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Hi Folks, I'm in the process of drawing up some detailed step by step marketing and content strategy guidelines and I'm currently researching LinkedIn as a platform and the potential benefits for B2B marketing on it and building brand authority. I'm coming across some conflicting data regarding how useful it is. Does anyone have any experience or opinions on the viability of LinkedIn for B2B marketing and building brand authority? A couple of questions would be: Is it a viable B2B marketing platform? Is it a good place to build brand and industry authority? What techniques would you concentrate on over others? Any advice on the subject would be great. Thanks, folks. Regards Gareth

Hi Folks, I have a page https://purplegriffon.com/courses/itil-training/itil-foundation-training/itil-foundation that grades with the 'On-Page Grader' as a B grade for the keyword 'itil foundation' but reports that there is no 'Exact Keyword is Used in Page Title' and 'Exact Keyword Used in Document Text at Least Once'. The thing is, it actually is but because of IP (intellectual property) rights we have to include a '®' (®) symbol when we mention the course title 'ITIL® Foundation'. Now I believe Google is smart enough to recognise that this symbol should not be included but it seems that for the specific criteria mentioned above, the MOZ bot isn't smart enough to recognise this, even though it recognises the keyword usage elsewhere. So my question is this. Would this constitute an issue in terms of ranking? Another question I have, is how significant are the gains with shorter URL's? For example, the URL to the page in question is: https://purplegriffon.com/courses/itil-training/itil-foundation-training/itil-foundation Would a URL such as below have a significant effect on SEO?: https://purplegriffon.com/courses/itil-foundation Thanks for your feedback.

Hi Folks, I'm in the process of going over our corporate website with a view to improving on-page optimisation, layout, design and user experience and I would like your feedback on what you think I should improve or change with respect to SEO. Some of my ideas include: Restructure Home Page to Better Show Our Services Possibly Add a Slider to the Home Page (I know engagement rates with these are generally low) Restructure the Course Pages Completely (https://purplegriffon.com/courses/itil-training/itil-foundation-training/itil-foundation) Restructure the Events Pages Completely (https://purplegriffon.com/event/2028/itil-foundation) Improve & Streamline the Booking Process AJAXIFY the Booking Process Improve Responsive Elements I'm also interested in conducting user testing before I go ahead and make any changes. What are your thoughts? What would you change? Thanks. Gaz

Hi Folks, I have been checking how many pages our competitors have indexed in Google compared to our website and I noticed that one of our main competitors has over 2 million indexed pages and I have figured out that it is because they have language/country specific pages for every page on their website. That being said, these pages contain all of the same content and the language doesn't actually change, it remains in English. Now my question is this. Will this not in fact hurt their rankings, in terms of duplicate content? Or am I missing something here? The URL's essentially do something like www.competitor.com/fr/ for France for example but as I say the content is in English, and duplicates their main website. Seems odd to me but would love your opinions on this. Thanks. Gaz

Hi Folks, Any ideas why Google Webmaster Tools is indicating that my robots.txt is blocking URL's linked in my sitemap.xml, when in fact it isn't? I have checked the current robots.txt declarations and they are fine and I've also tested it in the 'robots.txt Tester' tool, which indicates for the URL's it's suggesting are blocked in the sitemap, in fact work fine. Is this a temporary issue that will be resolved over a few days or should I be concerned. I have recently removed the declaration from the robots.txt that would have been blocking them and then uploaded a new updated sitemap.xml. I'm assuming this issue is due to some sort of crossover. Thanks Gaz

Hi Folks, I have event pages for specific training courses running on certain dates, the problem I have is that MOZ indicates that I have 1040 duplicate content issues because I'm serving pages like this https://purplegriffon.com/event/2521/mop-practitioner I'm not sure how best to go about resolving this as, of course, although each event is unique in terms of it's start date, the courses and locations could be identical. Will Google penalise us for these types of pages, or will they even index them? Should I add a canonical link to the head of the document pointing to the related course page such as https://purplegriffon.com/courses/project-management/mop-management-of-portfolios/mop-practitioner. Will this solve the issue? I'm a little stuck on what to do for the best. Any advice would be much appreciated. Thanks. Kind Regards Gareth Daine

Hi Folks, At this URL https://purplegriffon.com/courses/project-management/prince2 as an example, you can see that I am outputting all course dates in a table. Each table row contains information regarding the specific course such as start date, duration, location but also course title. In the course title it will obviously contain the keyword, in this example that is 'prince2'. So my question is this. As the MOZ on-page grader indicates that I am keyword stuffing (even though I receive an A grade) will Google be clever enough to know that I am displaying a table of events for PRINCE2? Or will it class the page as containing too many keywords? Each event links to a specific event page for that event, so is unique. I am interested in hearing the thoughts of the community on this. Thanks. Regards Gareth

Hi Folks, I was having a discussion with a friend and colleague of mine yesterday about the pros and cons of targeting keyword phrases that have very little if any search volume. I was of the opinion that if the keyword phrases (whether they were local or not) did not have any search volume as indicated by Google's Keyword Planner tool, then they had little if any value. Would this be a correct assumption? Or is there merit to targeting these phrases in order to begin to build a picture of a sites overall subject matter and to help rank in local search? For example, say there is a phrase like 'second hand clothing slough' (just a random phrase) which has no search volume but 'second hand clothing' has 2400 visits a month, would it be worth targeting the search phrase with no volume to build a better local profile, so that if someone in Slough searches for 'second hand clothing' the site shows up for that keyword? Thanks in advance guys! Gareth

Hi Folks, I have 300 keywords in the moz rankings tool but I would say over 90% of them simply show a 'WED' icon instead of the icon. It has been like this for nearly 3 weeks now. Any ideas why this is? Cheers Gaz

Hi Folks, The company I work for is based in Kendal in Cumbria in the United Kingdom (that's our head office) but as we are a training company and we have training locations all over the UK, how would I go about updating the local listings to reflect this. I'd like to specifically target our London based venues. Any help much appreciated. Gaz

What methods and tools do you guys use to perform link audits? Do you also use a traffic light system for links?