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Hey Dan,
Here's the answer from Adam at SEOmoz on 3/19/2012.
"Supporting https is definitely in the plans, but it's a big project (following some other big projects) for the Linkscape team. Our current plan is to address this in during the last quarter of this year. I apologize for the wait."
It all comes down to the number of links pointing to the sites, as well as the quality (and relevancy) of the sites linking to you all.
After a quick look, your site has a domain authority of 29 with link from 85 domains.
The competitors that rank ahead of you have a domain authority of at least 50 and have hundreds or thousands of sites pointing to them.
On page factors are becoming less and less important. To see a recent study, check out this article: http://www.theopenalgorithm.com/correlation-data/on-page-factors/
I suggest you create some awesome content that people will love, and then use that to do some link building. It will probably be a long process, but also a very rewarding one. All things considered, I think you should feel very good about where you rank now. Keep on keepin' on and move up those SERPs!
It's a little bit more tricky now, but definitely still possible. Here's how I do it:
It will probably take a while to load, but you'll get all of your keywords in one easy to export place.
Unfortunately, I don't think it's as simple as qualifying folks by their years of experience. There will be some brilliant SEOs with only one year of experience, and some awful SEOs with 10 years of experience. The same goes for just about every industry.
I'd recommend having someone do this job on a contract basis. For example, have them send you a keyword research report for $500. Then, if you love the report, you might look into signing them up for an hourly contract to keep doing your SEO going forward, or set them up with a monthly retainer. This way if you find someone great you can have them do more work for you, and if you find a "stinker" then you're only out a few hundred bucks.
Thanks for providing some more detail Holly. I definitely think it's applicable to leave here and I'm happy to help.
Some people like to prevent search engines from crawling category pages out of a fear of duplicate content. For example, say you have a post that's at this URL:
site.com/blog/chocolate-milk-is-great.html
and it's also the only post in the category "milk" with this url:
then search engines see the same exact content (your blog post) on two different URLs. Since duplicate content is a big no-no, many people choose to prevent the engines from crawling category pages. Although, in my experience, it's really up to you. Do you feel like your category pages will provide value to users? Would you like them to show up in search results? If so, then make sure you let Google crawl them.
If you DON'T want category pages to be indexed by Google, then I think there's a better choice than using robots.txt. Your best bet is applying the noindex, follow tag to these pages. This tag tells the engines NOT to index this page, but to follow all of the links on it. This is better than robots.txt because robots.txt won't always prevent your site from showing up in search results (that's another long story), but the noindex tag will.
If I'm not making sense at all then please just let me know :).
Lastly, from what I can see on your site and blog, it doesn't look like the category pages for your blog are actually in your robots.txt file. Have someone do a double check.
To check this myself, I just did a google search for this URL:
http://blog.squarespace.com/blog/?category=Roadmap
And it showed up in Google right away. Looks like something isn't going according to plan. Don't worry though, that happens all of the time and it should be an easy fix.
This is very interesting.
This might be showing the power of their title tag and URL. They have "adoption agency" in the title tag and "adoption" in the URL. Bethany.org doesn't have either. Still a bit baffling though.
If you're up for a test, try changing your title tag to start off with "adoption agency". Of course, only do this if it's right for your business.
If it were my site, then I would remove the bottom content. It's formatted in such a way that as a visitor of your site, I would never read it. It looks like legal text, or text that is just there for SEO. If it is there just for SEO, then I think you're better off targeting those keywords on different pages. For example, target "fairy costumes" on a fairy costumes page...rather than your homepage.
From my experience, internal anchor links don't correlate well with search rankings. For that reason, I think you should use the anchor text that is best for your user. If that also happens to help your SEO then great. If not, then I wouldn't worry about it.
The footer links serve no SEO value if you already link to those pages. If you link to the same page multiple times, then Google will generally just use your first anchor text.
Hi Nick,
Welcome to the SEOmoz community! It's great to have you :).
I'll give you the short answer, followed by a much longer (and probably more helpful) version.
Short answer: Follow your heart.
Long answer: All things being equal (which will never actually be the case) Google has no preference toward .com or .me. So, that means you ought to take some time to think about the people visiting your site, and the people linking to your site.
Which version is going to have more credibility, be easier to remember, AND be easier to link to? I'm pretty sure the answer to all three of these is the .com domain, although, like I said earlier, follow your heart.
Regardless of what you choose, I suggest securing both domains, and 301 redirecting one to the other.
Hope this helps!
Phil
Hi Sheryl,
If those URLs are returning a 404 Error, then you don't need to delete them -- they're already gone :).
The 404 error is simply a response code which says the page could not be found. The likely reason for this is exactly what you said in your question: since you renamed your URLs, you basically deleted the old URL and replaced it with a new one.
In general, there's nothing that you NEED to do, but here are a few suggestions:
If you link to any of those 404 URLs on your site anywhere, then be sure to change those links to point to the correct, new URLs.
Were any of these old URLs very popular? Did they get a lot of links and a lot of traffic? Are people still trying to go to them? If so, then you can 301 redirect those URLs to point to the new, correct URLs.
I hope that this helps. If you have any other questions then just let me know.
Phil
If you're willing to share the URL of your site then some of us here might be able to help. It's hard to analyze and offer suggestions without seeing the site since there are so many different things that it could be.
You can get that information from Screaming Frog (hooray for a free tool!) or from SEOmoz (if you happen to be a paid member).
Hi Boo,
First of all, congrats on getting that number one ranking!
Now, onto your question...
I would suggest creating another page targeted specifically to large and giant horse buggies. I'm sure that you could create a targeted and awesome page for these keywords that would really benefit folks looking for larger buggies.
My guess is that if you try to target these phrases on your homepage that you'll just be doing too much. It won't look great to users, it will be hard to send enough signals to the search engines (that's a lot of keywords to use), and that's a lot of different anchor text to get for one page.
To use a more modern example, if I had a site selling cars, then I would target the keyword "cars" with one page (I haven't actually done the research) and would target the keyword "suv" with another since folks doing those searches are looking for two very different things.
Hope this helps!
Phil
More action is definitely required :).
There currently is no redirect set up. When I visit http://accuposretail.com/ I receive a status of 200. If there was a redirect then I'd be able to see either a 301 or 302 redirect.
This is definitely a BIG duplicate content issue that you'll want to jump on fast. Have them 301 redirect the old domain to the new.
Best of luck!
Hi Ben,
Here are thoughts off the top of my head. Hope they help :).
Alright, I hope this helps Ben. If you have any questions then just let me know.
Phil
The problem is with this line:
meta-refresh: 0;url=http://akaalpet.com/default.aspx
You're basically telling the search engines "I know you came here to check out www.akaalpet.com but I'd rather you head over to http://akaalpet.com/default.aspx"
Because of that, when someone visits www.akaalpet.com you're redirecting them to that other URL right away.
Make sense?
Hi Nathan,
Despite using a different plugin, I think Dan's advice still applies.
In general I suggest INDEXing the categories. Make these your keyword rich overarching categories.
For archives, I'll general NOINDEX those. They're likely not providing a lot of value to searchers, and could possibly create duplicate content.
For tag archives, I also suggest NOINDEX.
As long as you INDEX your categories, then you can kind of just follow your heart with the rest of them. Luckily, there really isn't a worst case scenario. If you're nervous, then just don't NOINDEX anything and see what happens. If you're happy with the SERPs then keep it as is.
I know it's awfully stressful to make sure you get this all correct at the start, but I promise this won't make or break your SEO. Feel free to experiment to see what works best for you.
Best of luck Gary! You're on the right track!
The nofollow attribute and robots.txt file serve different purposes.
Nofollow Attribute
This attribute is used to tell search engines, "Don't follow this link", or even "Don't follow any links on this page." It doesn't prevent pages from being indexed, just prevents the search engines from following that link from that particular page.
Robots.txt
This file contains a list of pages that the search engine should not access and should not index.
To read more about robots.txt check out this page: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/01/controlling-how-search-engines-access.html
For more on Nofollow, check out this page: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=96569
Hope this helps!
In my opinion, the best possible thing to do is download the data from Open Site Explorer, and then use LinkDetective.com to analyze it. All of this is completely free and breaks down the links of your competitors into different types. For example, you'll be able to see if your competitor has a ton of guest posting links, comment links, directory links, etc. Once you have this information, then you can easily copy the strategy of your competitors, or (better yet) improve upon it!
Here's a link to a video that will walk you through the entire process: Video Link
Personally, I would 404 these pages.
But first, I would spend a good amount of time looking for incoming links. Perhaps take a random 100 of your 1,000 pages and do a backlink check on all of them. Is nobody linking to them....and they're not generating traffic....and you don't have a new page to replace it....then just 404 them.
However, if you find out that magically these pages have lots of links, then you'll want to put on your thinking cap. Might it be worth creating a new page to point those links to? Or, are you better off just reaching out to these folks and asking them to link to a different page on your site?
Also, on a semi related note, I wouldn't 404 all 1,000 pages at the same time. Do a few hundred at a time and see if anything happens. If there's no huge rush, it's better to space it out.
My hunch is that your your version of Excel has a semicolon set as the "list separator" rather than the comma. With that being the case, when you try to open the file, Excel doesn't quite know where to separate things.
To help out, I found this great guide for you that provides a few different ways for you to solve your issue.
It completely depends on your site and the competition.
For example, if you're trying to complete for "super duper elephant lamp" then you can be on page 1 within a week. Frankly, you could probably have the #1 result in a week.
However, for a keyword like "lamp" you'd have a lot more trouble getting on that first page.
Basically, without looking into your specific niche, there's no way to give an educated answer.
-Phil
PS If anyone reading this happens to go into the "super duper elephant lamp" business then I expect to be paid royalties :).
We wrote freakishly similar responses at the exact same time. High five!