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Best posts made by RyanKent
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RE: International Keyword Ranking
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RE: There was a really awesome Brand Video at Mozcon last year
A great reminder for us all. Thanks for sharing Dana. #RCS
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RE: Culling 99% of a website's pages. Will this cause irreparable damage?
The transition I mentioned would allow for a smoother migration process rather then a "cold turkey" switch from the old site to the new site. You clearly recognize the end goal is to create your new site and delete the old site. The good news is that change does not have to happen over night.
You can build out your new site completely and go live with it. At that point you would update any external links you control along with your advertisements, signatures, etc. You would also want to reach out to partners and any sites with links that you can influence. Update those links so they point to your new pages.
The final step is the redirection of your 140k page old site to the appropriate pages on the new site. Clearly you wish to begin with the most prominent pages such as your landing pages along with any important pages such as "Contact Us", your reservation system, etc.
The next step would be applying your redirect rules to the remaining pages. Extensive testing will be required.
You should set up GA or another tracking tool to monitor your old site. You will want to closely monitor activity for quite some time. Specifically look for any issues with 404s and multiple redirects.
With respect to your anchor text, I suspect it was used to sculpt your site so your link value was focused on a particular page for each topic. When you have 140 pages on a given topic, you can pursue an incredible amount of longtail phrases. Now I suspect you may have 4 pages for each area: Rome, Rome by Air, Rome by Car, and Rome hotels. If that is the case your future anchor text linking will be a lot more straight forward.
I want to say "I wouldn't be concerned about the anchor text" but you have a major project ahead of you, you are highly dependent on SEO and there are many opportunities for something to go wrong. In that context, I would share the anchor text would be on the list of things to think about, but the proper redirects is a much larger concern.
A final thought I would offer: this is all high level, generic advice. I would recommend hiring a SEO who could offer a proper evaluation of your site along with a migration plan. Once the change has been completed and tested, you should gain many advantages with your new site. Hopefully they will offset any loss from the migration. Once you are confident in your new site, I would recommend a SEO campaign promoting your new site.
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RE: What to tweet and blog about?
For content ideas, set up a news feed for yourself that is filtered for "teachers". I just read a story last night: http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/07/20/why.quit.teacher/index.html?hpt=hp_c1
Take recent news stories, add your experience, insight and commentary so the article will be helpful to your readers.
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RE: What keywords would you suggest for interesting concept?
Google AdWords Keyword Tool is excellent in this regard. Enter in a phrase and it will show you many other related phrases. You can also see the traffic generated for each phrase along with the difficulty in ranking for the phrase.
If you need more ideas, try to find apps which perform a similar function for other software. Examine their sites and keyword usage.
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RE: Do the search engines kind of test you out at a higher ranking for a short period of time?
The closest I could find as a word from Google was a reply from a lvl 14 on the Google forums. Since John Mu is a Google employee and lvl 15, I am guessing lvl 14 is as high as a non-employee can go.
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=7f20e3124fd3fa41&hl=en
"New sites get a short period (honeymoon) were they are "boosted" to see how they do and to get some traffic etc."
Also you can take a look at a blog article from Rand where he touched on this topic.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/googles-sandbox-still-exists-exemplified-by-gradercom
The topic is touched upon a number of times but I was unable to find any official statement from Google or Matt Cutts.
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RE: Culling 99% of a website's pages. Will this cause irreparable damage?
Nick,
Sounds like you have a good strategy. I only have two additional items to share based on your latest reply.
www.url.com/resort_hotels/hotels_in_rome.asp
That url seems a bit spammy to me. Mentioning "hotels" twice is something I would avoid. I would consider something along the lines of the below options instead:
www.url.com/resorts/hotels_in_rome
www.url.com/resort_hotels/rome
I also wanted to talk about the landing pages for cars and air travel once more. Before directing all your current pages to a generic page I would take a look at the existing 140 pages and ask once again, do any of the pages have anything that is unique which can be used for the location based car and air landing pages?
Your plans are to develop these pages with quality content over time, which is great. I hate the idea of having establishing pages for each area, pulling back to having one generic page, then expanding again to location-based pages.
If you sincerely intend to develop these pages on a reasonable time period, I would suggest establishing one page for each location even if it was thin on content to start with. Driving directions, local driving laws, testimonials, anything that can be used as a starting point to hold your footing would be preferred.
If you do pull back to a generic "car rentals" page, I have two ideas. Build out your location landing page for one area such as London. Closely watch your conversion rates on users on the London page versus the generic page. If there is a significant difference, it may help speed up your transition. If you realize you are losing $$ every day you don't have those pages, then perhaps you can hire additional help to speed up the process.
The final idea would be to build country-based landing pages for car rentals as an stop-gap measure. Your Milan, Rome, etc pages could all direct to "Cars Italy" and "Air Italy".
There are tons of choices on the internet for travel providers. You have an extremely well established user base. My top concern for any migration is to maintain all my existing relationships. Some travel sites do great with a single landing page for air/cars/hotels. It sounds like your site has catered to clients in a specific way, and I would be sensitive to maintaining your current user experience.
One last idea that just came to me. After the migration poll users for feedback. Take surveys, offer discounts, generate hype but engage users because they will offer a different point of view which you may not have considered.
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RE: Social Media For Doctors Office Help!
Even if your client is not actively trying to build his practice, grabbing his social media sites is still recommended. What happens if another person grabs those names and begins using them? It can cause a headache for your client to explain to his/her patients the social media site is owned by someone else.
Worse, what if the owner of the social media account offers bad advice or otherwise acquires a negative reputation. A facebook or twitter page with the same name as the doctor's office could build the page to rank higher then the doctor's website is SERPs.
Another consideration is connecting with patients. You can reach out to patients via phone, mail and e-mail but people move and many may not remember to update contact information with their doctors. Social media allows patients to connect with the doctor rather then having the doctor's office to connect with the patient. A doctor's address/phone number change, vacation and other information can be communicated once via social media and reach many patients who otherwise might be missed.
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RE: What is the effect of a proxy server replicating a sight on SEO
If the server was not publicly reachable (i.e. just on their intranet), then there would be no issues.
If the server was accessible to the public, then as long as the site was blocked with a robots.txt file search engines would not index it. There would be no reason for anyone to link to the site, so it should be invisible to search engines. At least Google/Bing will respect those settings, and they are all that really matter.
I would be most comfortable with the above but if you want to be extra cautious you can set up a canonical for each page back to the main site. You would need a script to either add or modify the canonical tag on every page.
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RE: Are Subdomains Beneficial?
Chris,
Your client's current set up is ideal. Why are you considering a change?
Currently each store has it's own directory. This enables you to run Google Analytic and other reporting on each store individually. You gain the advantage of having your domain authority for all stores contained in one site. You also can have significant cost savings for product licensing (SSL certificates, trust certificates such as Verisign, payment processing, software licenses, etc) which may each add additional charges for sub-domains.
Based on the information you shared, I am not aware of any SEO benefit to be gained from using sub-domains.
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RE: Do the search engines kind of test you out at a higher ranking for a short period of time?
You can be fairly confident any automated method of moving through a website will be quickly discovered by Google. They are a multi-billion dollar company which employs many of the world's best educated and foremost experts on the topic.
Live people have specific patterns and automated methods attempt to mimic those patterns and normally fail in a detectable way. If you want to try your hand at black hat SEO you are welcome to do such, but it is likely a waste of time, money and effort which could be directed towards providing your customers with real value.
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RE: Culling 99% of a website's pages. Will this cause irreparable damage?
Your understanding is correct.
Google does not care how many directories appear in a URL. The two URLs you offered as an example are viewed equally by Google. What's important is how many clicks it takes users to access those links.
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RE: So I am my coworker have a differing opinion on social networking sites.
I would recommend the middle road. Grab all social networking IDs related to your site. Grab the id's for facebook, twitter, linkedin, stumbleupon, digg and all other popular social networks with your brand or site name. The reason is simple. You want to control those names and not allow someone else to do such. If you think "well, I don't use MySpace so I don't care about that one" imagine what is someone else can do if they controlled the id and shared information with it.
Once you have the id's, then the discussion with your coworker comes into play. I would recommend building the profile on each site. It is simple and fast to do. It also may expose your site to people who otherwise may not find it.
After the profile is created, then Syed's points should be considered. The value of your profiles with these various networks increase with your level of activity. Simply creating the profile does offer some value, but not much.
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RE: My client's resort, ME Cancun would like to rank for the keyword “Complete ME” and related modifiers. So any advice or ideas you have to improve our performance on this keyword is appreciated.
The phrase your client selected will be very challenging and require solid dedication and SEO work.
Your client wishes to rank for "Complete ME". My definition of ranking is appearing on the first page of Google results. Using that definition, you are trying to compete on generic words rather then a unique brand. This type of ranking is the most challenging. It is made much more difficult based on the following:
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"Complete Me" is part of a very famous movie line "You Complete Me" said by Tom Cruise.
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"Complete Me" is also part of a song "You Complete Me" by Keyshia Cole.
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There is a wiki page titled "Complete Me" which will take one of the first page result slots
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There are books, clothing line and an opera which use that phrase.
With the above understood, here are some steps to improve your rankings:
1. Make a page optimized for that single phrase. The page's title should be "Complete ME"
2. Use anchor text where appropriate throughout your site directing visitors to the "Complete ME" page
3. Earn links from other sites using "Complete ME" and several variations of anchor text
4. Use solid SEO on the page. Ensure your title is a H1 tag which includes "Complete ME", and your content uses the term at least a couple times.
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RE: Type of redirect?
I agree with Dan's approach.
It sounds like you want to use your current "olddomain.com" as your development area. That doesn't make sense to me. If you use your "newdomain.com" site for development, then when you are ready upgrade/switch your current domain with the newly re-designed content, you wont need to use any form of redirect. It's less work for you and search engines.
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RE: Strategies in Renaming URLs
Well dignan, you will probably be as surprised as I am right now. Go ahead and Google Bacon Dental floss.
In our ignorance, we assumed it was not a competitive market. Justin's site is ranked 3rd for the term behind amazon.com and another listing. I checked the first 50 results and it is filled with various sites all specifically titled "Bacon Dental Floss".
I have to go. A friend of mine has a hot tip on a new product, Flounder Apple juice and I need to catch the IPO.
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RE: Do links on Quora pass link juice or other SEO benefits?
Do outbound links from Quora pass link juice or other SEO benefits?
Quora links in answers are marked nofollow, so they do not pass link juice nor any direct SEO benefits. I searched dozens of questions trying to find one with a link posted in the actual question but I could not find an example. Most likely, links in questions have the nofollow tag applied as well.
Indirect SEO benefits may be obtained any time someone is talking about your site, your products or services. Brand recognition increases which is almost always a good thing. Some SEOs theorize nofollow links may help your overall link profile by providing a broader link base.
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RE: Is there a PPC basics guide?
David's recommendation is good. I am not aware of any simple, quality AdWords guide like the Beginner's Guide to SEO. A few other great resources:
-http://www.google.com/ads/agency/toolkit.html
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not a beginner's book but still awesome: Brad Geddes Advanced Google AdWords
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Google Engage Basic Training (AdWords for agencies)
Probably the best way to go is download the free book and go from there.
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RE: Switched From Wordpress, Traffic Dropped In Half
Hi Jesse.
WordPress and EE both offer quality CMS solutions. Search engines don't care at all how your site is developed, but instead will focus on your content and how it is presented with respect to tags and so forth.
Some questions for you:
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is your current content 100% identical when compared with when your site was on WP?
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did you use any SEO plugin while you were on WP?
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what other changes have been made on your site around the same time period?
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you mentioned 301 redirects. Did your URLs change during the switch?
Your site seems pretty solid on the basic SEO factors. You should NOT experience this issue purely from moving your site to a new CMS unless something else is wrong.
EDIT: Jesse, you have an issue with the redirects on your site.
http://www.getrightmusic.com/robots.txt returns a normal page from your site, and provides a "200" response showing it is the intended page.
I also tried http://www.getrightmusic.com/robots.txt123 as a URL, and also received a web page along with the "200" response.
After taking a closer look it seems to be your home page. So it seems you redirected all URLs without a page on your site to your home page? And you provide a "200" (page found, all ok) code rather then a 301?
Based on your above reply the reason for your drop in traffic is you lost the majority of your pages during the CMS change. While the pages still exist on your site, you lost any links to those pages and redirected users to your home page. The loss in traffic would be expected based on this method.
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RE: How does an exact match domain.me rate for SEO
If your market is exclusive to Ireland, I would recommend going with the .ie domain.
It is my understanding the deeper you go into your URL, the higher value Google offers. In the below example, all things being equal, the second URL would rank better. You could make up for the "loss" of not having the keyword match in this manner.
www.widget.com/home vs www.bigcompany.com/widget
I would like to add while it is desirable to have the keyword match, it is just one of over 100 factors used to create an overall value. Many sites are top ranked without having a keyword in their root URL.
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RE: I have a duplicate content problem
Hi Steve.
Log into Google WMT and go to the Home page. From there press the "Add a Site" button. You will most likely see the non-www version of your site listed. Add the www version of your site.
Next, go through the process of confirming your site. When your site was originally set up your website developer probably added the code to your web page or web server, so it may already be there. Try to confirm the code without actually adding anything to your site or server. If you receive an error, then go ahead and follow Google's instructions.
Once your site is verified, you will then be able to go to Site Configuration > Settings > Set Preferred Domain.
Decide which version you prefer for your site and stick with it. It looks like you are already set up to use "www" so I would recommend using that URL style unless you had a specific reason to change it.
EDIT: I can't help but offering a bit of feedback regarding your site. These are just suggestions so feel free to disregard any you don't care for:
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Change the "Facebook" block to the same color as Facebook pages. Your current green color blends in too much with everything else. It needs to stand out and be easy to find.
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Update your copyright to 2011
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Add a meta description tag to your pages. This tag wont help you rank better, but it will often be visible to users and may influence whether they click through to your site.
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Add ALT tags to your images, and try to align your image names with your keywords when possible. Presently they have names such as "teens" where "teen martial arts" might more accurately describe the image, and help you rank better.
You have other opportunities, but the above will help get you moving in the right direction. If you have a chance, I highly recommend reading the SEO Beginners Guide as it contains a lot of great information.
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RE: How to get a link on Twitter box in Huffington Post?
The Huffington site uses a twitter javascript snippet called Twitter Anywhere. You can learn more about it here: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/anywhere/welcome
The topic in this case is a search for "Jennifer Lopez". The traffic is so insanely high that even if you appeared in the block, it is highly unlikely your tweet would be present during a crawl. The current block shows 1 tweet from 2 days ago, 1 from 1 day ago, 1 from 12 hours ago, and the rest are under 3 minutes old.
J-Lo is very hot right now and seems to be receiving over 20 tweets per minute. The block only holds a set number of tweets so they are flying in and out very fast. This page is likely indexed and reindexed very quickly so even if your tweet was captured on a crawl, it would likely be gone very fast.
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RE: Aged .com domain or brand new .co.uk for UK site?
In my experience the age of a domain has absolutely ZERO value. If you have a 10 year old domain vs a brand new domain, if all other factors are equal the domain rankings will be identical.
If an older domain currently has links which are related to your site, that can certainly have value for the domain. If the domain name has a user base who may visit the site and you are prepared to handle that traffic, that can add value as well. The age itself is not a factor.
My advice would be to pick the best domain name you can find irregardless of the age.
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RE: Ranking #1 for Local, Not for National
His retail location does not hurt his web results in non-local areas.
If you have a hardware store in Omaha, then you might be one of ?25 stores in that area. It is not difficult to rank well locally in this case. But to rank well nationally for the term "hardware" you would be competing with many thousands of stores across the country. Then consider wholesalers and other terms such as "pc hardware" that compete for the term, and it really is a completely different world.
Bottom line, when you compete locally, you often remove a lot of your competition so you can rank higher. His local directory listings would not hurt him on national searches.
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RE: Image Links Vs. Text Links, Questions About PR & Anchor Text Value
Search engines are constantly changing their algorithms but to the best of my knowledge the below is accurate:
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the first link to a given URL on a page is what's counted. The anchor text from the 2nd and further links would not offer value.
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the order search engines go by is the order the links are seen as they read the page's code which may differ from how you see the links on the page
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I believe link text offers more value then alt text. We know Google would prefer to weigh factors that a user can see such as text on a page, over a tag which can be stuffed with anything. With that said, since Google cannot see an image they are vulnerable and have to rely on us to tell them what is in the image. Lindsay offers a different opinion, see link below.
Additional reading:
http://www.seomoz.org/qa/view/26507/alt-text-vs-anchor-text
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/results-of-google-experimentation-only-the-first-anchor-text-counts
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RE: Canonical Tag
For your first question, the order of the link values does not matter. Either will work. You can declare the rel or href in either order.
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RE: What are the first ten steps you should do with a new website
Hi Diane.
The first step I would recommend is reading the Beginner's Guide to SEO. I am not simply throwing a link at you. This is truly GREAT information which you should read from cover to cover, and keep as a reference.
Before going any further, I highly recommend you take some time to ponder WHY you are making this site. There already are a huge number of sites which offer this information. What EXACTLY will your site offer that is not already available from other sites? This thought process is all about determining your niche.
Your site seems too broad at the moment to be successful in SERPs. There are an incredible number of other sites who have brand recognition and an established user base, along with strong financial resources. In order to effectively compete you will need a very strong focus, a narrow niche, and a detailed plan on exactly why a user should choose your site over the competition.
http://www.womenshealthmag.com/
Take a close look at your competition and see what they are doing. Have a clear plan for how your site will be an improvement for readers. Take a look at the wiki for your niche: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_women's_magazines
You will see a list of about 80 other women's magazines, along with a list of about 25 magazines that have stop publishing.
I am not trying to discourage you. To the contrary, I want you to be successful in your endeavor. I would like to see you develop a very sharp focus which can help you attract and retain a base of dedicated followers.
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RE: Different pages ranking for search terms, often irrelevant.
I looked at your site along with all the details you mentioned including the two pages involved and the moviebestwatch.com. I was unable to locate any apparent reason for the results you are experiencing.
I checked all the unseen factors including ALT text and incoming link anchor text. The logo-templates page is clearly highly associated with "templates" but there was not a single instance of the term Joomla in the html code.
I would suggest contacting Google via the Reconsideration Request tool and ask if your site is under any penalty. I am concerned about this site with 800k links. That would clearly set off alarms and it is unclear how Google's automated system, or any given employee, may have reacted.
If there were no other issues the only step I can recommend is to add a text link to your page footer for "Joomla templates" linking to the correct page. This step normally should not be necessary, but is being suggested as a bandaid to resolve your current issue.
I did a Google site search for your term: joomla templates site:http://www.templatemonster.com/. The correct page appeared as the first result. I would be interested to hear if anyone else has a different view on this matter.
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RE: Too Many On-Page Links for my Blog
For your Archives section, you could consider changing the 2008, 2009 & 2010 archives to a single link for each year rather then a month-by-month breakout. This change will bring you to under 100 links on the page while still making your archives available to users.
Prior to making this change I would suggest you perform some analytics to see how often these links are used. I suspect they are rarely used in which case this change would be recommend. The result would be an end to the warning and better PR flow throughout your site to your more popular pages.
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RE: Why doesn't everyone just purchase a .org tld?
Hi Elad.
Alan's answer is 100% correct. A .org site has absolutely no inherit value greater or less then a .com site with respect to search engine ranking. In fact, all the domains ranging from .net, .info, .edu, .gov etc all have the same value, zero. The value they gain is by building your site, adding content and earning links.
Where a particular domain has increased value is in public perception. A .com is seen as the legitimate business domain, which is as the domain was intended. Think of any major business such as McDonalds, Walmart, Facebook, Google, ATT, etc. and simply add a .com to it, you will land on the company's site. That is not the case of any other domain.
In that sense, .org is seen as for non-profits, .edu for educational institutions, and so forth. This is the public perception and it is by design. If you attempt to run a .org as a commercial site, you are likely to lose some traffic due to people not willing to conduct normal commercial business (i.e. shop online) with a .org site. SEOmoz pulls it off nicely in large part because of all the free SEO offerings: blog articles, Q&A, tools, etc. The basic services are offered for free and users can pay for upgrades. This business model combined with an exceptionally friendly organization and customer service works, but most businesses would not be able to pull it off.
With respect to an exact match, an Exact Match Domain (EMD) has been devalued and it is ridiculously overvalued by people who do not understand SEO. The domain name is one of over 200 ranking factors. You will find all the best names such as "insurance.org" have been taken. If you find a name left, it is because no one else wants it. The bottom line, the amount of traffic you can obtain with the EMD is not worth the effort it takes to provide the content and backlinks to make it work. You will receive a ranking boost for the exact match search, but not the rest of the searches for your site.
You clearly have a firm belief a .org site is advantageous. I am certain it is not, but feel free to purchase the domain and prove us all wrong. You clearly will have a bargain as there are plenty of domains available.
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RE: How to best correct cannibalization?
Hi Meghann.
Your two pages represent a classic case of keyphrase cannibalization.
The page title of each page is identical: Western Wedding Invitations by UrbanityStudios
The H1 tag of each page is almost identical: Western Wedding Invitations - 1527a
The URL of each page is almost identical: http://www.urbanitystudios.com/Designs/western-wedding-invitations-p-1527.html
To fix this issue, the first suggestion is to understand each page of your site should ideally target one keyphrase. That phrase (or a very close variation) should be used in the page title, h1 tag and content. If that same phrase is used elsewhere on your site, it should ideally be an anchor text link to the correct page.
Based on your question the root cause of the issue is you have two products named "Western Wedding Invitations". Even though each product has a different id number, there is not enough differentiation to help any search engine understand your wishes.
To fix the problem, keep the name on the page you wish to be indexed and change the product name for the other page. Perhaps "Country Wedding Invitation" could work? For the purposes of this reply I'll use that as an example.
Change your product name to Country Wedding Invitation. You stated that change would cause the URL to change automatically. Next, change the page title, h1 tag, content, alt tags, etc. to support the new name. 301 redirect the old URL to the new one. Once Google crawls your site it will recognize the change and fix the problem. Your results may bounce around a bit for a month, but then they should settle down.
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RE: Rankings moving in every 2 days.
Prior to exploring other possibilities, I would like to ask if you have been consistently using the same pc and browser to check the results? Or have you been using a particular SEO tool?
If you change pc's or browsers, your results could change due to various personalization settings. I would suggest using &pws=0 to help with consistent results. Additionally try to use the same pc, browser and settings if possible.
If you are using a SEO tool, there are potential variations depending on how the tool extracts data.
Before looking at other facts, it would be best to rule out these possibilities.
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RE: Setting a 404, best practices
If for any reason a web page is not found your web server will return a 404 http header code. Wikipedia offers a very readable status code list:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes
The challenge you are facing is Google does not automatically de-index a link due to receiving a 404 error. At times Google might crawl a site and there can be an issue where a page is not available, or even your whole site. In my opinion the best way to handle that is for Google to wait until they have received a 404 response a few times, then remove the page.
Make sure your page is not blocked by robots.txt or else Google will never be able to see the page and know it is 404'd.
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RE: Footer backlinks for sites I've developed
It is a common practice for a site's developer to provide a self-promoting footer link in the site's they develop. There is no harm in doing so. You should not expect any noticeable value from the link either.
The entire concept of a valued link is an "independent vote". More specifically, it is a natural link which a user chose to provide. Links from sites you develop or host on your server are not chosen by the site owner. You choose to place the link. You could argue the site owner could choose to opt-out, but that is a another matter.
Google offers very low value to links in footers. Google also offers a lower value to site-wide links. Google also devalues links from sites on the same server. The bottom line is these links are not earned and you should not expect any value from search engines for them. If you build a high quality site then adding a footer link may occasionally earn your site a visit from someone interested in having their site developed. That needs to be enough for you.
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RE: How do I get the expanded results in a Google search?
You are referring to Sitelinks.
Sitelinks are provided based on keyword searches where a given site's structure and content is highly relevant to where Google decides to provide additional exposure for the site. There is not any singular adjustment you can make to gain sitelinks. It is outside of your control.
You can strongly increase the likelihood of your site being listed with Sitelinks by improving the quality of your site's architecture along with the quality and quantity of content. Learn more here: https://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=47334
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RE: Is My Competitor Beating Me With A Better URL Structure?
Yes, the keyword in the domain makes a noticeable difference. Some other issues with your site:
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#1 take care of any outages so your site is 99.999% stable
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you show 3 meta description tags. Delete the last two
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you show 3 meta keyword tags. I would recommend deleting all of them
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your copyright date is 2009. It's not a SEO issue per se but it should be udpated.
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your competitor is clearly beating you on content. Try using the SEOmoz LDA tool and comparing your sites.
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RE: What are the top web design agencies?
Any list of the top CRO firms will likely include SiteTuners.
If I was asked to perform this work, I would involve multiple people in the process:
First, SiteTuners to gather all the CRO details.
Second, a graphic designer to provide the PSD for the site based on SiteTurners recommendations and the client's wishes.
Third, a developer experienced in the particular platform your client uses. The developer would perform the code cleanup, the PSD to HTML coding, and make the site mobile friendly.
The skillsets involved for each type of work is very different. The best results will likely be achieved by different companies. You may be able to find a single company which is "pretty good" at all three, but these would not likely by "the top" at any of them, or certainly not all of them.
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RE: Keyword search results
Is there any tools that provide information on how many results there are for a given keyword?
Google AdWords Keyword tool does such. A better tool is SEMrush (which uses AdWords data) but it costs about $70/month.
Either way, be sure you understand the difference between "exact match" and "broad match". You also should understand "global" searches vs "local" searches. Lastly, you need to be careful as the "difficulty" ratings in AdWords relate to ads, not organic searches.
Even when you use other tools to provide an organic difficulty rating, these tools are often highly inaccurate. Many base the difficulty solely on the site's Domain Authority. You need to consider the quality of the web page and how well it is optimized.
To start, begin working with AdWords and try to gain an understanding. Like most SEO tasks, you can learn a fair bit right off, but the finer points take time, experience and tools.
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RE: What is the effect on using jQuery sliders for content on SEO?
There is no issue with using js sliders in the manner you described.
Most similar questions asking if it is ok to use a certain technique can be checked by answering two questions:
After making this change can the code be read in the HTML (View Page Source) of the page?
Is this change a positive user experience?
If both of the above questions can be answered with a "yes" then it is most likely going to be acceptable to search engines.
This answer is based on the assumption you are proceeding in good faith. If you did anything manipulative such as present slide 1 for 10 seconds, slide 2, 3, &4 for 10 seconds each, then through in a long slide 5 for half a second with links or other hidden content, of course that can be an issue.
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RE: Is it too late to change an IP from the linking c-block?
There is a lot of speculation regarding how Google evaluates links and determines relationships between a linking site and its target. If you are a web developer and your clients are hosted on one of your servers, I would not make any effort to hide the relationship.
The prevailing thought amongst SEOs is Google understands IPs and therefore its important to not only change the IP address, but to ensure the new IP uses a different C block. This concept is years old and was employed as a first-step measure when Google first tackled the issue of site owners who were manipulating links. I strongly believe Google evolved past the linking C-block idea a long time ago.
Google is a very intelligent and experienced company when it comes to evaluating manipulative links. Here are a few examples of how Google can still determine a relationship exists despite varying your C-block:
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when all your clients are hosted on the same server, and they all provide links to your site, the relationship is pretty obvious.
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Google can ignore the IP addresses entirely and examine the nameservers. Many site owners use "SEO hosting" where they have one server with various IPs. The site owner specifically requests their IPs to use various C-blocks thinking Google wont recognize they are all using the same nameserver.
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there are numerous other ways Google can relate sites. A specific combination of software is one example. Perhaps all the sites you develop are Joomla 1.7 with a certain combination of extensions. Perhaps you install a specific custom-created script or widget.
The bottom line is footer links are the least valuable type of link. You can expect Google to recognize the link and offer it some minimal value. There is not likely any significant improvement to the link's value by varying the IP. If you desire more traffic I would suggest creating code to solve a problem no one else has tackled. You can then earn authentic links from a variety of sources and be far ahead of the game.
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RE: When to remove bad links.
Time and money is less of an issue, we just want to do what is best for the site
That is a fantastic position. SEO is a long-term proposition. This thinking should guide your entire decision making process.
Some people have mentioned in the past that sending a reconsideration request could do more harm than good
I cannot comment on what "some people" have shared. I read a lot of SEO related articles and there is a high percentage of questionable and outright incorrect information shared. I would ask you exactly who shared the advice and in what context.
Here is what Matt Cutts has shared on this topic: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rsWc78dits
My strong opinion on the matter is as follows:
1. If no manual actions have been taken on your site, Google auto-replies. Accordingly, there is no harm in asking.
2. Matt shared in a different video (sorry, I was unable to easily locate the link) that his team does not go looking for problems as a result of a Reconsideration Request. Based on my knowledge and experience, if you have a penalty on your site and you submit a Reconsideration Request asking if you have a penalty, a member of the spam team will likely just push a button and share the canned response Google offers for penalties of that type. A Google employee would not go searching your site looking for issues.
3. For 100% of clients, I submit a Reconsideration Request upon accepting them as clients. It has never once been a cause for concern on any level.
Running a website is the act of a business. You cannot run your business in fear, and there is no reason to fear any aspect of the Google Reconsideration Request process as a white hat SEO or site operator.
Is it worth just removing links with no reconsideration request? Or is that essential?
It is essential to submit a Reconsideration Request if you are manually penalized.
One final note. There are legitimate other opinions on this topic. I have tremendous respect for Dr. Pete and agree with his approach 99.9% of the time, but I do recall him sharing a different viewpoint on this topic suggesting site owners not to submit a Reconsideration Request unless they had reason to believe they were penalized. Even if that were the case, in your instance there is strong reason to believe a manual penalty may exist on your site. Submit the Reconsideration Request and find out. Knowing is better then not knowing.
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RE: Are URL shorteners building domain authority everytime someone uses a link from their service?
Jay, you are asking a great question and the answer is yes, links that are offered from URL shortener services build DA.
Think of those links as 301s. When you use http://bit.ly/xyz that URL is 301'd to the actual web address. As with all 301s, you do lose a bit of link juice due to the 301, but 90%+ of the value will remain.
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RE: Ecommerce & Responsive design
Responsive design is specifically mentioned as Google's preferred method for presenting mobile websites.
how Google will treat hiding content with the smaller screens
Google understands the code very well. As long as you implement the code in a reasonable manner, you should not have any concerns about a Google penalty.
Will this effect our rankings in a negative way?
Not if implemented correctly
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RE: When to remove bad links.
Our links were from an SEO company who always vowed their methods were totally adhering to google, but that was before penguin.
I have heard this exact statement countless times. I hate to be harsh on my own industry but things are quite bad for clients. They do not know who to trust, with good reason.
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many "SEO agencies" have little to no SEO knowledge. They skipped everything and built links, which worked too well in the past and now many site owners are paying the price.
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many of these same agencies outsourced 100% of their work to other countries were the work was performed in the lowest quality manner, despite assurances to the contrary
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many sites offer the appearance to be US or UK companies, but a quick inspection shows the veil is very thin and these are actually companies from India or other countries who pay for a virtual office or a single small office in order to funnel business.
Companies and site owners need to know how to navigate the shark infested waters of SEO and work with quality service providers.
Regarding your Penguin issue, based on the information provided your efforts are not even close to what is required to resolve the issue.
1. A comprehensive backlink report is necessary to capture all known links to your site. I use data from Bing, Google, OSE, Majestic and AHREFS. Once combined, this report is the most comprehensive list in the industry. There is no single source, nor any two sources, which can be used to properly capture all the links to your site.
2. The links need to be properly identified. Most site owners and even SEOs struggle in this regard. It cannot be done by any automated tool as there are far too many errors.
3. A comprehensive Webmaster Outreach Campaign needs to be conducted, and it needs to be successful. On a bad campaign the success rate should be about 25%. On a good one, the success rate exceeds 50%. There are numerous factors involved.
I know you are probably thinking "no way! I only get 1 out of 100 site owners to respond". The problem I see is most site owners chose the easy way out when they built manipulative links, and they similarly choose the easy way out when attempting to remove them. That is why forums are full of site owners sharing "I have turned in 10 Reconsideration Requests and all of them were declined".
You need to eliminate a "significant" number of links before using the Disavow Tool. My recommendation is to seek out a quality SEO provider with experience in resolving Penguin issues. If you cannot afford the cost of cleaning up the manipulative links, you can also change domains. The cost of losing all your good links and changing domains is very high in the long term, but in the short term the expenses are quite minimal.
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RE: Any ideas for capturing keywords that your client rejects because they aren't politically correct?
It's all about educating the client.
The client may not like the term, but if that is what the rest of the world associates with the business your client offers, then you are stuck with it. If you wish to get creative I can think of a few options:
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as you suggested, write articles on why the business model offered is not a "nursing home" but a "skilled nursing facility", "elder care group" or whatever name is preferred.
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you could supplement your SEO with SEM by placing ads on "nursing home" which do not use that phrase.
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you could use creative writing such as "...requires in home nursing...." and use image alt text, image names and other less visible means to get the correct associated for the term. This is certainly not the preferred approach but if you are dealing with a stubborn client your choices may be limited
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you can walk away from the client. It's your role to offer appropriate SEO advice. If that advice is not followed, there is not much you can do. I would try to work with the client as much as possible, use some of the techniques listed above, etc. but in the end either the client's expectations need to change or no one will be happy with this arrangement.
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RE: Legitimate hidden text and H1s are "OK?" Show me the data!
I could not agree more with EGOL. Text on a web page should appear as text, not within images. With CSS3 and current design standards, there is rarely a reason to do otherwise.
About the only place on a site where I permit text within an image is within the logo.
I am not aware of even the slightest SEO value from applying a header tag to a graphic.
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RE: What are the most trusted SEO sites?
Dana and Kevin's responses are great and deserve a thumbs up. I would add a few key site which have not been mentioned. I would place these primary information sites above any secondary sources:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/
http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/
http://www.youtube.com/user/GoogleWebmasterHelp
http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/default.aspx
Before looking to other sources, my advice is go to the official source of information.
If you decide you need more analysis, SEOmoz is (obviously) my preferred suggestion. I would suggest the above sources combined with SEOmoz is enough to keep a person busy for a year.
When you do view other sources, including SEOmoz, keep in mind there are great posters on bad sites, and bad posters on good sites. The difference is, the good sites will (eventually) correct any bad information. I prefer SEOmoz because they do an exceptional job of correcting misinformation. Even so, it may take a week for the error to be caught. With such a large, active community it is a huge amount of work to review every post made on the site.
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RE: What should my optimal anchor text look like, given cannibalization risk?
Hi Aran.
A few suggestions regarding your page:
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Your current title tag is "Raised Garden Beds: How to build, and where to buy a raised garden bed or planter | Eartheasy.com". Change it to "Raised Garden Beds | Eartheasy.com". Move the rest into your meta description.
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While you are making this change delete your meta keywords as it is rather large and offers no benefit.
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Your current H1 tag is Eartheasy and your H2 tag is Navigation. Change your large "Raised Garden Beds" message at the top of the page to an H1 tag. Your navigation should not be presented with a H2 tag. The H# tags are page headers indicating important topics discussed on the page. Think of it in terms of newspaper headlines where H1 is the main title.
As to your questions, changing "click here" and similar tags to actual anchor text is a great move.
Cannibalization happens when you have multiple pages on your site competing for the exact same keyword or phrase. As long as you vary the text and remain consistent, you are fine. You can refer to your "Farmstead Raised Garden Bed" page using that phrase as anchor text as long as you always point to the same URL. You are welcome to reuse "raised garden bed" in other anchor text as long as you include another brand or text with it.
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