Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Patrick,

Here's a 301 checklist that might help you.

Cheers,

SEO5

Try not just focusing on the exact keyword but also closely related keywords. If the article is well written and picks up good social traction , you might end up ranking for different closely related keywords, not just the main keyword.

Hi,

If your on site optimization is done properly then your focus going forward should be on the 2 activities listed below:

• Link Building

• Social Media Optimization

Some posts below that you might find useful in your SEO planning:

Building a Monthly SEO Action Plan

Noob Guide to Online Marketing

Noob Guide to Link Building

6 Month Link Building Plan

Good point Patrick.

Would love the group's opinion on the Forbes.com welcome page

(http://www.forbes.com/fdc/welcome_mjx.shtml) redirects to the actual home page after 20 seconds.

• SEO implications for this tactic?
• Does it impact the home page rankings? (Positive/Negative)

Any input is appreciated.

I suggest you also read this post here  and the comments. Discusses the issue at length.

Hi Frédéric,

You might find the below resources useful:

Article by Bruce Clay

French Link Building Tool

French Google SEO Guide

You can also analyze your competitor link profile using OSE and identify link building opportunities using this tool.

in addition to Google Analytics, i would also recommend piwik , it's a free software like google and provides good info. Link below:

http://piwik.org/

There are a lot of very powerful paid analytics software solutions like omniture and webtrends that provide terrific insight into visitor info.

Pick the one that has more inbound links associated with it and already has high pages in the index. Make sure you set the preferences in WMT to either the www. or the non www version.

I'd recommend option 4, using a sub domain and specifying the geo target in webmaster tools . I should add that you might have a tough time using this strategy in some countries like Austria and France where country specific TLD's tend to rank better.

Rand covered this topic in one of his whiteboard sessions. Link

Hi Bob,

Some thoughts below:

• You might want to try a sticky navigation so that the top navigation follows the user as they scroll down the article page
• Trying a sliding secondary navigation option. Sort of like gmail with the labels following the user as they scroll down their mail

Hope this helps.

Tanveer, your site speed might have something to do with it. Please take a look at the GT Metrix report that i ran for your site on this link. It grades your site speed as a "F". Also gives you recommendations on what you need to do to fix it. Once you fix the site speed issue,i think the indexing issue will be solved.

Keri from the SEOMOZ team had replied back in an earlier post that it will be fixed by Friday evening.

Have you suffered any penalty or loss in rankings/traffic. If you have then the answer is yes, use the disavow tool to report all the suspected bad links to Google. If you have not then a suggested  route would be to contact those directories and get your site removed.

Hi Joel,

This question has been addressed at length in one of the Google Product forums. Here's the link. Points 1 , 2 and 3 relate to your question.

Hope this helps.

Hi DaddySmurf,

While this query does depend on the extent of social media usage for your company, but a general sentiment with users is the desire to unique content catering to the strengths of each platform. Using similar content won’t necessarily fall under the duplicate content rule of Penguin, but it does create the impression of only basic maintenance of social media platforms for your company. Sometimes it may be easier to load a quick blog post or the like across multiple platforms, but based on user experiences documented elsewhere on this forum, it would not necessarily be a recommended strategy across the board, so to speak.

Hi Donald,

I would recommend SEMRUSH for this kind of research. By just typing in the URL , you can check your competitors top 20 organic rankings for a majority of their keywords and get an insight into their strategy. It gives you info related to keywords, positions, search volume, level of competition etc.

Cheers,

SEO5.

no way to tell for sure except for looking at dates when the traffic dropped and when the Google updates took place. I've added the change history link for your reference.

Hope this helps

1. Google Analytics

2. Rankings Check

3. Social Media updates

4. Working on Content

You may want to exercise the option of reporting your site to Google so they can take a closer look at the search results associated with your site.

Google Survey for Small Sites

In addition to David's choice, my recommendations include:

• Advanced Web Rankings
• GShift Labs
• SEO Book Tools

Hi Steve,

I'd like to reference this site www.cityfeet.com that i did in one of my earlier posts. This site ranks extremely well for any geo targeted search for the keyword "office space for lease" . Type in " office space for lease dallas" or "office space for lease new york" they are always in the top search results. Their URL structure is below:

http://www.cityfeet.com/cont/new-york-office-space

http://www.cityfeet.com/cont/tx/dallas-office-space

So it seems like you may have to adopt a dual structure on the site. For the more competitive search terms you can have the keyword close to the domain name. For the others , you can have a state abbreviation and the city keyword next.

Hi Stephane,

As mentioned previously, there are a number of factors which can be considered by Google as over-optimization. Most commonly, these can include bad inbound links, cloaking and hidden text, and high keyword density. This can also include excessive interlinking, as evidenced by the article here, so you may want to be careful with how links are built between your domain and sub-domain. However, as long as the links are relevant and with unique content used sparingly, Google will generally not consider this over optimization.

Hi Rob,

A good post on this link by Guy Kawasaki on this topic.

Cheers,

Thank you! I'll test it out!

Hi Rafiqul,

The site overall does not seem like it is user friendly. All i see are ads on the site and not a lot of quality content. The keyword "love messages" has been over used on the home page and might be the cause of a penalty. I also see that you are using "infolinks" that highlights different keywords on your page. From a visitor standpoint, it's not very appealing and might be causing some issues.

i would recommend compete. You can review the features here http://www.compete.com/us/pro/features/

You should also review this post http://www.seomoz.org/blog/monitor-competitor-traffic

Hi Jorge,

Option 1 would be good if you have a lot of sub pages that can be classified under the "utilities" section. This would also help the search engines to index and classify your site pages better also benefitting you on the SEO side

Option 2 would be recommended if you don't have a lot of content that can be classified under "utilities"

Think about the user first and what would be benefit them. To directly answer your question, in my opinion , the closer the link to the home page the better it would be from an SEO perspective.

Hi Bob,

Here's a link to a great app marketing strategy post . Hope it helps:

Ultimate App Marketing Guide

52 ways to promote your app

Cheers,

Google Analytics

Google Webmaster tools

Google Insights/Trends

Google Keyword Tool

SEO Quake

Backlink watch

SEM Rush

Majestic SEO site explorer

Xenu Link Sleuth

Woorank

Good collection of free tools on SEO Book (http://tools.seobook.com/)

You can setup FAQ pages and an info guide on all the products. The key is to create lots of good quality content and each content piece should be focused on one keyword.

We use network solutions and have had a good experience with them overall. Very good customer support.

SEO BOOK - Bloggers Guide to SEO (Highly recommend reading this)

All the best.

Google's official response on the issue below:

Once you've set your preferred domain, you may want to use a 301 redirect to redirect traffic from your non-preferred domain, so that other search engines and visitors know which version you prefer.

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=44231

Hi Brad,

Google's official version below:

• Syndicate carefully: If you syndicate your content on other sites, Google will always show the version we think is most appropriate for users in each given search, which may or may not be the version you'd prefer. However, it is helpful to ensure that each site on which your content is syndicated includes a link back to your original article. You can also ask those who use your syndicated material to use the noindex meta tag to prevent search engines from indexing their version of the content.

You can refer to it on this link

Cheers,

Hi,

2 really good links below discussing this topic:

How to do SEO for different countries

International SEO - Whiteboard Session

Cheers,

to be on the safe side, find a hosting provider in Africa. If you type in "franchise" in the google.co.za search engine, the majority of the first page listings are the .co.za extension, so even if the local hosting makes a small difference might as well take advantage of that.

Try emailing the forum administrator for help. They may assist in pinpointing the source of the traffic and the exact link on the forum causing it.

Hi Bob,

Link analysis for a competitor's site is a very solid tactic for finding linking opportunities in our opinion. You can find a lot of relevant links by utilizing this strategy and use it for your site's benefit. Although DA is important, analyze lower DA links and question their relevance for your site. If the relevancy is high, then i would suggest going ahead and adding your site to it as well.

Couple of resources below to assist you with your query:

Link Analysis Page - Moz

31 Link Building Tactics Discovered from Competitive Analysis

Cheers,

SEO5..

Just to add to Mihai's response, you can always delete the sitelinks from the GWT if there are some irrelevant links showing up for your website.

Alex,

I'm not sure about the 3rd path you mentioned however i've seen sites rank high with both 1 and 2. The idea is to have a clean URL structure without any dynamic strings associated with the URL. The URL itself however is not enough to get the page to rank high. It must be combined with strong on page SEO to get the full benefit.

Hi Dan,

If you click on the "other" icon. (it is a clickable link), it breaks down the source of the tarffic that has been classified in that category.

I was just taking a look at one of the reports for our clients and it shows that the traffic classified as "other" came form Google, Bing and one of our internal domains. You can also look at the geographic source for the traffic to give you more ideas on where the traffic might have originated from.

Cheers,

Hi John,

A quick check of your backlinks IN OSE shows some other questionnable links like submityoursite.org , freeadddirectory.com, addurlshopping.com, txtlinks.com

Did you submit them for non inclusion as well. Perhaps Google is referring to those links not the relevant ones.

Cheers,

SEO5..

Hi Brittany,

While it is not essential to have meta descriptions for each page, especially if they are not indexed by Google, there can still be some benefit to having meta descriptions for pages people are linking to. Users can see the meta description if the page shows up during a search query, and sites with strong meta descriptions tend to come across as more professional. There is always a chance the page can show up in other search engines and directories, so you won’t want to worry about random text showing up. There is no real ranking benefit to meta descriptions, but Google does indicate whether meta descriptions are too long, too short, or too similar in Webmaster Tools, so it would seem Google would consider proper meta descriptions to be of at least some value.

Hi Courtney,

I've referenced a few links below that might be helpful for you.

Conversion Rate Experts - Moz Case Study ( this is a fantastic example of how to build landing pages. Their site has other excellent examples of landing page implementation)

Unbounce Article on Landing Pages

Landing Pages Guides on Hubspot

Ion Interactive Presentation

Cheers,

SEO5

Hi Dan,

Were you able to sort this out?

Successful implementation of the code requires 3 elements:

1. Modification of the tracking code

2. Updating your privacy Policy

3. Enable Demographics reports in the Analytics interface

Tracking code instructions below:

To implement Display Advertising features for Classic Google Analytics, replace the bold text in this example:

with the bold text in the example below:

You can also generate an updated basic code snippet that includes the change by going to Admin > property > Tracking Info, and turning on the Display Advertiser Support option.

Full info on this process in the link below:

Enable Demographic Targeting in Analytics

Dino,

a good post in this link describing a checklist to follow. Please read the comments on this post as well , helpful info.

http://www.authorsure.com/514/how-long-will-it-take-for-my-facelogo-to-show-up-in-the-search-results

In one of our our client scenarios, it took 2 months before Google started showing the image.