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Posts made by RuthBurrReedy
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RE: Home Page
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RE: Why isn't SEOMoz using Wistia's social sharing feautes?
Wistia's sharing buttons still share the URL where the video is embedded, not the individual video - just like the buttons we have implemented. We just don't want to have redundant sharing buttons all over the page, so we skip Wistia's sharing buttons in favor of the buttons already in our blog template.
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RE: Why isn't SEOMoz using Wistia's social sharing feautes?
Ben, you are absolutely on the money on this one (not surprised!). Because our blog template automatically adds sharing buttons to each post, and videos are published within blog posts, using Wistia's sharing buttons on the videos themselves would create redundant sharing options on each page.
From an SEO perspective, there is no advantage to using buttons one way or the other - you simply need to consider factors like do you want users to share the video, or the entire URL? From a UX standpoint you don't want to have sharing buttons all over the place, confusing people, which is why we're not using the Wistia sharing feature
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RE: Can a Hosting provider that also hosts adult content sites negatively affect our SEO rankings on a non-adult site hosted on same platform?
Your site should not be affected by other sites hosted by the same provider. Think about huge nationwide hosting sites like GoDaddy - if sharing hosting with websites with questionable content was a problem, a LOT of websites would have a problem!
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RE: PR Media and Syndications
I would leave keyword density out of it - go ahead and do press releases, but your goal should be media coverage, not link building/SEO.
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RE: PR Media and Syndications
I would say, don't use press release syndication as a way to build links - it tends to generate duplicate content an David's right, the links aren't worth much. Instead, use PR the way PR is traditionally used - to build awareness and encourage media outlets to cover your stories in their own words. The last thing you want is for your own content to outrank you on somebody else's site!
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RE: Lots of incorrect urls indexed - Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site
Since (I assume this is what is happening) your ecommerce platform is duplicating the entire page, code and all, and putting it at these new URLs, having the canonical tag of the original page URL in the code for the right/real page will mean that, when it gets duplicated, the canonical tag will get duplicated as well and point back to the original URL. Make sense?
Can you talk to your ecommerce platform provider? This can't be an intended feature!
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RE: Lots of incorrect urls indexed - Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site
Oh how frustrating!
There are a couple of things that you can do. Updating your robots.txt is a good start since the next time your site is crawled, Google should find that and drop at least some of the offending pages from the index. I would also go in to every page of your site and add in a rel=canonical tag to the original version of the URL. That way, even if your ecommerce platform is generating odd versions of the URL, that canonical tag will be on the duplicate versions letting engines know they're not the original page.
For the existing pages, you could just 301 them all back to the original versions, or add the canonical tag pointing back to the original versions. I would also add the tag to these pages to let Google know not to include them in the index.
With pagination and canonicalization there are a few different approaches, and each has its pros and cons. Dr. Pete wrote a really great post on canonicalization that just went out, you can read it here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/which-page-is-canonical. I also recommend reading Adam Audette's post on pagination options at Search Engine Land: http://searchengineland.com/the-latest-greatest-on-seo-pagination-114284. I hope that helps!
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RE: Question on backlinks indexing
I would be cautious with doing too much article marketing - you're at risk that search engines will see your article on multiple sites, deem it duplicate content, and then decide your article on a submission site should rank instead of the version on your own site. With the Penguin release, Google is also taking a closer look at links from article submission sites - I wouldn't be surprised if those links become lower and lower value as time goes by.
Definitely let Google discover your backlinks on its own - grow your link profile too quickly and they'll take a close look at your site to see if any of those links look suspicious.
There are plenty of more valuable ways to grow your link profile. Mike King recently had a post on this topic at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-noob-guide-to-link-building - I suggest you check it out for new ideas on how to build links to your site.
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RE: Ezine Articles - Copied Content on Site
Right - so you would be using the canonical tag on your clients' site to point to the ezine articles site. Otherwise it will just end up looking like duplicate content - but again, if you just want to noindex, follow the content then canonicaling won't be an issue.
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RE: Branded vs non branded keyword question
Recently Google has been taking a closer look at anchor text, because exact keyword anchor text isn't really how "natural" links (i.e. links you didn't build) look. Ben has a great point that natural link growth usually means anchor text that is either your brand name or your URL. Rob Kerry recently did a Whiteboard Friday on the Penguin update that may shed some more light on your predicament: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-penguin-update-whiteboard-friday
A majority of your inbound links should not have exact keyword match anchor text. Instead, focus more on building overall link volume, both for your domain and individual pages. Try to get links from high-authority sites, and create pieces of content that people want to share and link to - these are link building strategies that will be more successful than a hyper-focus on anchor text, whether branded, keyword or "click here."
I think the steps Ben outlines above are a great start.
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RE: Ezine Articles - Copied Content on Site
If you don't want them to appear in the index but still want them on the site for user reasons, noindex, follow is one way to do it - you could also use the rel=canonical tag to call out the original post as the canonical one.
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RE: How does Google treat multiple backlinks on the same page?
When thinking about links without keyword-rich anchor text, think about how people are linking to you on their own, without your actually building the link. They're more likely to link either with your main brand name (AccuPOS), your domain name (AccuPOS.com) or text like "read more" "click here" etc. That's one reason that Penguin has targeted keyword-rich anchor text links, because they aren't "natural" - i.e. it's unlikely someone would link to you with "Restaurant POS Software" unless you specifically ask them to. So when building links it's helpful to have a good mix of these other less-specific anchor texts, to appear more natural. If the link appears on a page that is talking about your keyword, there's some evidence to suggest that that semantic info might help in a similar way to keyword-rich anchor text.
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RE: How does Google treat multiple backlinks on the same page?
In a post-Penguin world, I'd be leery of this kind of automated anchor-text-rich link building. If you continue with this approach, make sure you're also getting plenty (i.e. a majority) of links without keyword-rich anchor text. Otherwise, yes, they will both count as they are to different pages.
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RE: Is a Shorter Page Title Better?
For the phrase that begins the title tag, I don't think having more terms in the tag is going to affect rankings for that phrase one way or another. For any additional phrases in the tag, whether or not the page ranks for the phrase is also going to depend on how the phrase is used on-page, but I agree that they usually have diminishing returns rankings-wise.
As for testing one phrase vs. multiple phrases and their effect on CTR and rankings...sounds like a great YOUMoz post to me!
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RE: Is a Shorter Page Title Better?
A longer page title is certainly ok - although, as the other answers noted, yours is pretty unreadable by humans. Too many keywords in a title tag can make your page look "over-optimized" and have a negative effect - not to mention that users are less likely to click on an unattractive tag. I would advise targeting a maximum of 2 keywords in a title tag.
WIth Google's recent updates it's becoming more important to have a tag that's not TOO long, though. Title tags longer than about 68 characters (including spaces) may be automatically shortened by Google - or Google may choose to use different text from the page altogether in place of the title tag. This can make for some pretty weird results since Google's auto-inserted text isn't always as nice of a user experience as your hand-crafted tag. So make sure your tags are shorter than 68 characters so as not to get truncated.
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RE: How to structure your site correctly for optimal juice flow?
Adding "noindex" to your page doesn't just keep link juice from flowing to it - it also means that it won't appear in the SERPs at all - what about your users who are actually trying to find your page? I wouldn't noindex anything unless you're sure that you don't want anyone to be able to find that page via organic search.
When you're structuring your site, it's better to focus on having a structure that allows search engines to crawl and find every page (no orphan pages, no content that search engines can't crawl, no duplicate content) and that allows users (you know, the people who give you money!) to easily find content. If you want to conserve link juice on your pages, try to make sure you don't have a ton of links on every page, but don't try to nofollow/noindex content based solely on the idea of link juice - it won't work.
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RE: Home Page
Hi - I didn't see the drop-down window called "popular products" on your page so it looks like you've decided to remove it.
I think a "popular products" section can be valuable for users. If you do decide you want to direct users to your most popular products in the navigation or on the home page, doing so shouldn't give you too much of a hit - although I agree that creating short articles about them just for SEO purposes is probably something you want to stop doing.
After Panda/Penguin, it's unlikely that having a ton of keyword-anchor-text-rich links from one page on your site to another page on your site will do much good, so if your users aren't really using them to travel from page to page, I'd remove them (which it looks like you did). If your pages didn't take a rankings hit after you removed them, you're probably fine. Let me know how it went!
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RE: Does it make any difference to your SEO if the homepage infrequently updates.
One of the questions Google is trying to answer with fresh content is "is this site still relevant?" If you're not updating your home page regularly because it's not necessary for your users, continuing to get new fresh links is a great way to keep sending the signal that your page is still relevant.
I would definitely advise against making a bunch of random changes to your home page just for Google's benefit - but if there are ways you can include more fresh or dynamic content that would also be good for users, that might be something to explore. Maybe have a link to your newest or most popular blog post that updates when you post?
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RE: Image hosting, afraid it will be viewed as doorway
I agree with Martin - I don't think it would be an issue. To make sure you don't get duplicate content problems, make sure your images have different names and descriptions on your .net site than they do on your .com site, and you should be fine.
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RE: Crawl errors in GWT!
Neither access denied nor not found crawl errors are dealbreakers as far as Google is concerned. A not found error usually just means you have links pointing to pages that don't exist (this is how you can be receiving more errors than pages crawled - a not found error means that a link to that page was crawled, but since there's no page there, no page was crawled). Access denied is usually caused by either requiring a login or blocking the search bots with robots.txt.
If the links causing 404 errors aren't on your site it's certainly possible that errors would still be appearing. One thing you can do is double-check your 404 page to make sure it really is returning an error of 404: not found at the URL level. One common thing I've seen all over the place is that sites will institute a 302 redirect to one 404 page (like www.example.com/notfound). Because the actual URL isn't returning a 404, bots will sometimes just keep crawling those links over and over again.
Google doesn't necessarily crawl everything every day or update everything every day. If your traffic isn't being affected by these errors I would just try as best you can to minimize them, and otherwise not worry too much ab out it.
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RE: Delete 301 redirected pages from server after redirect is in place?
50 redirects is a lot of redirects for one week! Sometimes when that much change has happened on a site it can longer than a few days for the site to be fully re-crawled/indexed and your rankings to normalize. Have you updated your sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools?
I always like to put a self-canonical tag in where it makes sense, just because there are a lot of URL parameters (session IDs, tracking code, etc) that can cause duplicate URLs and it's nice to have the stripped-down plain URL be the canonical version.
Can you clarify what you mean by "the old pages are still visible to Google's bot"? Do you mean they're still showing up in the index after the redirect is in place? If so it could just be that your site hasn't been re-crawled yet. Some other things to check: Have you updated your internal links that pointed to the old pages so that they point to the new page? Have you done a link building push to try to get some external link love to the new page? Basically I would say don't rely on the redirects alone to help the bot find the new page.
Kristinn's suggestion would be another way to go: don't redirect the other pages, instead post a link at the top saying "for updated info go over here" and then canonical the old pages to the new page. Over time though a 301 is going to be the best long-term solution. If the URL is redirecting you shouldn't need to keep the content up on the page.
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RE: I am still confused about anchor text and penalties
One nice thing about the Penguin update is that we don't need to be quite so concerned with anchor text. I would say focus more on getting links from high-authority, trusted websites and less on the anchor text. Getting keyword-rich anchor text links from time to time won't hurt - and if you're using natural link building methods, you'll probably be fine having them - the important thing is that your ratio of keyword-rich anchor text links to regular anchor text likes (like "click here") is similar to that of other sites in your niche. It's when it's ALL your links or a vast majority of your links that it starts to look suspicious.