Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi my cottage has star ratings in Google places, is there a way to show them under my sites in the google results?

Thanks for any advice

UKAEds8

ha Spencer, what a muppet i was being, helps if i had used " after rel= it's easy to spot when you spell it right! lesson learned again....

Hi we have been looking at competitors websites do see how we can improve,  this website jumped out at me straight away as spammy gateway pages where 3 words was the only difference on all of the pages.  Why does google give them so much weight still and rank them so highly?  I thought this is what G was trying to avoid?  Am I missing something here in terms of great SEO opportunity? A checked for noindex or canonical and I cannot see any.  Love to hear some feedback. Cheers

With the increasing use of a single codebase to serve both mobile and desktop sites and the use of off-canvas menus which are loaded but only displayed n mobile phones, does anyone have any view on whether this will impact google's understanding of the page.

The off canvas menu is the same as the top menu but loads in its own divs at the bottom of the source.

Any thoughts or anybody testing different methods

We have been using Google+ to load our images straight on to our site, we did this to make sure our site loaded fast. google+ delivers them to website at the size we specify, so even if original is say 4000px x 3000px we can ask for them at 100x100 and they send as resized scale. we dont have to manage sizes just the original images and their tagging

If we wanted to improve our SEO opportunities should we be doing this another way?  Our images show if you look in the image serp but they dont appear on the main serp.

How much of a difference would having the images on our own domain rather than having them on Google+

I am working through the recommended list below, would love to hear guys who are doing well with images and have to manage 1000's of them.

There are a number of ways to optimise your images to increase your visibility within Google image search, and the chance of being featured within the main search results (as seen in the 'tablet PC' example):

Use a short descriptive piece of text featuring desired keywords within the image alt text attribute.
Save the image using a descriptive file name
Create an Image XML sitemap
Ensure your images directory isn't blocked by robots.txt
Ideally host images on the same domain
And surround the image with related text content to build a stronger page context/association

Sorry for slow response kids school holidays have started! Yeah Doug i thought their on-page was well stuffy, almost spammy but some how they still get away with it.

What i have noticed on a few tests we have done in May / June is how quickly I can get a new site to rank for 2 or 3 keywords and stick in a matter of weeks.

Bang goes my theory of building one great website and it's back to building micro sites specific and not have all eggs in one basket.

Tom I know I should not get wound up by it, but when you spend 10 years on a brand / site to be beaten by some crappy sites it's hard to swallow, like anchovies

Dan yeah the site has ranked high for a while, and I see his other sites doing well, I may wake up one day and he gets hit across his network but to date that's not happened and I am not sure he is actually breaking any Google rules.

Hi Guys,

It's bugging the crap out of me why this site does so well http://www.stagedinburgh.com/ when I look at it's link profile its so weak and terrible plus many links comes from  the sites they own. Somehow the site out ranks many sites for search terms like edinburgh stag party, edinburgh stag do, edinburgh stag weekends.  Am I missing something?  They seem to only have links from 13 domains and they aint great.

What am I missing?

We have just relaunched http://www.gobananas.co.uk/ and made the site much smaller than .com and dissallowed robots on 98% of the site.  The goal with this site is to get users to use the search facility rather than go through our menus like we have on .com

Should I host the UK site on a different IP number to the .com?Thanks

So again I would look at the competition and look at ratio of their deep link to home page links.  I have focused much more on using internal links to pass juice on and use of anchor text, I have found the pages I deep linked to suffered the most, the pages that had no or very few back links to seem to have done better if I have good internal links to them.

Each industry / keyword is different, what works for one industry does not mean it will work for another.  % of brand vrs money making kw's vrs white noise (click here, etc) will really depend on what sector you are in.  My advice would be look at the link profile of the top 3 sites in your industry and match what they do then slowly improve on it.

If the top 3 ranking sites on average have say 7% White noise links, 60% branded and 33% money making kw's, then that would be what I would aim for.  I have learned over the last 12 months that one brush does not fit all!

Hi Guys, I have spent 2 days looking at our site and competitors after the update, 3 things jump out straight away for us.  I am in the travel industry and still on the first page of the major KW's but in the 8 to 10 region, was 2 to 5.

1. The sites that have moved up both have shops selling merchandise which is not the main focus of their site, anyone else spotted sites with a eCommerce section have benefited from latest update?

2. Sites we have links from, although they look like a travel sites, maybe be themed differently by Google.  Anybody know a good tool that will help determine what theme a site is?  Images, design and content don't always seem to be a good indicator, I think back links to the domain has a big effect on the site you get the link from.  Any tool that will help speed up this process would be great.  We need more quality links from travel sites (or at least what google thinks is a travel related site).

3. The competitors who have done well seem to have 45% links to home page, we only had 28% so we are focusing now on links to home page.

We don't really stand out from the top 10 sites in any other way in terms of other indicators like branded keywords vrs money making kw's.

Any thoughts or feedback would be great.

Thats exactly what we are thinking of doing Make h2 bigger and at the top and H1 lower down and less obvious.   I'm glad that the feedback has been the same as what we feel.

yeah it confirms what I feel thanks

Because H1 "may" carry some  weight with Google does it have to be placed at the top of the page?  Can I place it towards the bottom of the page instead in normal body size?  My goal is to keep the main keywords in the H1 but create a much friendlier title for the customer to read at the top of the page.

Can you mix content up from your website e.g. paintball site A, C and E on one page and B,D and F on another if the towns are close together?  What I'm not sure about is how different in % terms the content actually has to be.

If we have less written content then the amounts of words we have to actually change would be much less.

The challenge we have is we have build the site this time with filtering in mind, so rather than making customers navigate we allow them to be able to search which is much better in terms of getting the activities they want.  The downside is now our site does not show for the long tail as we reduced the pages massively.

so we dont have the resources if we did it manually but what would happen is the content would be different on each page as we would only show activity sites within a 50 miles radius.  And we would make certain text, h1 etc different and relate to the town.

Below are some examples of sites I see doing well ie number 1 using this method

Our content would be much better than say http://www.justpaintballDOTcoDOTuk/site_guide/Aberfeldy.htm or http://www.goballisticDOTcoDOTuk/paintball_in_/ABERFELDY.asp

But as you say getting this wrong is my worry.

Hi Folks,

Over the last 10 months we have focused on quality pages but have been frustrated with competition websites out ranking us because they have bigger sites.  Should we focus on the long tail again?

One option for us is to take every town across the UK and create pages using our activities.  e.g.

Stirling
Stirling paintball
Stirling Go Karting
Stirling Clay shooting

We are not going to link to these pages directly from our main menus but from the site map.

These pages would then show activities that were in a 50 mile radius of the towns.  At the moment we have have focused our efforts on Regions, e.g. Paintball Scotland, Paintball Yorkshire focusing all the internal link juice to these regional pages, but we don't rank high for towns that the activity sites are close to.

With 45,000 towns and 250 activities we could create over a million pages which seems very excessive!  Would creating 500,000 of these types of pages damage our site? This is my main worry, or would it make our site rank even higher for the tougher keywords and also get lots of traffic from the long tail like we used to get.

Is there a limit to how big a site should be?

edit

I am looking for sites that will rank high in SERP's for my brand name, any suggestion would be great.  I am not looking for links from these sites.

Cool good idea, the problem I have is when we suggest products that maybe similar, not sure if we can automatically add nofllow tags, also like you I've never been to kean on it.  I'm hoping that google will see we are linking to relevant pages because they are relevant and not because its SEO driven.  The links on most pages are different so some pages have less than 90 while other have 200+ (the further u drill into the site the more links naturally appear).  What I have not seen is the pages with 200 links doing any worse or better than the ones with 100.

Hi, we have been developing our new site and improving the internal linking for 2 reasons, 1 to improve spidering and 2 to up sell more to customers.  The error reports from SEOMoz are showing our biggest problem is too many internal links from 2000+ pages.  How much of an impact does it have by having say 180 internal links compared to say 99 on a page?

Our website has been moving up the SERPs so should i worry about it or should I ignore the warnings and continue with the menu system and internal linking we have in place already?

Thanks