports. I wanted some advice on improving this and perhaps looking for an alternative also looking at the current setup and asking is this wrong.

for link building

One of our clients sites rankings has been jumping around like crazy and I have never experienced this before. The site - http://www.tshirtsubway.com Was 2nd for Music T shirts on Google.co.uk Plus top of the 2nd page for T shirts. Then all of a sudden the ranking for T Shirts disappered. Do you think the site could be subject to a spam link attack from a rival ? What is the best way forward with resubmission to Google webmaster tools. The strange this is the site is now 4th for Music T Shirts so still ranking ? But for that word it has disappeared... Head scratching as I type...

I have a client who is concerned about the performance of his images ranking on Google Images. I have taken a look at the obvious things like - alt tags, title tags , file names. I am not sure why he is struggling quite so much to get his images ranked well as the sites he is competing against and who are already ranking are a very poor quality. This is his site - http://www.ukweddingfavours.co.uk Would really appreciate your feedback and I can dish out some good answers.

Looking online I noticed sites like mashable listing share buttons on the left of the screen I think this is a great idea and a lot more prominent. So I then looked at the current solution we have on wordpress that lists them at the bottom of the individual posts. does anyone know of any plugins that list the share buttons to the left of the page ?

I am not quite sure why this is happening but the Moz point s total on my logo when I hover over it is around 6 times more than the one on my main section. Can someone explain why ? Screen-Shot-2011-11-23-at-01.21.22.png

Week after week we get enquiries for Link building services. Time and time again we are losing out on contracts and deals... My stance - We work on your site for a period of time doing link building so 2 days in the month a link building member will research competitors , yadi , yadi, ya 🙂 You get the picture right... But the customers are being told by less scrupulous companies the numbers of links they will receive. Impossible unless you are buying them right ? So it reaches that point when you start questioning being 100% honest... What advice would you give me on selling link building services...

Rand Fishkin has become a hero of mine recently I respect what he has achieved and would love to have the chance to drop him one email and ask him a few questions. I contacted him via Google plus but I didnt received an answer I then wondered has Rand lost touch with the little people now he is a celebrity in his own right or can I actually email him directly and ask a few questions. Will he speak to us little people 🙂 Can I get him on Facebook or my Linked In account and get a recommendation...

After 28 long years of wait this year I finally made it to the United States of America. I grew up on "The A Team" , "Knight Rider" and Mcdonalds cheese burgers from 2 years onwards. I am as American as a English person could possibly be. It wasn't until I arrived in Florida and spent two weeks in the great country that I understood the difference in the minds and mentality of people. People were nicer ! People on the whole had a can do mentaily. If your a success people congratulate you for it . Unlike the UK.... Plus people were not scared to make a fool of themselves... (People jumping up and down at traffic lights with advertising boards) Now to my question - I loved it so much I want to go back and I figured me and my wife and 3 year old may have a extended break next time where I can work on vacation maybe over a month or so. I would love to get to know as many SEO's and people based in the USA as possible please and introduce myself etc. Hey who knows maybe SEO Moz can change my future (fingers crossed) Thanks to all the people that get in touch !

What techniques do you use for the optimisation of images on Google. Alt tag , image title Surrounding text Anyone tested actual linking to the image url and not the page url. I have achieved hundreds of top listed images but when it gets competitive what is the most useful technique you have used. Thanks

I am aways being my worst critique and constantly looking to improve. Thats how you become a winner right ! something I feel I can improve on is Keyword analysis and targeting. I would really appreciate hearing stories of other SEO's on here , gaining an insight into the techniques you use and how your keyword analysis has evolved as time has gone by. Thanks in advance.

the real time news feed style in which we all use the internet these days. How do you think this new change is going to effect things ? “This is the result of them saying we need to find a way to more effectively get fresh content up,” said Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Land and an industry expert. “It does help with the issue of people thinking, ‘Wow, if I need to find out about something breaking, I’ll go to Facebook or Twitter for that.’ ” Is google reacting to a massive loss of traffic volume from Facebook and Twitter ? I also ask the question would Facebook benifit from some form of built in search engine or would this never happen ??

Is it possible to make your site un readable by the back link checkers such as open explorer ? Or would it have a negative effect on search engine rankings. Sorry I have been in the business for 10 years and it has never crossed my mind. Figured I would say that before I get all the "I can't believe you don't know that" type comments 🙂

I have a customer that has asked me to find out the best way to move forwards with foreign languages. He sells Jukeboxes in the UK and has found recently that a large number of his customers are coming from abroad due to the financial climate. So he wants to appear on the first page of google in Russia, Arabic countries, French speaking countries and China. Whats the best route ? Add pages to his current .co.uk site or look at purchasing domains for each country. Then submitting them to each google. So Google.ru etc. Thanks

Has anyone else had experience with different CMS's for Ecommerce . Ones that create static pages and others that dynamically create pages. What differences have you seen with rankings on google with the two. Here are two examples of sites using static framed pages and one with a system that dynamically creates pages - http://www.gardeningexpress.co.uk/ - static frames and http://www.floraselect.co.uk - dynamically

I have a customer who runs campaigns on adwords and we have had real problems with his ads being taken down due to certain ingredients being present in supplements. Now we move towards his SEO campaign and we wondered if the natural listings are effected by sites that list banned substances or pages listed on the adwords policy as being banned ? Has anyone experienced a site being downgraded by link being present from sites that provided products or services that are banned from being advertised on Google adwords ?

What are peoples opinions on a blog and its appearance in relation to a site. The two ways being - 1. A Blog that is fully fitting within the theme of the main website. 2. A seperate entity following a standard wordpress theme Now I have seen many different scenarios and I wanted to share some experiences and gain insight from other people on here. I once spoke to a web designer who totally frowned upon the idea of it being a separate entity. "It looks cheap it doesn't fit within the design" My thoughts are benefits can been found with having a separate looking blog it provides that realistic "student" type look and feel adding a "realistic" angle. Thanks for your opinions,

One of our customers has been getting a whole bunch of really relevant links recently as many of his competitors are actually going to his site copying the text from his page and forgetting to remove the links that are within the text. Its amazing we have links from major UK providers of his products totally for free. This is where linking to the actual page itself is coming into play and we are gaining good back links. Has anyone else experienced this before ?

Hi Guys We run a marketing company based in the Uk and rank well for internet marketing on google but conversions and bounce rates are quite high. The site is one of those constantly in progress due to Time and budgets so we are well aware of the short comings. I wanted to however get some other peoples opinions on why our site doesnt convert very well and is there anything you can suggest. You never stop learning I have been in internet marketing for 10 years so willing to listen to any suggestions. Thanks here is the site - http://www.onlinemediadirect.co.uk

One thing I recently pondered following the introduction of logos on reports bringing that level of personalisation for the customers is ... would it be somehow possible to take it a step further and have a login on your own personal site that could somehow enable clients to download and look at the information as and when they wanted. An almost mini sep moz for clients where customers login through your own site ?

I setup a few tiny urls last week to test if the pass on any page authority. Is this something you have tried and tested ?

How are directories ok for buying links ? How can the funds be claimed to be used to review your submission when everyone knows you are basically buying a link ? What experiences have you had god and bad with directories ? Is it a free for all any directory will do or should you be more selective in your approach. If so what are the signs to look out for on a top quality directory.

Is it ok to add the SEO Moz logo to the homepage of your website  ? We are a UK based Internet Marketing company and we are looking to inform our audience that we use SEO Moz to manage our SEO clients campaigns. here is our site - http://www.onlinemediadirect.co.uk I am looking to add it on the SEO section to the left of the page.

I recently had a discussion with a fellow SEO on the importance of older domains. The guy said he uses a lot of auctions to dig out old domains and use them to setup sites. I considered this as a potential way of generating incoming links. He did mention he had been punished with the google Panda update. What are peoples opinions on this as a way of generating incoming links. A domain may cost around $10 plus the hosting could be found quite cheap -  it seems a good idea ? Plus if you get lucky and perhaps get a domain with existing authority it could really be a good investment. In research I do come across these sites quite a lot a basic wordpress install with pages added linking into other sites. They type that have no contact details and you have to find the whois info to gain any contact with the webmaster.

I spotted a few bogus links today on one of my clients sites got in touch with the sites via email asking for them to remove the links. also did a whois and emailed them but have had no reply. Whats the best solution to this if they wont remove the links ? Is there anything you can do. I am just worried these links may have a negative effect on the site.

Hi Guys I just wanted to give you all a heads up on something I adjusted recently that worked really well and wanted to ask for your own experiences on this. 1. We have a blog that adds regular content and within the blog we link from the keyword we are targeting. Standard stuff right ! We were struggling for movement on a keyword so I removed the links from the articles and added a link on the site wide blogroll. The link on the blogroll included the keyword but was a longer descriptive link. Low and behold we got a first page listing when the changed it.The change in ranking was made a few days later. I have always been given the impression that site wide isn't that great ? So explain this one . Of course there are many other factors etc 🙂 What are your experiences and thoughts on what happened here ?

I must admit its every 3 months or so I check these listings 🙂 I would even admit we are that engrossed in google we forget these sites exist many times. I wanted to see if anyone had experience doing sep for these sites and what sort of techniques you used in order to help improve these rankings. I tend to get great listings on Yahoo for many sites but bing seems slightly different. Would love to find out some information on the algos on each of these.

How much do other people rate Ezines as a provider of articles and incoming links.  What are peoples experiences. It has to be one of the most strict article sites but does this make it the best ?

how often does this system update ? Its seems to stash very old results ?

When is linking from one particular keyword to much. At what point could link building from one keyword be considered spam and potentially delist a site ? Is it possible for a site to be delisted for having to many links from the same keyword ? Heard linking from the website name is more important following recent changes. I try and link from a selection of 3 to 4 keywords. Thanks for your help

What are peoples opinions on blog categories and their importance. On many blog I setup a general news category and on others I have gone to town adding detailed categories. Is there a major benefit in doing this ?

Hi I like to link from blogs on similar keywords on a regular basis but I am thinking about changing tactics as it can appear monotonous and un natural. What are peoples experiences in linking from blogs ?

I have noticed recently on open site explorer that pages are listed that contact the ending / and that dont. so for example- www.onlinemediadirect.co.uk/blog-setup and www.onlinemediadirect.co.uk/blog-setup/ They also have slightly different page authority. Is it worth setting up a redirect or does google not need this ? The page ranks well of course.

These are the numbers of words I have heard mentioned as being "good enough" for the categories of ecommerce pages. Even at a stretch 50 words maximum. What are peoples opinions on the volume of words required ?

One worrying thought following a meeting with a friend in the Poker industry was when he told me he heard some rival companies tried to spam other sites with paid listings a few years ago ? Does this happen all the time ? Also could it happen in other industries ? I was worried when hearing this news and then thought about an SEO companies position in all of this. Could an SEO company be falsely blamed for this sort of behaviour ? Is it is better to cover these things in contracts with customers.

For wordpress ? I have been using Photo dropper recently which allow copyright free images to be added to posts which helps things look a lot neater . What seo related plugins do you use and non seo plugins ?

Sorry for the silly Shakespearean introduction but what are peoples opinions on leaving tag clouds to be indexed or no indexable by the search engines. I tend to leave them non indexable at the moment. I use wordpress for blogging as do most others.

Getting a site listed on the first page for most keywords is fairly easy but pushing for the final 3 positions can be difficult. Have you ever experienced a point where you feel you have given all you can for a campaign and are left scratching your head as to why your not taking over the competitors site ? From experience SEO only tends to count once you reach those top positions. When you reach burnout with a keyword with link building etc Where do you turn ?

Hiya fellow SEO's I have been working on a site - www.hplmotors.co.uk  and I must say it has become difficult due to flaws with the content management system . We are speaking with the web site makers to be able to add a unique title, description to all pages. I know what is wrong but I would also like some 2nd opinions on this and welcome any suggestions for the site. A burnt out seo 🙂 thanks

We use several copy writers for regular blog posts and they do a great job. They rewrite breaking news stories and keep them as unique as possible to avoid duplicate content. When it comes to writing text for pages on websites they dont half take there time. I will need one to write a page of 2000 words at some point. Do you think that is a unfair task and what time limit would you look for on this. I am thinking 7 days. Whats the best ways of managing Copywriters to get the best out of them and making sure they keep content fresh.

I Use Blog roll links all the time but recently they seem to be having a lower effect on listings. Is there a limit on Blog roll links you place on a blog. Internal blog roll links and external blog roll links. Also do you rename your blog roll to something such as popular links like we do ?

What are the other seo's opinions on linking the same keyword you are targeting lets take an example like Trampolines. So we have a Online shop selling trampolines would you feel it a good or bad thing to link the keyword trampolines from the homepage to the homepage almost creating a loop. Some SEO's say yes some say no ?

I tend to focus on two or three main keywords to target from the homepage. In fact come to think of it from all pages. Do you target up to 10 keywords of more from one page. Taking longer tail keywords into consideration. Granted the limits to any phrase or keyword group.

I tend to work on the on page changes first of all following keyword research. Then take a look at some internal linking, Setup a wordpress blog on /blog or sub domain and get my copywriter to start adding regular content . Next stage is link building Old fashioned emails requests, blog comments taking a look through existing sites we own for relevant places. On going analysis once positions change.