I'm a bit confused. Are you talking about within a portfolio of past work you've done for clients on your own website? Or are you talking about 301 redirection from the old domain to the new? Or a bit of both?
Posts made by RyanPurkey
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RE: Update citations
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RE: What was your experience with changing site url's?
Hi Kent. This can vary pretty substantially based on a number of factors, but losing organic traffic for a a couple of months would be on the high end of delays and cause for concern towards the tail end of that time. There's a nice migration guide here from 2012 that's still relevant: http://moz.com/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos. Mostly it comes down to solid planning and good promotion of the new site address to really help the process along. Cheers!
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RE: Why do Local "5 pack" results vary between showing Google+, Google+ and website address
The obvious problem would be that their website address hasn't been verified and linked to their Google + profile... Linking them together in GWT and Analytics would help too. After checking those things I'd check other settings, like use Google + as site.
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RE: Image URLs changed 3 times after using a CDN - How to Handle for SEO?
Sorry I missed this follow-up earlier. Within the site map you'll want to change the http://WWW to http://CDN for these image files. The www version of your site, and the cdn server are on two different IPs / server. You want images to be serving from the CDN one.
For 2, if you do use 301 redirection I'd recommend scripting it so that the script inspects whether or not it's an image file and then applies the cdn change. A pro in your area that works with REgex and htaccess will be able to guide you through that.
The username.net-dns.com thing... That's not your server is it? You can't apply redirects on servers outside of your control. Cheers!
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RE: On the use of Disavow tool / Have I done it correctly, or what's wrong with my perception?
Highland's analysis is correct. You should only be using the disavow tool carefully and with a measured approach, and usually in dealing with penalties.
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RE: When the site explorer will recognise the new TLD?
Correct. The .website extension is causing issues for tools such as Moz and Majestic. Still, you will be able to look up competitor data on more standard domains. That alone will give you plenty of data and goals to work with when planning a new website.
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RE: What is the importance of root domains linking to your website in Google's rankings? I notice our competition has a much higher number on keywords I'm analyzing. Thank you!
Hi Miriam. Root domains are the first two extensions of a domain name, working right from left, so in the example www.google.com, the root domain is google.com. It's a handy metric because sometimes you get links from mobile versions of sites that are like m.google.com so by removing the third level (m, www, etc) you get a better idea of how many individual websites are linking to you or your competition. Like you've said, it's basically more websites linking to your competition.
Time to build varies! Some sites explode onto the web via viral content, product releases, huge funding, etc, but in your research you can likely get a decent idea of timeline by looking at dates on when various articles were written, how long a site's domain name has been registered, and their presence in archive.org's way back machine.
The Moz Learn center (http://moz.com/learn/seo) will definitely help you on your way. Cheers!
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RE: OSE Inbound Link Report Exports Returning Blank
I've been able to download populated reports since you posted this. Have you tried again, or with a different domain? Cheers!
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RE: Best way to find the best keywords to write Q&A
You can also install site search and look at what people are trying to find once they arrive to your site. Further, if you have profiles that are thoroughly developed you can look at the analytics to see which aspects of that are drawing the most visits for setting content creation goals when it comes to planning what to add to other profiles. Cheers!
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RE: Keyword research when the site's subject is low volume
Hi Leo. You might also try terms that are tangentially related, like global volumes around contact centers (US and UK spellings), non-charity based services, and so on. That way at least, you'll be getting larger numbers that you can distill downwards towards your search volume.
Another source of search referral traffic that I see with search providers is testimonial based, i.e. someone is researching a brand or charity and they come across your site via their testimonial around your service.
Lastly, you can check contact center strategies in other markets to see what they've done in the past, what they've missed, and where you could improve. Cheers!
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RE: Site hit by algorthithmic update in October 2014 - filters and thin content queries.
If the filters are working via parameters you can go into GWT and add them to the exclusion list. Robots.txt might be able to apply if you were able to serve filters via a folder through a bit of URL rewriting. Mostly it's a question of getting Google to ignore the duplicate content so research specific to your clients situation there will be a good start.
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RE: 303 Redirects Search Engine Friendly?
This is an older post on it, but still applicable: http://sharkseo.com/nohat/303-redirects-seo/ and is more like a 302. 301 is the standard way to pass along site authority for permanently moved addresses. See: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93633, "If you need to change the URL of a page as it is shown in search engine results, we recommend that you use a server-side 301 redirect." Cheers!
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RE: Did you take the industry survey?
Yup! Congrats on the usability score. I liked that the survey self-truncated when selecting that a section didn't apply. Good work there.
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RE: Commas in Meta Title and Description Okay?
Within titles a comma is often seen as wasted space since the character count is so limited, but sites with them in their title still rank, see: https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=lions%20tigers%20bears. Headings tend to be as short as titles which is probably what dictates comma usage more than anything. Meta Descriptions using commas are fine and fairly common since they're written with less space constraints as the above.
Do you have the source on where you heard this first? Would be interesting to see how they're discussing it. Cheers!
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RE: Why did my DA and Links go down?
Moz just recently pushed their latest update: http://moz.com/products/api/updates which tends to affect these numbers. The important thing is to check how you're comparing to your competition. Often they see fluctuations as well. With the previous update, Rand put out this post regarding fluctuations: http://moz.com/community/q/have-questions-about-the-jan-27th-mozscape-index-update-get-answers-here:
...we crawled a massively more diverse set of root domains than ever before. Whereas our previous index topped out at 192 million root domains, this latest one has 362 million (almost 1.9X as many unique, new domains we haven't crawled before). This means that DA and PA scores may fluctuate more than usual, as link diversity are big parts of those calculations and we've crawled a much larger swath of the deep, dark corners of the web (and non-US/non-.com domains, too). It also means that, for many of the big, more important sites on the web, we are crawling a little less deeply than we have in the past (the index grew by ~31% while the root domains grew by ~88%). Often, those deep pages on large sites do more internal than external linking, so this might not have a big impact, but it could depend on your field/niche and where your links come from.
Cheers!
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RE: Domain added to the url
Hi Karin. Try out the crawl tool: Xenu Link Sleuth. It will show you broken links like these along with the page on which they're located.
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RE: 301'd an important, ranking page to the wrong new page, any recourse?
The applicable bounce rate would be more along the lines of time spent on your site between Google Organic clicks, still you could see some benefit from more visits to the page in general so the adwords sourced traffic won't hurt. If applicable you could also run a campaign targeting SEO value as an outcome. See: http://moz.com/blog/advertisement-investments-organic-roi-whiteboard-friday. Cheers!
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RE: Pure Manual Spam v/s New website
Just from glancing at your site, the displayed content doesn't seem to be the source of the spam. If I were you though I'd hire a trusted professional to help you purge bad links, hacker access, and rigorously check to make sure your site is clean before attempting to fix it by transferring to a new domain. You want to make certain that the new site isn't carrying any of the old baggage from the one that got in trouble and typically you can get the old one fixed in about the same time if you're disciplined about it.
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RE: Pure Manual Spam v/s New website
I see. If you had a site that was hacked and were unable to get rid of the hacker inserted content then Google would see that content as pure spam. Please do read through the Google guidelines as they're pretty clear on what they want. Cheers!
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RE: Pure Manual Spam v/s New website
If the content from your old site is part of the problem, then you shouldn't use it. There's a nice post on how rigorous Google is trying to become when presenting sites here: http://moz.com/blog/panda-pummels-press-release-websites-the-road-to-recovery. It's long, but gives you several insights into what Google is considering when looking for quality content.
For your site individually, what was the level of engagement? Were people spending a lot of time on site? Good conversations if you had a comment section? Lots of pages viewed per session? Several naturally received links form people sharing your content? Referrals from email because people had emailed each other links to your site?
There are no tricks. A site people love can do a lot of technical things wrong and still do very well in Google.
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RE: Do Press Releases help ranking?
Hi Mase. The type of press release that gets the best benefit regarding rankings is when it's sourced via the press side. In situations like that, you have news based sites that are receiving large numbers of visits sending referrals to your site along with the associated links. The release from your side of it may be a new product, service, personal interest story, local news, business profile, etc. You'll be wanting to pitch various aspects of your site to the press for them to do the write up and publish to their network. Those are still, and will remain, really great sources of links / referrals.
The commoditized form of spun press releases across a network of press release sites is a bad route to go. Google has taken on several algorithmic changes to discount these. Cheers!
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RE: Pure Manual Spam v/s New website
Hi Howard. Manual actions are typically applied due to the following: automatically generated gibberish, cloaking, scraping content from other websites, and/or other repeated or egregious violations of Google’s quality guidelines. See: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2604777. If that's the case with your site, and you keep using the same tactics as you've used in the past, none of the solutions above will provide a long term fix. For more on Manual Actions, see: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2604824.
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RE: Does Google local account access affect local rankings?
I've never heard of that being the case, especially considering how many people / companies handle bulk listings. It could easily affect your spot check of their results unless you have a localized machine dialed in though. Local Rankings are much more likely to be affected by the things listed here: http://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors. Cheers!
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RE: Rank Tracker won't update rank
Hi Jamie. The tool seems to be working for me. To better track rank over the long term you could put those terms into an Moz Analytics campaign. Cheers!
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RE: Image URLs changed 3 times after using a CDN - How to Handle for SEO?
Right. Not everything is going to be served from cdn. It's most likely setup for your images so your sitemap will still reside on www. Make sure to point to the front end files though as those are the publicly accessible ones.
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RE: Base copy on 1 page, then adding a bit more for another page - potential duplicate content. What to do?
I see. In my experience that is too small of a difference to create multiple pages for. I'd get better rankings driving links, reviews, and engagement around the one page with multiple day purchase options. For content marketing to work well it needs to be more differentiated per page. Cheers!
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RE: Base copy on 1 page, then adding a bit more for another page - potential duplicate content. What to do?
To me this seems like something that would work better on one page, just from the potential of upsells and CRO. Plus you'd have more content and strength potential dedicated to the one page regardless of trip duration which would be better for search. I'd cluster something like this. Cheers!
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RE: Description vs meta description
Meta description will be what you write as the suggested description for Google to display in the search results, but Google will often rewrite the description to better match someone's search and their understanding of your page. They'll either pull text from another location on your page that matches terms or related terms of a user's search, rewrite title tags from time to time, or display what you write. See: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35624. Cheers!
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RE: Why is analytics.moz.com showing up a traffic source in Google Analytics?
It might be from you clicking on one of your URLs in Moz Analytics and visiting your site directly from there. They're likely your own visits so you could filter by your own IP to remove these along with other self-visits to your site, or filter them out via domain. I'd try filtering by your own IP first as it will cover more areas and is a best practice, see: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1034840. Cheers!
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RE: Image URLs changed 3 times after using a CDN - How to Handle for SEO?
You're on it. Redirecting to the new image source and submitting a new sitemap pointing to the URL 3 location for your images will be big steps in the right direction. Be sure to follow the instructions here for your sitemap: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/178636 as well as reviewing image publishing guidelines: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/114016. Cheers!
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RE: Difference between Link Analysis and open site explorer
Have you set OSE to the maximum amounts? Target >> this root domain, Link Source >> all pages, Link type >> all links?
You might be missing some if you're checking only external, certain types of links, only the current page, etc. Cheers!
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RE: MOZ Local
This blog post covers the details on their network pretty well: http://moz.com/blog/announcing-moz-local You can also see current status on business listings just by trying one out in the Check Listing tab: https://moz.com/local/search
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RE: Redesigned and Migrated Website - Lost Almost All Organic Traffic - Mobile Pages Indexing over Normal Pages
Hi Judah. Running the Desktop version through Google's Page Insights returns a score of 27/100. See: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.jmac.com%2FKeedex_K_DS_FLX38_p%2Fkeedex-k-ds-flx38.htm&tab=desktop
While the mobile version is at 75/100 for desktop and 66/100 for mobile (https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.jmac.com%2Fmobile%2FProduct.aspx%3FProductCode%3DKEEDEX-K-DS-FLX38&tab=desktop)
Based on those factors alone, it looks like Google could be returning the mobile site as the 'better' version for users. Another thing you should employ though is 302 redirection based on OS / browser detection so that trying to go to the mobile version with a desktop browser results in seeing the desktop page. See: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/mobile-sites/mobile-seo/configurations/separate-urls?hl=en, while following the rest of the practices on that page. Cheers!
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RE: Hacked site - knocked of for brand name
Feel free to report this issue to Google via: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport via your webmaster tools account (you should set on up for your site / brand as well if you don't have one yet).
This post goes into even greater detail as to how some scraper sites were able to outrank original content post-Panda: http://moz.com/blog/postpanda-your-original-content-is-being-outranked-by-scrapers-amp-partners and should give you several further ideas on improvements you can make.
You can also go the DMCA route since they're scraping your copyrighted content. Full instructions on that here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93713. Cheers!
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RE: 301'd an important, ranking page to the wrong new page, any recourse?
It sounds like you already fixed the issue by sending the redirect to the correct location. The old page's value should eventually associate with the correct page.
New links to the new page could help speed up the process either internally or from some external sources. If it's the type of page that makes sense to have its product featured on the home page for a bit of time that links back to the correct page that could help as well.
You shouldn't be starting from scratch, but you will experience the time delay involved in applying a redirect because of the change. The more things line up better with the correct page based on your own internal links, navigation, and external signals (maybe tweet a discount to the product for a few weeks to generate buzz), the quicker Google will get it.
Cheers! -
RE: Increase in pages crawled per day
Agreed. Especially since Google's own Gary Illyes respond to the following with:
How long is the delay between making it mobile friendly and it being reflected in the search results?
Illyes says “As soon as we discover it is mobile friendly, on a URL by URL basis, it will be updated.
Sounds like when you went responsive they double checked each URL to confirm. From: http://www.thesempost.com/googles-gary-illyes-qa-upcoming-mobile-ranking-signal-change/. Cheers!
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RE: Malicious bot attack?
Have you tried digging deeper into the type of browser and OS they're emulating? Chances are you could get a pretty precise block on just their activity if you match up their browser, screen dimension, OS, versions, etc without affecting any other users.
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RE: Strange Cross Domain Canonical Issue...
Yes, you'll still have the tracking parameters in place for your own uses but when it comes to GWT and the crawler you'll be telling them that page_X+parameterY is the same as page_X+parameterZ. Your link juice would be more concentrated in that case as you wouldn't be creating duplicate content via parameters and would further help Google to canonicalize your page.
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RE: Strange Cross Domain Canonical Issue...
You might want to make use of the URL Parameters section in Crawl >> URL Parameters to further help with your canonicalization. See: http://searchengineland.com/google-lets-you-tell-them-which-url-parameters-to-ignore-25925. Cheers!
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RE: Site hacked, but can't find the code
This search gives you a pretty substantial list of them as well: https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Apdnseek.com%20inurl%3Awll. Running off of the first one it looks like the 301 redirect is also pinging your XMLRPC and likely a consequence of being hacked through that file in your Wordpress implementation: http://blog.sucuri.net/2014/07/new-brute-force-attacks-exploiting-xmlrpc-in-wordpress.html. You'll want to update and tighten up your Wordpress install, create an admin that's not named 'admin', and noindex the /wll/ location.
See also: http://perishablepress.com/wordpress-xmlrpc-pingback-vulnerability/
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RE: Verified News Sources: A New Feature in Fresh Web Explorer Launched Today!
Also useful from working on the other side of trying to make traction within larger / verified news sources. Great work!
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RE: Increase in pages crawled per day
Ah, the responsive change could be a big part of it. You're probably getting crawls from the mobile crawler. GWT wouldn't be the best source for the recency on backlinks. I'd actually look for spikes via referrers in Analytics. GWT isn't always that responsive when reporting links. Still, it looks like the responsive redesign is a likely candidate for this, especially with Google's looming April 21st deadline.
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RE: Getting Google Plus Page to Appear
Hi Lauren. Cyrus wrote a nice post on this last year: http://moz.com/blog/google-plus-tips-seo, specifically, "For this method to work, it requires that your visitors actually engage." (Emphasis his). The rest of the tips break down how to incorporate the work you do there with the work you do on your site.
Next, appearance is partially a branded search question. Sometimes if there's not high enough volumes, Google doesn't incorporate it within the search results. Still, if you begin integrating it more and get user interactions: follows, reviews, comments, etc.you'll be much more likely to get it to show up. Cheers!
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RE: Google News Bug
I agree with Linda. Google Search and Google News are two different things with two different user types. High bounce rates are more common with people scanning headlines and skimming articles. I've never heard of a site popping into Google News causing a Google Search penalty.
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RE: UPS bought a domain that was blacklisted and now we cant rank in Google
Hi Tamir. Even though Google is a registrar itself and could see the change in ownership on the domain name, if there are a lot of spammy backlinks associated with Holidayshuahin.com, it'd be best to disavow them as part of your new ownership. You'll also want to register the site in GWT, Bing, etc to display new ownership, and make sure any of the old content is changed.
As far as links to and from your sites go, you'll want to make sure it's done in a reasonable manner. There's an older WBF on that here: http://moz.com/blog/interlinking-your-sites-whiteboard-friday along with a Matt Cutt's example outlined by Barry Scwartz here: http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-linking-20-domains-together-likely-a-cross-linking-scheme-167089. Those should give you enough guidance to right the ship. Cheers!
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RE: Responsive Code Creating Duplicate Content Issue
Yes. That's a good sign. GWT Fetch and Render would also show you how it's being handled. From your example you've definitely got multiple H2 tags as you're using them to subtitle subsections of the page, but none of them are duplicating. This seems to fall in line with Google's own practice: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.mx/2010/03/googles-seo-report-card.html (an example of them looking at their own site). Cheers!
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RE: Increase in pages crawled per day
There could be several factors... maybe your brand based search is prompting Google to capture more of your site. Maybe you got a link from a very high authority site that prompts higher crawl volumes. Queries that prompt freshness related to your site could also spur on Google. It is a lot of guesswork, but can be whittled down some by a close look at Analytics and perhaps tomorrows OSE update (Fresh Web Explorer might provide some clue's in the meantime.) At least you're moving in the right direction. Cheers!
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RE: Google My Business- Will a large service area dilute local search results?
Hi Brett. The biggest changes that you'll want to address / consider when working on this come from last July's Penguin update: http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change (see: Penguin - July 24, 2014). Mainly that, "Google has released a new algorithm to provide a more useful, relevant and accurate local search results that are tied more closely to traditional web search ranking signals." It sounds like you'll want to create content on your site that does as well traditionally as your HQ content for: CA, Hawaii, CO, AZ, and UT. This will help spur your localized results on as well.
More in-depth on the disappearance, check: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2014/07/25/google-updates-local-algo-with-more-web-based-signals-turmoil-in-serps/, "In searches I follow there has been both ups, downs and the disappearance of the pack where it was previously prominent. In one case a detached listing which had been doing well both organically and locally but wasn’t in the pack returned to the pack."
It's likely your current listings will stay as long as you don't nuke content on your site. The addition of service areas else where matching additional content on site would be a natural fit. Cheers!
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RE: An SEO Strategy (need review)
I see. In my opinion monetizing based on the number of links you build isn't a likely sustainable long term model. Good luck though!
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RE: Is this still considered true about INTERNAL anchor text? "Penguin seems to be targeting overly aggressive anchor text (both internally and externally), especially from low-quality sources."
Me either. Previously you asked, "Is there any difference in Google's treatment of aggressive anchor text between internal and external?" Externally, if every link pointing to your 'green widget' page or home page said, 'green widget' you'd likely get penalized by Google. Internally, linking to your page as such navigationally and in context like EGOL mentioned is fine. So there's a major difference right there. I don't think it's a question of 'being aggresive with it' just that you can refer to your own pages more precisely within the context of your own site.