Welcome to the Q&A Forum

David,

First, Local optimization and citation sites, etc. is very important. If I am working with a nationwide company in the states, and they have only a headquarters location, I am going to make sure it is optimized for that locale.

Then, Schema - I believe it does have an effect and that it is in Google, et al's best interest to see to it that it does - Obviously, assuming they really do want adoption.

Short of that there is the super secret Algorithm Usurper Application Module (AUsAM)(You can purchase from me for a mere pittance...) Sorry, I just could not resist that one.

Best to you,

Bristolweb,

I would approach it this way (and have with other sites): Create a page on Kayaking versus Canoeing. Explain how they are different with really good content written by someone who is a subject matter expert (your client with the help of a good copywriter for example). You optimize around the canoeing portion and you are not sacrificing anything in the eyes of your kayaking clients (you did not sell out to those lowly canoe people). You are simply showing why they should switch.... But if they meant kayaking, Voila!

Hope it helps,

Sara, 
You need to use images that are either yours, you bought from a seller of images, or are in the public domain without copyright. A FanPage is a commercial endeavor and as such you will have no protection IMO if you use someone else's copyrighted material.

For basic images, you can use a supplier like IStock, etc.

Whether or not it is monitored is not the issue. Understand that if it were your image and I took it to use somewhere without your permission, whether or not I am caught does not change what I did. Also, if I am eventually caught, I had better be prepared to pay if the owner believes they have been harmed in any way and brings an action against me.

Hope this helps,

Steve,

I feel your pain, but....

Thinking about your situation, I went to the site and used OSE to see what your links look like. The first red flags I see came within 5 seconds of opening OSE and clicking on linking domains. You sell accounting software for contractors and, while that can be rather broad, the first couple of domains that stand out are links from NASA and the University of TX.

There were so many links from the NASA blog I did not bother looking for yours and assumed a lot of BS was there. For UT, I started scratching my head as the blog post was around a UT student visiting Germany. For your comment a "student" named Alex is gushing about Germany being efficient but, the name is actually a link to your home page.

So, what is Google seeing?

My guess is that if I can hit two really questionable links, one a .gov the other a .edu in the first few seconds and Google is really digging, you are going to have to work very hard to fix this. Otherwise you are going to have to reform your site by doing as you state above and rebuild.

My only incredulousness comes from you stating that Google does not respond. I would have thought they would have sent you the does not meet Google Quality Guidelines.....resubmit request for reconsideration... email.

Good Luck,

Carlos,

This is an interesting question. Not provided is Google's "protection of logged in users," and would lead one to assume that you have a lot of users not logged into Google in some way. So, lets assume for whatever reason that you had a lot of international traffic from a place with fewer logged in Google users (say a country(s) with a low percent of Android users for mobile comparatively - Finland, South Africa, etc) that could have a major effect on NP. 
There are obviously a lot of ways to be logged in: Gmail, Android, G+, etc. But in some of these countries the take rate for Google will be much less and would therefore cause fewer logged in users.

Obviously, with a NP % as low as you are seeing, there is a mystery there to solve.

Wish it was of more help,

Peter,

Are you saying that every product is an FSX Addon?

If so, then you are going to need to think this through and really get clear on Keyword research. Other keywords that get a ton of queries are FSX as a stand alone, FSX Simulator, etc. Also, FSX Download might be a clever one for those where there is a direct download as many who buy software do not wish to wait.

So, my thought is this: You could make it start with the FSX piece: FSX Download, FSX Missions, FSX Aircraft, FSX Addon PIPE the specific aircraft  PIPE then your Brand Name.

So:  FSX AddOn | Boeing 747 British Airways | Your Brand

I think this will help you and as long as your content is unique (so dont have 90% of FSX Addon on the page and 10% on the plane). There are ways to avoid duplicating the content by potentially using Categories then make the product the individual aircraft download. I would need to see more of the site and think it through to be clear on resolution. 
Hope this bit helps,

The first thing you should be looking at is what is the query? In  other words what are the searched on Keywords for these items. Since FSX is an add on for flight simulation, what do people who are looking for it search for?

If they search for FSX addons and the type (Boeing 747) and your company is Super FSX Addons, I would follow the suggested convention of FSX Add on Boeing 747 | Super FSX Addons.

So, the keyword is first in the title tag, separated by a PIPE (straight up line) and then the Brand.

Be sure you take a look though and know what the important keywords are and don't just assume you know because you sell this all the time. You may be surprised,

Good luck.

The difficulty here in giving a reasonable opinion is we do not have the domain or pages to look at. If we did, we could give educated opinions. 
RY.com.au makes a good point if you have pages that are ranking, it is easier to change a page than a domain. It becomes a question of risk/reward. You have to decide.

EGOL

As a confirmed content junky, I have to say this is great content.

...my goal is to be aware of the above and produce things that have potential. We have all written things that we knew would be stunning to the world and later scratched our heads wondering where we missed the boat. At the same time, we have written something because it needed to be written and looked up a few days later as it was showing up everywhere and then re-read it to see what those who shared it liked about it.

IGOR,

Please understand the wisdom of this statement:

**This type of content is not written in a moment or acquired for a few bucks on a freelance site.  It is produced by someone who knows a subject very well and has creativity to come up with something awesome. **

One cannot overstate the importance of understanding the subject and of creativity. We are an agency and our copywriters are tasked with writing on a lot of subjects. Literally everything from rewriting product pages so that they are not the same dupe all others have to writing about the law, the weather, medicine, current events, and so forth. While they are great at what they do, without giving them enough time on a subject to know it, all the creativity in the world will not make a piece good. At the same time, subject matter experts who lack creativity usually write like...subject matter experts without creativity...(read the text book, ain't this fun?!). Lastly, asking them to write something great in an hour or two will not produce something great. (We are aware, that on some sites, we are writing to cover a given page topic in the best possible way based on time and money limitations of clients.)

Search the web for queries that provide basic information in your niche and identify content that ranks well and clearly deserves it.  Then create something that beats it soundly.       Well said in my opinion.

Great content alone will not win the war instantly.  You must have a powerful site to get instant rankings, or get it in front of influencers who will help you promote it or put word of it it out to places like slashdot, reddit, facebook where people can share it.

I could not agree more. All to often in SEO we see those who want to do one thing and capture position one in the SERPs. There is no easy path. Yes, there are tricks, etc. but in the final analysis the battle will be won by those who are meticulous in their approach. Someone getting 500 backlinks from a Chinese ginseng business directory, etc. may rank ahead today; I guarantee you they will not win out over time against skilled SEO's who possess determination, skill, and an understanding of reaity.

EGOL,

This was great content you provided to all. Thanks,

LB,

I will not write what first came to mind

The short answer to your question, "Is resource linking page a good way to build backlinks?", is no.

This is really a fairly old technique that is quite frowned upon on a lot of levels. The biggest being that is just a link manipulation scheme. If you have never read the Quality Guidelines on GWT, I will provide the link and an important excerpt: the link is Read and Heed Quality Guidelines to Survive

The excerpt is:

Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"

The bold and underline are mine.

I hope this helps. The best way to get links is with great content and following the phenomenal suggestions provided on SEOmoz.

I wish you the best in your endeavors,

Robert

Thomas,

There is one thing that will help a magazine type site IMO more than anything else: Original quality content that people are looking for. We build sites, do SEM/SEO, etc. and I never cease to be amazed at what happens when one of our copywriters seems to write the "perfect" piece for one of our clients. It does not matter that the on page SEO was not perfect, etc. All of a sudden we are seeing the piece on different sites and in news feeds and we did not use some press release or other mechanism. One person picked it up after another and all of a sudden it was out there.

If you concentrate on this and then provide a way to stimulate/tickle the reader along the lines of say a highly known sports site (ESPN, Sports Illustrated, one I have just begun to marvel at is The Bleacher Report) people will have more reason to stay on and go through your site. Just go to one of these and look how often a given story teaser appears on a single page. Have teasers that attract attention: If on the NBA page, see what is there about specific teams, on a team page specific players, etc.

Lastly, a client of ours has probably taught me more about the value of an image than anyone ever. He was unbelievably strong in how many, where, quality control, etc. on his site. As the result, he has a site with a ton of traffic much because of the images (not a mag type site though). So, look at successful magazine to web sites and learn from them.

The one concern is "they make their money primarily through advertisements...," make sure the good is not the enemy of the best. Many business people fall prey to the "if we take that off, we won't have the revenue..." line of thinking. Too much advertising will cost you in bounce rate and time on site. It must be advertising that fits the visitor and it must not be so obtrusive as to be annoying. I once let my online subscription to a major newspaper that I truly enjoyed because the way the began doing ads kept interrupting any chance of finishing an article.

Later they dropped that mechanism; I never went back.

Good luck,

Jan

I will leave it to those who live and work in the UK to suggest a hosting company there. As to do you have to host there to target there, no you do not. You can have a .co.uk domain if available as that is a good indicator for those searching as well and no matter what way you go, you will set your domain to target the UK in GWMT. (Go into Configurations>Settings>Geographic Target and then select UK.

Here is a great place to start if you want to be really clear how to set this up the correct way:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html

It is updated so the material is relevant and quite helpful.

As to the dedicated server, we use dedicated servers as an agency as we want to insure our clients are protected. If I had a single site, that was not huge in traffic, revenues, etc. I would simply find a quality hosting company and get the best backup, recovery, etc. package they have as that is much more cost effective.

Hope this helps,

Mark,

The first question would be... does the sandbox exist (still) and if so who is affected and how? There is a ton of info and non info on the subject, but the best I could find from any source I trust was this from Rand a few years ago: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/googles-sandbox-still-exists-exemplified-by-gradercom

Based on Rand's conclusions, the entire domain would be affected and by changing the domain, the problem abates. 
Given that today with Panda, Penguin, etc. having their own effect for penalties, I am not sure as to the relevance of the term. My guess is that if you created a new page with unique content that page could rank on its own. The sandbox was more apparent around links than content. If you are having a duplicate (borrowed) content problem that would seem more of a penguin issue.

Hope this helps,

Cesar,

I do not believe the way you list will matter in terms of the way the bot reads the page. Assuming all are in the body, the bot goes left to right and top to bottom. So, unless there is a specific trigger that says terms with links separated by a comma are a negative, I do not see a problem. I assume your links are internal or if not are going to something explaining the term.

But, as a dictionary site, I would be driven by what works for the reader.

So, with Scrabble players looking for words with a Q, a Z, a J, an X and three A's, how would they find it? (Please hurry as I need to make a play!)

Hope this helps a bit.

Edward,

On the whole this is ok, but there are newer things to consider like the change for targeting multiple languages using hreflang: From GWMT.

The best for Folders/subdomains/ccTLD's is the chart (near end of page) with pros and cons in GWMT here

I think you will find both up to date and exceedingly helpful.

Best to you,

Robert

Hello Robert,

I will give you a method here that may assist you on the reindex side:

In GWMT go to Health> Fetch as Googlebot

In the url space following the initial domain, put an offending page and then click Fetch

It usually takes less than 5 seconds and you will see "success" with a green check mark followed by a button for Submit to Index. (Given the situation, I highly urge you to click it!

Note: If the entire site is affected, you will want to use URL and Linked pages on submission (you only get ten of these per month) and if not, just that url. (You get 500 Fetches a month).

This should help get you indexed more rapidly. PLEASE do not tell anyone as it is a secret!!

Good Luck,

Robert

Hello Activitysuper

"**How much do you use the search queries report in webmaster tools to research current rankings/movements?" **

Specifically for checking current rankings/movements, rarely.

But for checking ranking you need a shorter run (a few days as opposed to a month) if you are trying to draw a conclusion IMO.

When we make a content addition or change with the intent of specifically effecting a ranking now, it can be nice to watch in a type of trailing 3 to 5 day pattern. This usually will tell a story or, sadly sometimes, tell a nightmare.

BUT, if you check rankings here and then go to search and look at the SERPs without &pws=0 you are not seeing reality. Non personalized search is imperative when looking at search to determine current rank. If you have a 30 day run on GWMT and then look at today for SERPs, you can be a million miles off.

I use it to check queries against my keywords/landing pages in analytics and to draw a better conclusion with regards to what is being searched on. It helps with the 'not set' in analytics.

Hope this helps a bit,

Robert

Dana

You make a great point around the various facets of SEO and how long term some may be affected. However, I think there will be a need for SEO going forward just as there was after keyword meta tags and seeing how many times you could get the keyword in faded. I remember about ten years ago a gentleman came and presented to our company about eZines and how they were going to revolutionize the web, etc. Obviously, they did have an effect just as the PRWebs/newsline, etc. (web trash I affectionately call it now) have an effect today. But, will they still be here tomorrow? Don't think so, IMO.

There seems to be a continuum that goes one side to the next. This is driven not in a small part by those who think of the search "system" as something to beat. So, black hat says use a link wheel, hide links in periods and colons, etc. But, my belief is that people who search will ultimately determine what is Optimum or not. 5 years ago I was looking for a water pump for a small fountain for my home in Houston. I searched on Fountain pumps etc. + Houston and could not find anyone with a fountain pump in Houston. tons in Ohio, etc. I have now watched as the web has become more and more localized. That was driven not by the engines, but by their customers.

Remember that with Panda or Penguin, many perceive it as Google spanking a bad child and I see that as not being thought through. Google understands that when I search for water pump Houston and someone or two or 5 have gamed the system in order to show up high on page one, but none are in Houston. That is not a good result for GOOGLE. There customer does not like it because they were clear about what they wanted. So, the technical SEO will be there as it is very important. But, good content that is not stolen, spun, or rehashed by a "PR" vomit machine is what people want and what they will come back to over and over. If I know I can search on any engine and consitently get what I was looking for, that is where I am going.

Remember, this is a change but one that will allow the early adopters and true believers to gain a lot of real estate if they are diligent.

Thanks so much for your thoughtful responses,

Robert

Steve,

First, I am not a .net expert and there are some here. As to the overall question though, when you 301 www.example.com/boss-man to www.example.com/big-boss-man, you do not need the canonical on the example.com/boss-man. The 301 is handling all for you.

Best

Chait

I think there are really two questions you should ask: the one re SEO effect, Google/Bong, etc. and, how they are perceived.

As to Google others have stated correctly there is no penalty. I am not sure that using a .ca/.in is wise even if you are US based, use US server, and make correct geotarget selections in GWMT.  The reason is not Google/SEO per se, but perception. 
It is a given that in some countries, having a cc tld that is different is not wise due to bias. A documented one is the French bias in Europe (no hate mail please, my son was born in Paris - yes France, not Texas). In the US, as open minded as half of us seem to be, there will always be a bias if someone knows the .in is India and there may well be one with .ca especially if you are in more northern states that are more likely to see it.

So, you have to factor all in and then ask: "Why am I going this way?" Is whatever domain name so critical that you are willing to sacrifice for it? Have you considered using hyphens?

We do a lot with EMD's using hyphens and without. At the same time, I believe many over emphasize EMD and could spend time and energy better elsewhere. Is there a second best EMD and then spend all the energy on something else SEO?

I cannot imagine, short of a known and, likely, very well known brand where I would risk a .ca or .in in the US for that EMD.

Good Luck, let us know what direction you take and how it works,

Robert

Lucas

You have made a good start with some on page and you might want to ask yourself a question: Why this keyword phrase? Have you looked at criminal attorney/lawyer san diego? They both have many more searches for them. (So, KW research is important for a competitive area like this).

Next, have you worked on the local G+, gotten reviews from former clients?

But, then: Be careful as it appears you are working on elements as opposed to delivering anything that will make me want to engage your attorney.

Your title tag of CDASD | SDCDA is not the way to go. Stuffing Criminal Defense in the content on that page over and over is a killer and reads terribly. (see image)

Before that though, if I were in jail and needed a criminal atty. I would not go to one who was accentuating immigration law. See image on practice areas. (What is most..)

Last, in your meta description you are still repeating the KW phrase. It has zero effect on ranking, this is where you get someone to click because you wrote something that drove them to your site. "Get out of jail now, before something bad happens." Attorney XXX is here to save your day!

Think about it.

UwKAt.png 9bvkM.png

Again, the trash been in the mail is best hope IMO.

You won't get the messages resent from Google. But, if you are curious as to prior issues, you might be able to see them historically to a point. (crawl errors, etc. 90 days back). Look under Health and you can see quite a bit.

Also, did the first admin delete them...but not take out the trash? Check your Gmail folder for deleted messages. My guess is unless they were a neat freak.... you will find what you are looking for.

Best

Benj25

In trying to see what you were using as a platform I went to Builtwith. In using their plugin, I could only see that you were on Apache, using HTML 4.01, and canonicals. (normally see a lot more)

On the Builtwith site, you come up with them saying you don't have a meta description, H1, etc. When I look at it, these are there so they are in some way not being picked up. (Remember, it is rare for Google to choose a meta description when there is one there.) So, the reason this items 1 to 9 ... is coming up is Google is not seeing the meta either.

Without knowing the particulars of the site, it is a bit more difficult to determine the cause. If you want to see what I am seeing, go to http://builtwith.com and put your site in. You will then get the initial info. Then, at the top, the 4th tab will be yoursite.com SEO profile. Click that and start scrolling and reading.

Hope that further clarifies,

Robert

SEOscar

DiscoverAfricaGroup is correct IMO with, "...If you have your standard bloggers with little HTML/programming/Graphics design skills, wordpress is the way to go..."

What I would suggest is for you to get really clear on what CRO you want, then decide which plugins are best for you, and train them on that set of plugins. An example is the ubiquitous Contact Form 7. Easy to use, install, etc. 
Now, make sure they understand about the database and shortcode pieces as well as they help. Obviously, for CRO, if you don't keep a database of those who have contacted you, you might not be as optimized as you think.
By training all on one and keeping it simple, you make it easier on those who don't naturally lean to dev or design. You help them in that they are not having to 'work' at something they are totally unfamiliar with all the time.

With other CMS, there are advantages, but for this use, WP would be great for you. Get a dev to assist in what would be simplest, etc. then institute that set of plugins for use.

Also, remember there can always be issues with any plug in on any CMS. Make sure you track to see if you are losing some traffic, etc. on a regular basis or you will wake up one day and say, "We haven't gotten any contacts in two weeks and we were getting X/day." Ouch, been there.

Best,

Hello Benj25

When you say the Meta on your home page, and I am assuming the book site, I don't see it with that category and when I do a search on Google I do not see that in the snippet. (I checked US and .co.uk).

Can you tell us/show us where you are seeing it?

Thanks,

There are ways to use math to balance CTR based on position (simple ratio and proportion), and search engines may or may not do so. Depends on who you believe. 
But, if you look at Dr. Pete's post in Feb on The 2 Metrics that Matter for SEO  you will see how dwell time may be more important.

Interesting stuff this SEO.

Best

Kelly

Happy to help, but there are strings attached...No, you don't have to let me use the Maserati for a week next time I'm in town...

Before you put the change in effect, please run a measure of all DA/PA for both sites and date it. Then, weekly at least, rerun looking at both. Remember, you will be ask do you want to see the other url so you can still see both even though you have the redirects in place. 
Then, you will get a great view of the change over time and can track the effect which, whenever you see a similar question on moz you can refer back to.

If you chose to share that data with me, I promise to use the data anonymously and never share what site/sites or page/pages it was from. No plans to publish it in any way as of now, just started tracking sites with 301's about a year ago and like having some that we are not associated with other than tangentially.

Thanks, but no worries if you don't want to share, I understand.

Best

Amazon uses Schema with their products. We use product Schema on our eCommerce sites. My belief is that it will help from a rich snippets pov and simply that this is something the search engines want. The best way to get people to adopt is to show that it helps. That's my opinion anyway.

Best,

Dana,

Really great to see a response from someone who went through and graduated. And with a DMA, I am impressed.

I completely disagree that writing skills are the mostimportant for SEOs. This is probably an oversimplification of where EGOL was going and my followup. I am hiring an SEO now who is not an English major (Journalism Summa Cum Laude) and got her SEO training on the job where she was hired as a blogger/writer to work with the marketing firm they were using.

What EGOL said, was: "great content can defeat SEO over time and crappy KW research is a waste of good SEO.." So, the content is king. Not English majors are kings.

There are gaps in the SEO/SEM she has, but she does write well and understand what SEO is and the basics and more. She will be a superstar in a year most likely. Yes, technical SEO is very important for her to learn.

My issue with the Full Sail candidate was that he really did not know anything about SEO and (he may not have gone there at all) when I asked about how long the curriculum was he said 6 months. (Maybe including his internship.) I do have copywriters who knkow more about SEO in two months than he knew.

I am curious as to why you think someone who was taught SEO would leave? I don't see it that way at all, but I also do as much as I can to insure they are constantly learning and to insure their pay is ahead of others at other firms. Plus, they get to work with me!

Last, I can't imagine outsourcing my SEO/SEM. That's why I built my firm, to do those things

Thanks a lot, hope to see you here a lot.

Best

Kelly

Here is the code per our dev:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^olddomain.com$ [OR]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.olddomain.com$

RewriteRule (.*)$ http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

This should assist you in getting it done correctly.

He also suggested that the PHP is not the way to go and it does not handle the url to url. So, there you have it.

Best

If you are saying use those analytics to change outcomes, I say do it. Will it necessarily improve the page rank, I don't know that it will. But, if a site owner focuses solely on rank and ignores conversions, what is ranking worth?

Dan,

I've seen Matt's piece on this but still see it as a bit counter - intuitive. I think at some level, (maybe not PR per se) I still see a site with bad CTR to a page as moving down. So something is affecting it.

Good answer though,

Robert

Yes and most likely are the best answers:

Yes in that if you put a new site up and due to freshness a page is on page one, but the meta description does not fit the query and no one is clicking on the SERP link, therefore little or no Click throughs, you are going off the page quickly.

Obviously, especially with black hat SEO, when someone misleads with a meta description and you land on a page that is no where near what you were looking for, you leave in a heartbeat or less - you bounce. So, one mechanism that Google has is to see that for what it is and count that against you. But, if your bounce rate in your vertical is normally around e.g. 50% and you are close to that number, you are likely ok. If you are a bit better you are likely improved.

So, you want good meta descriptions so that you get people to the page and you want great content to keep them there.

We took on a new client about 6 months ago and he was ranking in top 2 to 3 for almost every major kw in his vertical locally. After a new site, better content his CTR is improved by about 25% and his bounce rate by roughly 5 to 10% (45 to 35-40). His pageviews doubled (images I think) and his time on site is up by over a minute.

He now ranks first for almost everything. I think the CTR and Bounce are huge in that result

hope that gives you a reasonable idea.

If coming from a 404 page, the link does not matter. I am not sure that means that Google did it, so I would show the 404 in any evidence you send to Google re resolving the issues.

For getting reconsideration, you need to show you did all in your power to remove the BS links, etc. Keep a log. Send it all.

Good luck,

As to:

Here is to the day that we don't have to make a domain registrar rich!

As an old Marine, we have a saying in that proud group that really applies:

COPY THAT! (A Big I agree) especially with regard to a certain daddy that sucks rocks in Arizona, USA and has girls as his spokes persons...

Fortunately or unfortunately, it is 0400 here in Houston. Fortunately, our web dev magnificent & company VP is still asleep, but works like me (a bit much). I sent an email for the code that will help. He will rise in a couple of hours and see email and direct us. When he does i will send to see if it helps.

Hopefully, we will find the magic juice retriever.

Best,

Fo me, when you say, "GA for a website with multiple languages on multiple domains", then I inherently look at this as I am going to have one GA account for this website with three different properties. I do a lot by intuition, so that is just what comes naturally for me.

You account is Example Account or Example Analytics, but it is about the Analytics for this specific content group for lack of a better descriptor: Yes, different languages on different domains, but same site - correct?

The biggest pro for me is unless I am running three browsers open at once, I do not have to log in and out of analytics for each account to see whatever I want. (Seems simplistic, but I find it a pain). So, I can now navigate between the three domains easily, copy a filter from one to another easily, etc.

You could have a different profile for each domain, but I really do not see a massive reason for this and by having them all under one, again it seems intuitive and to communicate they are together which could loosely help with any dupe content issue down the road. (Yes, I understand how duped content is looked at across multi languages. I just like being able to have a track back of some type that shows the sites together.)

Hope this gives a bit of insight for you Frederik,

Best.

Thanks Stephen,

Actually, that is well put.

I think it kind of hangs with the English majors. Enough questioning to make them open minded in SEO and, if you can read that stuff with any level of comprehension, you can probably write!

Well put.

EGOL - This is truly great. We have 9 copywriters of which 8 are either in journalism, English, or political science or have graduated, and done well in school. They come in and take to this and the fact that they are really learning like crazy.

I still wish there was an organization that actually had some clout with SEO that did a test or cert. for same.

We do use Craig's list, but our copywriters also go after others in advertising org on campus, etc. They make great recruiters! Your suggestion for ad is excellent and I will try immediately.

As usual, you are spot on with your answer. Thanks,

ojwilliams8

I think, given the info from Matt Cutts at SXSW (Check it here)

I do not see them gaining any advantage in Local. Given that local should have its own page and that needs unique content, given that while they have a location there with nothing to go with it, given that links from the footer are devalued, Then I do not see them gaining an advantage.

The competitor's approach is bad. For each city/township you desire to improve local for, you need a separate page with its own content. I really think there will ultimately be a penalty or a loss of any value for this very soon.

Best,

We are actively looking for a couple of positions. A qualified SEM (for PPC, etc) pro that has experience with Google but also others including BING and Yahoo. And a good SEO person who gets it is about delivering a result and not blowing sunshine up someone's skirt or pant leg. 
That said I got a resume the other day from a guy and he stated he had a Master's Certificate in Internet Marketing from Full Sail University. I looked them up and they offer a Bachelors Degree and a Masters Degree in Internet Marketing. They also offer a certificate in Internet marketing they call a Master's certificate. So, I set a time for him to call me as I was mildly skeptical. 
When I started asking about the certificate (His LinkedIn page had Masters Degree in IM) he said he had taken the certificate and I did not pursue the LinkedIn. I asked how long he was in school for the certificate and he stated 6 months (curriculum is 4 months and is fairly t h i n.
I asked what he had done and he had completed an Internship with a Texas company and helped a construction firm move to page one. When I asked how he started telling me about inserting keywords in the meta tag field in the CMS..... He did not know what a title tag was, knew nothing of content, H1, H2, Local Optimization and then wanted to tell me how when you put their Domain name in google they are number two on page One.  So you get it, I believe.

I am just really frustrated with the whole "certification" etc. thing and believe we do need it. Market Motive is as close to good as I can see, but I would love to hear from you. (Note on MM- I do not like the if you pay monthly you get Provider or whatever but it you shell out $3500 you are a Master. Just doesn't feel right to me. And, I did speak with someone a while back with a masters from them and again, I scratched my head).

Would just like to hear of your experience and if anyone has hired from these schools with success.

Kelly, 
First, you state: Basically 3 months ago i did a site wide 301 from economyleasinguk.co.uk to www.economy-car-leasing.co.uk

By a sitewide 301 do you mean you simply redirected the domain (meaning one 301 of  domain economyleasinguk.co.uk only to www.economy-car-leasing.co.uk only)?

Next, when using OSE and you get the "abc.com redirects to www.abc.com we're showing links to www.abc.com to provide more accurate metrics... That can be from the preferred domain you set in GWMT or the .htaccess file so is likely not a factor in this.

When you do a site wide 301 it must be url to url: abc.com/ to a-b-c.com/ and abc.com/hot-deals to a-b-c.com/todays-sales, or abc.com/our-locations to a-b-c.com/our locations. Otherwise you are wasting all the link juice from the old site. This must be done in the .htaccess file.

To test this- OK I just did and you did it incorrectly and need to back up. When it says "do you want to see the results for economyleasinguk.co.uk instead click on that link for economyleasinguk.co.uk. When you arrive on the page, you have only one result from a site with a domain authority of 50 and that home page has a PA of 40.

I am guessing it was fairly close to those numbers prior to the 301. after three months, a lot should have moved to you. I looked at a cache of the new site and it goes to 2010 so I am assuming it was up when you did redirect and had been up for a while. The DA of the new site is 38 and home page PA is 39 so I would have expected that from a site up a couple of years. You don't appear to be getting much help from the redirect.

So, go back in and go url to url and make it work for you.

Let us know if there are other issues - great question as this happens to us all!

Hello Bizzer

I am going to approach this from a different angle first:

Why are you creating a directory for your blog?

Is the blog an industry specific blog of some type?

What are you hoping to gain from having the directory?

Is it something they pay for or do you allow them to be on it for free?

Personally, on the duped content, if there are going to just be about 100 then I would have zero duped content. I would have them submit something and let them know it might be edited and then I would check it. Hell, your writing blogs, you could edit this type material in ten minutes most likely.

Hope that helps.