Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Suppose you have a weekly blog article and sometimes your articles earn social shares (e.g. 23 +1's on Google Plus on one article but normally 3-5 social shares). One out of 10 earns an organic link from a random blog. Would you continue publishing these blog posts?

I was listening to an interview with Rand Fishkin on the Eventual Millionaire: http://eventualmillionaire.com/rand-fishkin/ Rand said that Google says that having an author photo increases click through rate by 15% on average. I am trying to find the original source of this information. Has anyone know the source of this stat?

Suppose that you want to rank for two keyword phrases that mean the same thing but are slightly different in spelling. When should you put both keyword phrases on one page versus two pages? What are the pros and cons?

If you are using the Facebook social plugin on your site like ThinkGeek does for comments: http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/ed6b/ Are there any positive social signals from people leaving comments that could impact the SEO of the page? I searched the text of some comments in quotations in Google and it appears that the first few comments are indexed but most are not.

We have several interviews with industry experts on our site. How do we get the benefits from Author Rank? If I link to the interviewee's Google Plus profile, will Google recognize that they contributed to the site. Or do I need to get them to add our site to their contributor section on their Google Plus profile to receive any Author Rank benefits? (I know Author Rank is not believed to be affecting rankings yet). Thanks!

Suppose your press release got picked up by high authority sites like Yahoo, Morningstar, PaidContent.org, etc. But they republished the press release and kept the links. Do these links pass any value since the sites are just republishing the press release?

Suppose a company did a press release and linked to you in it. The press release was republished on some high quality sites but also over 50 low quality press release syndication sites from all over the world. Suppose that they used a money keyword anchor text to link to you. Would this be harmful to your site? What action would you take? Should we disavow these 50 links?

I received a link removal request from a site who said that they were penalized. I confirmed that they were #1 for the competitive keyword phrase that is also their domain name and now they are #10. Here are some things I noticed about the site: Over 2,500 linking domains. Dozens of high quality linking domains like Huffington Post and Mashable. Some off topic guest post links, e.g. on a SEO site. Guest post anchor text was usually their site name which is an exact match domain. Lots of top 100 resource pages that received good organic links. Infographics with links using their domain name as the anchor text. Relatively few spammy links according to Open Site Explorer. Overall their site's links were engineered but using tactics that most would consider "white hat." I don't think they violated any Google Webmaster Guidelines. Why were they penalized? What do you think?

Does anyone know how to implement a rel canonical tag on a Blogspot blog? I am trying to pass link juice from an old Blogspot blog to a self-hosted website.

Is 100 total links for every linking domain too high? I suppose I could also look at ratios of sites that are doing well in the rankings.

If you are answering common questions about your industry, should you create a separate page or place it on a existing page that is related. On one hand it may be seen as thin content on those pages. On the other hand it may be a poor user experience if someone lands on your page and has to scroll down to find the answer.

Suppose that Google made a change and all of a sudden a certain type of keyword phrase doesn't show any commercial sites on the first page of SERPs. Have you ever had this experience? What would you do in this scenario? Would you give up on those keyword phrases and target a different keyword phrase?

Suppose you write a guest post for an authoritative site, is it beneficial to claim authorship of the article by linking to your Google Plus profile and adding the site to your account as a site you contribute to? If yes, would you do this for dozens of sites? (since your contributor list could get really long).

If you are seeking links from blogs in a niche that is known for having a lot of commercial links from reviews or sponsored posts what precautions should you take? Should you avoid any blog with sponsored posts or that reviews products?

Mike Arneson has an excellent Mozinar where he shares some helpful Author Rank tactics. What specific tactics are you doing to boost the Author Rank of your site?

If your competitor has a page that is optimized for a keyword (title tag, URL, content) and you target the keyword halfway down a page with an H2 and a short paragraph about the keyword, are you at a strong disadvantage?

I recently heard someone say that if your site is on a lot of link lists (example "Useful Links" pages) this can hurt you. How likely is a Google penalty if your site is listed on tons of .edu link lists?

What if someone leaves your company and removes your site from their Google Plus profile (under "Contributor To"). Does that kill all the rel=author on the pages written by this former employee? (Should you use the email verification with employees to avoid this scenario? Email verification is a big hassle for us.)

I recently launched a trial of a retargeting campaign but after a month I have only 100 impressions and 0 clickthroughs. I am working in a competitive space but I placed a relatively low bid because I read that retargeting campaign banner ads should cost less. The number of people who have been added to the retargeting list by visiting the site is under 10,000. What do you think is most likely to be the problem causing a low number of impressions and clickthroughs? Can a retargeting campaign be successful with a small audience size?

I have heard that a good source of keyword suggestions is looking at what pops up as suggestions when you start typing into Google. My question is how do you know if it is worth your time to create content around those suggestions? If you enter these suggestions into Google's Keyword Tool, often there is no data on search volume.

What are your considerations when deciding whether to create a brand new page versus adding content to an existing page when targeting a new keyword phrase on your site? My thought is that if it is mildly competitive, a new page would make more sense since you can optimize the title tags and URL. But if it is long tail and low competition, you would be better off to add a paragraph to an existing page to minimize diluting your website by adding more pages.

If you want to target long tail traffic from commonly asked questions what is the best way to publish answers to these questions? A really long FAQ page, a new page for each question in a /faq/ subfolder, adding them to relevant product pages that already exist? Is creating a new page for each question a problem because the answer might be a paragraph and Google doesn't like thin content?

Has this ever happened to you? You create an amazing piece of content to rank for a keyword phrase that you are targeting. The content is way better than your competitor's page but they are outranking you. You have a higher domain authority. 
Your page has a higher page authority.
Your page and site has higher toolbar Page Rank.
Your page has more inbound links.
Your page has higher quality links.
You have more Twitter, Facebook, and Google plus shares.
etc., etc. But still you are being unranked and you can't find a single factor where your competitor is better. What can you do?

If you use a link building tactic for long enough, you can estimate the average cost for each link that is acquired through that tactic. For instance if you typically get 10 links from an infographic that costs $1,000 to create and promote, your average cost per link is about $100. What range do you target for your average cost per link? What average cost would you take all day long if you could scale it?

On some of our website's pages, Google displays the date of the last update in the search results. We want to remove this because it cuts off our meta description and it can make our page look outdated. Are there any negative consequences that you can think of when removing the date rich snippet.

If you send out a lot of email outreach (manually not automated), are there ways to avoid getting labeled as spam and having your emails filtered to the spam box by the major email providers? (or are you pretty safe if you personalizing each email manually and getting a decent  number of replies).

If you run an Adwords banner campaign with retargeting, how is the cost per click determined? My hunch is that it would be different than text ads in search result pages.

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?

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?

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!

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?

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!

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?

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!

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.

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.