Welcome to the Q&A Forum

What tactics have you found to be effective in promoting an interesting infographic that you have created?

How do you think Google would go about devaluing infographic links?

Suppose the infographic image itself is not hyperlinked to the creator's site but there is a paragraph that mentions the creator and links to their site. How would Google distinguish the infographic creator's link from other external links on the page?

Here's a tactic that is pretty inexpensive and should work in most niches.

Find non-profits that are related to your niche and write an article on your site that highlights the great work they are doing. Then contact the site and let them know about it. If they have a press page they might include your link.

Another idea is to interview influential people or experts in your niche on your blog. Often people will link back to your site to share the interview with their readers.

Another idea is to create an industry survey using survey monkey to find out some interesting information and then publish the results on your site. Then followup with the people you surveyed and  tell them about the resource.

Suppose you have an interesting infographic that you are promoting. Should you be cautious about having it published on sites that only publish infographics? Do you think these sites pass any link value?

Suppose you publish a guest post on a relevant and quality blog and then you have that site also write a guest post for you. Is this considered natural? What do you think of this tactic? Is there risk of a penalty for exchanging links?

Is it a bad idea to spend resources to get a second link from a site that already links to you? It seems like the marginal value of each additional link is much smaller than the first link.

Suppose you have a page on your site that is a couple thousand words long. How would you determine when to split the page into two and are there any SEO advantages to doing this like being more focused on a specific topic. I noticed the Beginner's Guide to SEO is split into several pages, although it would concentrate the link juice if it was all on one page.

Suppose you have a lot of comments. Is it better to move comments to a second page at a certain point? Sometimes the comments are not super focused on the topic of the page compared to the main text.

I recently read about a well known company giving away a large prize and offering anyone a chance to win by Liking their Facebook Page.

Has there been any statements provided by Google on how they view the attempt to increase  Facebook Likes through contests.

Or if they have not revealed anything, what do you think Google's approach would be based on their history?

I noticed that some infographics have really small font.

I think that the intent is to make the font small so that people who see the infographic (on a blog that embeds it) have to squint and then are compelled to click on the image to be redirected to the owner's website.  Often bloggers post the smaller size to fit on their blog.

Do you think this is a good practice and is aiming for the image link better/worse than a just a text link e.g. Infographic courtesy of Acme Co.

Thanks!

Suppose you are being outranked for a keyword phrase by a competitor but you have a significantly higher page authority and domain authority. 9 out of 10 people would consider the content better on our page. We have more links pointing to our page from highly authoritative sites than they do.

What other reasons could explain why we are being outranked?

I've read that following the Penguin update, too many sitewide links can be a risk.

What percentage of your linking domains are sitewide? What is a good percentage to aim for?

Does this work for both Linux server software and Microsoft server software? Should there already be an .htaccess file or do you usually have to upload it to the server files via FTP?

I try to stay away from these paid submission infographic sites. There are plenty that publish your infographics for free. I agree that it is better to target sites that are relevant to your industry. If someone has published a similar infographic in the past, use Google image search to find out where it was published. These sites may also be interested in publishing your infographic.

I've noticed that the Pro webinars on SEOMoz seems to have slowed considerably with the last one in April 2012. Are there other good places you would recommend to find good SEO webinars?

Thanks!

Yes you can use a 301 redirects to concentrate the link authority of multiple pages into one page (assuming that each page has some inbound links). This may give you a rankings boost to get you over the hump.

301 redirects can be difficult to implement (http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection) so you might be better off trying to get earn more links and social media shares to your most powerful page.

I don't think you would get credit for your content if it was within an iframe and hosted on a different site like DotSub or YouTube. If you Google "HTML scroll box" you can find some good tutorials on adding an HTML scroll box. This should make it easy for Google to crawl and index the text content as part of your page but not take up too much space for human visitors.

If you also post the transcript on YouTube then I think this would be considered duplicate content by search engines. After the Panda update I would be cautious about having tons of duplicate content on your site.

A great way to build links to your site is to first seek to understand what content your audience wants (especially influencers and linkerati) and develop that content. Then look for ways to promote your content to people who have sites and tend to link to awesome content. People are more likely to link to content that is tremendously valuable or relevant. Developing relationships with key influencers in your niche can help a lot. Look for ways in which you can help these influencers before you ask for a link. Remember it is a marathon, not a sprint!

One line of thinking is that you can not have too many words on a page because the more words you have the higher the chances that a long tail phrase will attract traffic. But can you go overboard with this? Is there a limit to the number of words on a page in terms of SEO?

I have had a good experience with MediaWiki. Another fairly good one is PBWiki.

Warriorforum is one that I have found useful. There is also SEOBook which has a premium forum that I recall is a few hundred dollars per month.

A lot of sites put their Facebook "Like" widget on their homepage and it shows the number of people who like them.

Is there an SEO or marketing benefit to having this. I could see how this can provide social proof to visitors. Are there any other benefits?

If your domain name is a exact match keyword and you have a really high percentage of your links with the anchor text of that keyword, are you at high risk of getting penalized by Penguin or does Google's algorithm adjust for this. For example if your site name was AuethenticBaseballJerseys.com and people usually linked to your site at "Authentic Baseball Jerseys".

Thanks!

In terms of SEO, subfolders are almost always the better option. If your brand pages are in a subfolder, they will receive more of a boost in rankings because they are considered part of the main site by search engines. More of the link authority and trust will be passed to pages in a subfolder. Subdomains are considered as a separate site by search engines - for example the blogs like sitename.blogspot.com or sitename.wordpress.com and receive little trust and authority from the rest of the site.

Suppose you came across a website in your niche with solid domain authority that accepts guest posts. However you notice some of the guest posts are linking out to somewhat off-topic sites. If you already have an article that you think would be accepted easily and all you have to do is spend 10 minutes to craft an email pitch, would you do it? Why?

Occasionally I notice spammy sites linking to us. Should I proactively try to request that they take down the links to avoid getting penalized? Or should I just wait for Google to provide a disavow link tool.

It seems like the intended purpose of the aggregate review rich snippet is for an individual product page like a page for Madden 2013. However, what if you created a single page for all football video games that you sell and put reviews on this page for different games in this category. Could you still use the aggregate review markup for this page?

Is it possible to have multiple rich snippets show up in the SERPs for the same page?For example, could a product page have both the aggregate review rich snippet and also the author thumbnail?

If you assume that rel=author increases click through rate in SERPs, would it be a good or bad idea to implement it on every page on your site?

Thanks! It turned out that it just needed to be indexed or cached and showed up after about a week.

Hi!

I added microdata markup to a page with 10 reviews of a type of product (e.g. red basketball shoes). I used the aggregate review microdata markup so that when you use the Google rich snippet it shows that Google "sees" the rich snippet data for an average of 4 stars for 10 reviews. But when I search for the phrase, the search result doesn't show the review rich snippet. Do you have an idea why this is?

Thanks!

I haven't paid a lot for a domain name but I would definitely consider 5 figures if the domain was an exact match for a really important phrase. In my experience Google still gives a ton of bias to exact match domains and if that goes away you will still have a strong advantage over competitors because people are likely to link to you using an important keyword phrase in the anchor text. When considering a price, I would suggest looking at the potential extra traffic you would get if you had the exact match. If you assume that the exact match domain will help you rank #1 for an important kw phrase, the ROI could be very good.

If you have been linked to from authoritative sites would it be appropriate to name them on a "As Seen On" section on your homepage with their logo. Do you need permission to use their logo on your site?

A followup question: would doing this help with the Panda algorithm.

You should email Jen Lopez who manages YouMoz. You need to include the HTML for the link in your bio on your profile page. If you change your Bio now, I don't think it would change your by line on past blog posts. The SEOMoz team should be able to help you.

Good question. I think that if a guest post creates value for readers is should continue to pass link juice to the author's site. An easy way for Google to determine if the guest post is valuable is to look at whether the guest post has earned any links and if it has social mentions. It is like most linkbuilding tactics - it can be effective as long as you don't go overboard with it. I have had a positive experience with MyBlogGuest. There are definitely a lot of junk sites but you can block them. I have found more quality opportunities on MBG than BloggerLinkUp. You also want to pitch your ideas to blogs that don't publish a ton of guest posts (as Rand has suggested in a WBF).

SEOMoz's link data is the best available in my opinion but you may want to consider looking at other sources as well like Majestic SEO and Google Webmaster Tools to supplement the SEOMoz data. Sometimes these other sources find links that SEOMoz doesn't have in their index.

Suppose you have a page on your site that discusses a topic that is similar to another page but targets a different keyword phrase. The page has medium quality content, no inbound links, and the attracts little traffic. Should you 301 redirect the page to a stronger page?

Based on recent changes in Google, do you think that an off-topic guest post on a high quality domain will help you or hurt you or have no effect.

An example would be if you published a guest article on SEOMoz about SEO but your website sells basketball shoes.

What are your thoughts about the following scenarios.

Scenario 1: You purchased a banner ad on a site for $50. Then you notice that the site accepts guest posts and you contribute a guest article which has a followed link.

Scenario 2: You pitch a guest post to a blog and they say sure but first pay us $50. You say, I can't pay for links but how about I buy an ad spot for $50 instead in appreciation of you reviewing by submission.

Scenario 3: You pitch a guest post to a blog and they say sure but it will cost $50 to be published. You say sure and pay them.

Which of these would go against Google's guidelines and be considered a paid link? It seems like they are all buying links to a different degree, but they would all be indistinguishable to Google.

Posting articles on the MyBlogGuest article gallery can lead to several sites offering to publish your guest post on their blog.

However many of these sites will accept any guest post that links out to anything from socks to hotels. Would you avoid guest posting on these sites? (if it would take very little time to do)

Thanks! Those are very good and helpful suggestions. One reason I'm optimistic is that a lot of the links are from large media companies that linked to the site in articles. As long as I put similar content there I think a good number of the links will remain.

Do you think Google will discredit all previous links if the all the content is deleted? We will be moving to a different hosting company and I am considering to keep the registrar the same company (but different registration information).

What if you are moving host providers and are deleting all content and rebuilding the site from scratch with new content? Would you retain a lot of the link equity (assuming you used the same URLs as before).

Suppose you were interested in buying a successful blog with lots of powerful links and they offered to sell you the domain but none of the content. Do you have any tips for conserving the link equity when buying the domain?

(Note: about half of the inbound links are to the homepage and the plan is to relaunch the site with new content.)

Have you tried the SEOMoz LinkedIn group? I know they have a jobs board where you can post job opportunities. You could also SEOs on Twitter to share your job opportunity to their followers. Also Craigslist is usually good for receiving a lot of resumes of candidates.

In the aftermath of the Penguin and Panda monsters a lot of blog networks seem to have been devalued by Google. It seems logical that spammers will flock to low quality guest posting next. How do you think Google will determine which guest post links to devalue?

Thanks!

We do great in earning links to our homepage, articles, linkbait, and resource pages but we get few links to our product pages which are honestly pretty boring. Do you have any advice for increasing links to these important "money" pages? (we are trying to add useful content to make them less boring and unremarkable)

Suppose a blog has pretty good authority and quality articles but allows guest posters to use really random anchor text in their bios like Miami mexican restaurants when the blog is about blogging. Is there a risk that all the outbound links on the site will be devalued?