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Thanks for your response Tim... we are very close to securing a PHP dev who is expert in CodeIgniter which PyroCMS is based on, but I hadn't really thought about Drupal - will give that some serious consideration!

Thanks

Simon

Hi Yannis

I am sure there is (a few options discussed here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/what-are-the-best-seo-tools-out-there)  but my question would be why do reciprocal linking?

Generally it is a tactic that has no SEO value these days, with search engines recognizing both links, and essentially cancelling them out. If one party is a huge high authority site (CNN/BBC etc.) then the smaller receiving party will benefit, but in most cases where sites are of similar authority levels, there really isn't much point to reciprocal linking.

Regards

Simon

Hey folks

I'm working with a small team on putting together a new niche accommodation / holiday search portal here in the UK. We are most likely using PHP / MySQL technology for the site - I am a huge fan of WordPress but not sure its quite man enough for the task (many option search over 10,000 plus properties).

We can't afford to pay for a bespoke development, so off-the shelf CMS is the most likely route for release 1, and from what I've been reading Pyro CMS seems a good open source choice... https://www.pyrocms.com/

Has anybody come across this, or know how good it is with regards to on-site SEO?

Or maybe WordPress is up to the task?

If not, what are other good open source options for sites focused around a search function?

Cheers

Simon

Hi Chris

Your timing was quite unfortunate as Google rolled out 2 fairly major algorithm changes on 27th Sept - 2 weeks ago today. This may have muddied the waters a little with regards to understanding the reason for your drop in traffic.

It is always quite risky doing a lot of URL re-writing at once - presumably you put 301 redirects from the old to new URL structure? (in case you didn't that is a crucial step in altering the structure of your URLs / changing page names, and may be related to the traffic drop - some useful pointers on that here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/transferring-to-new-url-structure-301-existing-ones)

I am not sure I understand your driver for doing the changes - the URLs were already unique - as long as the productA name is relevant, unique and descriptive then it probably doesn't warrant too much time changing things.

I'd suggest keeping the same-url/product structure and ensure your other on-page SEO is tight and focus on trying to create some new unique interesting content to go with your products to make them stand out. Maybe pictures / stories of some of your furniture in the home environment or something along those lines

Cheers

Simon

Many thanks Ben - and sorry for slow response!

I'm now planning on doing a simple hand coded re-write for some key terms, and monitoring the results/impact. Good call re: slow site is much worse than ugly URLS - totally agree on that. A migration is inevitable, its a case of 'when' not if (CMS is bespoke and ageing) and I'm hoping re-writes/re-directions on some of the higher traffic pages may help reduce the hit when the migration happens.

Cheers

Simon

Hi folks

Hope someone may be able to help wit this conundrum:

A client site runs on old tech (IIS6) and has circa 300,000 pages indexed in Google. Most pages are dynamic with a horrible URL structure such as

http://www.domain.com/search/results.aspx?ida=19191&idb=56&idc=2888

and I have been trying to implement rewrites + redirects to get clean URLs and remove some of the duplication that exists, using the IIRF Isapi filter: http://iirf.codeplex.com/

I manage to get a large sample of URLS re-writing and redirecting (on a staging version of the site), but the site then slows to  crawl. To imple,ent all URLs woudl be 10x the volume of config. I am starting to wonder if there is a better way:

1. Upgrade to Win 2008 / IIS 7 and use the better URL rewrite functionality included?
2. Rebuild the site entirely (preferably on PHP with a decent URL structure)
3. Accept that the URLS can't be made friendly on a site this size and focus on other aspects
4. Persevere with the IIRF filter config, and hope that the config loads into memory and the site runs at a reasonable speed when live

None of the options are great as they either involve lots of work/cost of they involve keeping a site which performs well but could do so much better, with poor URLs.

Any thoughts from the great minds in the SEOmoz community appreciated!

Cheers

Simon

Thanks Martin - the site is ecommerce, and the category pages are blog posts. The homepage links directly to product categories, the use of the blog is quite new and the blog category looks pretty awful right now...

But the listing keeps jumping in and out of the top 10, when its gone the homepage is back, and last seen at bottom of page 1.

I like your ideas, and will look to make the category page more appealing...

Cheers

Simon

Many thanks for the input Andy. Good call on less sub folders, have a few sites with this kind of structure, will change for some pages and monitor results... and yes, I just typed a not real example of the hotel name, totally agree spaces (dashes) are required.

Great idea with the mixing it up too, those are the perfect kind of long tail phrases that will add up and help massively.

And yes, we are looking at user reviews, but limiting it to people that have booked via the site to avoid the 'trip advisor effect' and be as genuine as possible! As for showing in the SERPs - I've seen uplift too following adding rich-snippet review data on an ecommerce site, but they are so easy to game at the moment!

Cheers

Simon

Hi Harry

have seen these guys advertised recently: http://infographicdesignteam.com/ The site gives you an idea of cost ($399 and up) and they have done some pretty awesome infographics recently that you may well recognize. Not used them yet, but thinking about it and looking for alternatives that I will post.

Cheers

Simon

I have experience of this. And it wasn't a nice!

I created a test copy of a site (WordPress) that I work on with a friend. It had been ranking pretty well mainly though lots of quality curated content, plus a bit of low level link building. The link building had slowed in late 2010.

Within 12 hours of the test version of the site going 'live' (it was set to no-index in WP options, which I no longer trust) the live site rankings and traffic tanked. The test version was on a sub-domain, and was an exact replica of the live site. With no known links, it was somehow picked up by Google and all 400 or so pages where in the Gindex along with the live site. Three re-consideration requests and 6 months later, we got back to where we were. The offending sub domain was 301'd to the live site within minutes of inding the problem, and during the 6 month bad period all other causes were ruled out.

I now password protect any staging sites that are on the internet, just to be safe!

Hi folks

Following Penguin 1.1, I have a client site at number 5 for their primary keyword. (was creeping up page 2 with whitehat link building and tight on-site SEO.)

However now the page ranking at No. 5 is for a blog category archive. What do people think the quickest / safest way to get this ranking directed back to the homepage is?

Many thanks

Simon

Hi All

I have been thinking about the best strategy for keyword optimisation on a forthcoming accommodation website I am involved with. This may be a bit of a newbie type question, but most of my work has been on considerably smaller sites to date....

Lets say the site will have 1 primary landing page for "Hotels in Bristol" and then 50 pages that are each for a hotel in Bristol. The aim would be for the primary page which will be a browse/search result type page to rank well for the term 'Hotels in Bristol' and other similar terms.

If each of the hotel listing pages that have a hotel in Bristol on, have the phrase 'Hotel in Bristol' contained within the title, url, page content, maybe headings/alt tags etc. will the result be that the rank for the site is 'spread too thin' across the domain? Whats the best way to drive all the relevancy and keyword usage on the 50 listing pages, to the primary page such that that is the one that ranks well? And the other pages rank more for the hotel name etc?

I guess one way would be to avoid using the words hotels and Bristol in the title/URL etc.. but the natural approach for usability (not SEO) would be to use these words i.e. http://www.newtravelsite.com/hotels/bristol/stgeorgeshotel/

Or would each of the 50 listing pages simply need a followed, anchored link pointing  the main landing page?

I'm sure there may be a fundamental technique to do this that has alluded me so far, but any help, thoughts or guidance much appreciated!

Regards

Simon

Old question now, but interesting none the less and currently marked as unanswered. As tomcraig86 says there is much more to it than relying on the KD score, but I tend to go by the rough guide of :

• Sub 30 - pretty easy.
• 30 - 35 fairly easy with good on page and some quality anchored links.
• 35 - 40 - starting to take a bit more effort, air tight on-site SEO required as well as good link profile.
• 40 - 50 domain authority counts much more, without it will take longer to rank although I have done this with minimal off-site efforts before.
• 50+ All about resources. Onsite SEO needs to be totally nailed, including internal linking/ topic modelling etc. a strong & diverse link profile with good social signals and ... time.

This is just from my experience of ranking for keywords in conjunction with output from this awesome tool. Been doing SEO for some time, but only using the keyword difficulty tool for about 12 months.