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I have never had much success with these style tools (i live in the UK).

You can attempt to contact the web master of the site you are linked from and request that they remove your link...

How many are we talking about and what kind of site are they on?

Yes that's normal Google have more power and can crawl more of the web than roger, plus roger chooses to not show low quality stuff (I am pretty sure this is still the case!?). - FYI roger is the bot that crawls the web for OSE.

And yes it is possible for people to point bad links at you, your site is on the internet anyone can link to you.

The best thing you can do is build a strong back link profile, then a few low quality links won't hurt - tbh a few links should be ok any way most people have some spammy stuff in their back link profile...

I would simplify your robots.txt to read something like:

**User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/

Sitemap: http://www.your-domain.com/sitemap.xml**

Personally I find those forum automated birthday emails annoying, why would you care if a forum (or more specifically a php script) wished you happy birthday?

Happy Birthday any ways...

I would have them under one domain, pref something that is branded and not specific to any of your services...

Lets call it "www.totalservices.co.uk" (probably taken I know...)

I would then structure the main pages like this:

**www.totalservices.co.uk/driveways **

**www.totalservices.co.uk/driveway-cleaning **

**www.totalservices.co.uk/patios **

www.totalservices.co.uk/artificial-grass

(etc etc)

As the guys have already mentioned, any links you earn or build to your site will count towards your domain authority... Also link juice will flow through your site "helping" you rank.

By splitting the sites into 3 you are going to be increasing your work load by 3.

Plus by having a branded domain name you will likely get a higher click through rate from the google search results - keyword heavy domains look spammy and "typically" are trusted far less IME.

Hope that helps...

Keith

If you know you have claimed the google places pages and get listed is saying you haven't - what does it matter?

Get listed just shows you where your business is listed across the web?

Keith

The main problem is, spammy anchor from spammy sites...

It's ok to link to a page or a company using a descriptive anchor text an example would be "I have heard SEOmoz provide some awesome SEO Tools, I would recommend checking them out if you need some simplified SEO software."

You are going to run into problems if all your anchor text is saying "SEO Tools" and there is no diversity in your link profile... Organically, most people link with naked URL's or the name of your site unless they are linking to a specific resource or service you provide...

However if you just build on brand the whole time you are not going to rank for your desired keywords / phrases...

Ok this is in fact two issues, page title and URL length.

To fix the issue with the page title, there is probably a global setting within the Yoast plugin (I don't use it myself) and you have the following title above added in this section.

Failing that it will be in the Site Name section of the wordpress settings.

I would use page name | site name - in some cases I don't even bother with site name (on a blog for example), having just viewed your site it looks like you have fixed the page title issue?

Regarding the long URL's, if you wish to change these Wordpress should automatically 301 the old page to the new URL that you chose (but test this by changing and trying to visit the old URL above and confirm that it redirects).

Hope that helps...

Keith

The domain is keyword heavy think along the lines of "mountainbikes.com" and they are ranking ok for mountain bikes, however on inspection they have a LOT of poor quality back links and a lot of those links are anchor text phrases (and far too much of it!).

A lot of people recommend building on brand in situations like this, however how would I go about doing this for a site without a branded domain name?

In this case their is a company name but it's not the same as the domain name, would you simply build links using the company name "Uber Bikes" or use the domain www.mountainbikes.com.

If the aim is just to build a more varied back link profile then I guess using both would be good?

Thanks in advance!

We all know that exact match anchor text is sill a key factor in ranking well on the engines, but how do you build links for awkward phrases like.

**ppc london **

**architects new york **

**accountants new york **

The Bio Solution

I know one solution might be to include the anchor in your bio after the company name like:

_Luke Skywalker works for DeathStar Accounts New York and often blogs about fishing, playing golf and kissing his sister. _

Are Some Key Phrases Too Spammy

But say for example you want to link in the content, obviously you can phrase things differently and make it sound "ok" and probably "acceptable" but it still sounds a bit rough when it reads like this:

"We performed a review of all the accountants london and found them to have worse Excel skills than my grandma."

Obviously this would read better as:

"We performed a review of all the accountants in london and found them to have worse Excel skills than my grandma."

Possible Options:

1. Just deal with it, the blog owner will let it slide more than likely if the rest of the content is useful / quality.
2. Change the anchor slightly so its not exact match e.g "accountants in london" and optimise the page for "accountants london"
3. Choose another phrase that reads better and has fewer monthly searches

If anyone has any ideas, suggestions or feedback I would love to hear them.

FYI: Opensite explorer (mozbar) is reading the PA wrong for Twitter pages.

Unless my personal twitter page has a Domain Auth of 98

So don't pay too much attention to the PA score on Twitter pages plus it's no follow any way.

To answer the "not showing in site explorer" question, for a start OSE does not crawl every page on the web, it does a good job of trying but SEOmoz don't have the horse power of Google. The more links you have pointing at your Twitter page the more likely Roger will pick it up, but I really would not worry about it.

Also remember that the SEOmoz index only gets updated once a month, so if your page is new that might be why it's not showing yet...

Hope that helps

I have a new domain and I am beating pages with much higher page ranks / DA etc

Typically in the niche I am targeting if I use the Keyword Difficulty tool i get an average of about 50% - I think this tool mainly uses DA / PA to work out the difficulty %.

After I will do a Google search and look on the pages for mentions of the keyword's I am going to target with my pages / posts.

Often I find there are few mentions or 1 exact match mention in the content with the page title being something different / not exact match.

I will then build a page which is targeted specifically for the keyword and optimise for it, I don't over do the optimisation - if the other pages only have 2 mentions of the keyword in the content I would normally build a post with say 3 - 5 mentions. I have noticed when going over 5 keyword (aprox) pages tend to rank poorly or rank badly then crawl back up the SERP's slower - this could be due to the domain on the site being 1 month old.

I also only build quality content that is relevant to the search term, this should prevent the pages dropping from the SERP's (I hope!).

Obviously if your niche has highly optimised pages and a bunch of links pointing at each page then this method is not going to work.

Hope that helps.

It means when you created your campaign you created it as a root domain - e.g domain.com not www.domain.com

It is nothing to worry about.

Hope that helps.

Again, my advise would be the same as Bryan's - leave it alone and build more links to the insurance page.

I don't see a problem with that page out ranking your home page?

I would either use rel canonical as Nakul instructed above, although this is a bit of hack IMO.

Or just build some better quality links at the page you want to rank, I don't see a problem with building links to the /insurance page?

I suspect his home page is just not ranking for the keywords, could you post the URL in question?

If not then type

_site:www.yourdomain.com _

Into Google and let us know if your site is listed.

Thanks,

Optimise your home page for your chosen keyword and 301 the page /insurance to your root domain.

To do this you need to create a .htaccess file in the / directory on your server and enter the following information.

Redirect 301 /insurance  http://www.mydomain.dk

About 90% of the link juice "should" flow through if you use a 301 redirect, you can test the above is working by visting http://www.mydomain.dk/insurance and making sure it redirect you to your home page.

Note that a 301 can take a few weeks (possibly longer) for Google to pick up so do not expect overnight changes.

Hope that helps.

Yeah, I heard Matt Cutts talking about this and his answer was "Google will discount those links and not count them" (or something similar to that affect) along with paid links.

I would also check out this post, this directly addresses your concern. http://www.searchenginejournal.com/lets-kill-the-%E2%80%9Cbad-inbound-links-can-get-your-site-penalized%E2%80%9D-myth/32426/

It would also depend on your current back link profile, if you have a bunch of poor quality / border line junk links and one of your competitors point a bunch or really bad links at you I can "imagine" (I don't know for sure, I have not tested this) you are going to take a hit in rankings.

Bottom line is, build good quality links and you should be golden

Hi Todd,

A site can still rank for the keywords you are optimising for with on-page alone - if the area is niche enough (or the other pages have poor on-page SEO).

If you mean that you are appearing on page one and you are not getting people link back to you organically... That's just life

If you mean you have built links and they are not showing up using Open Site Explorer then either Roger has not crawled the site with your links on or the index has not updated (IIRC OSE's site index gets updated once a month).

Hi Hannah,

"I think" I will just leave the .com in place...

I can see a lot more .co.uk's in the SERP's for my keywords but perhaps that is just because I live in England and everyone has bought .co.uk's

I have already done the geo targeting in web master tools and claimed a places page etc.

Thanks for your help

Keith

1. I would 301

2. Who knows, it's possible... But not right now

3. mostly UK

4. Nothing at all

I would love to hear from a person who has actually done this to find out if it's worth while from a ranking prospective.

I own both domains, when i say swapping I mean go through the effort of 301'ing the .com to the .co.uk

I have read up on this and I know most people will say that swapping domains won't make much difference, however it would be great to hear from some one who has actually done this.

Thanks

I currently own the domain lionseo.com and I also own the .co.uk variant some of the keywords I am targeting will have UK in them. My thoughts are that a .co.uk may help improve rankings on google.co.uk and click through + have a keyword match in the home page URL.

**Do you guys think it's worth swapping to the .co.uk domain from .com? **

Thanks in advance

Keith

Hi Vjay,

TBH it's probably your back link catalog... It's mainly built from blog comment spam.

It's the same thing the rewrite is a 301 it's just using Apaches mod_rewrite to achieve it.

You can use either option, after you have setup the 301 you can check the Apache status code, If you have shell access you can tail the access log file.

If you don't have shell access I am sure their are Chrome / Firefox plugins that will verify your 301 code, or you could use Screaming Frog.

Personally, I would always try and host the server in the country you are trying to target for a number of reasons - mainly performance (and chances are it's going to be cheaper for me, I live in the UK).

However the video "SEO Executive" posted above is from 2009, since then Google have released the following: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html stating that the server location is irrelevant if you own the ccTLD e.g .fr

Martijn you might also want to check out the following whiteboard Friday video about international SEO: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday

Hi Dr Pete, Would correcting the current issue with a 301 and adding the rel=canonical tags to each page be the best option? My thought being any future duplicate content issues that may occur (not caused from this issue) would be avoided.

Sorry I just read this again, the 301 will fix the URL issue site wide.

I recommend you update each page, note the rel canonical tag will be different for each page. And 50 pages should take you less than 15 mins

Maybe explain to the client it's not going to rank as well without text and has less chance of getting found by searches (generally speaking...).

I get duplicate content flagging as well sometimes, I check the pages manually when it happens.

Brian, it's the same thing just a different method both 301.

No it would not cover the issues site wide only for the home page.

CMS = Content Management System (an example would be Wordpress or Drupal).

You should still do the rel="canonical" site wide (on each page).

All make sense ?

Just an idea, if you are part of the same company why don't you redirect the pages from the larger site and point them at your newly designed smaller site?

That way you won't get stung for duplicate content.

If that's not possible I would rewrite all the content from scratch, the problem with rehashing is that sometimes it's often harder, also you can write optimised SEO copy for your new site to help increase rankings and traffic

The location of the server should not matter, obviously latency will be reduced if you host the site in the country your targeting.

You can assign the target country in Google web master tools also.

Those pages are very similar so it's probably throwing the duplicate content switch in SEOmoz, you might want to ignore it in this case.

I would add some more text to those pages personally to aid with ranking, you can position the text over the images with CSS.

Your site probably has a bot running on it creating those pages, being controlled from another location online.

Do you have shell access to your server?

If you have a backup you are better off cutting your losses and restoring from your last backup.

Yes Google will flag this as duplicate content eventually, chances are one will rank and the other wont.

Unless both of the sites are on the same server and of poor quality, in which case I doubt any of them will rank well.

The only way to not get penalized would be to create unique content on each site.

Why not just integrate both of the sites and create a promotion page?

Bryan, you need to redirect the page http://www.mobilemowermedicsinc.com/index.html and point it at http://www.mobilemowermedicsinc.com

To do this create a 301 redirect using a .htaccess file.

Connect to your server and look in the root of your web server for a file called .htaccess - if it does not exist then create one (make sure it's called .htaccess).

Add the following line to the .htaccess file:

301 redirect /index.html http://www.mobilemowermedicsinc.com

This will fix the duplicate content problem on your home page.

Brian, if you 301 the example.com to www.example.com that will get rid of the duplicate URL issue server side. (this will resolve your current duplicate content issue).

Additionally I recommend you add the rel=canonical it will prevent other potential duplicate content issues that may arise and is considered good practice to implement.

The tag looks correct, note the space after the domain in quotes:

Are you using a CMS ?

The rewrite rule above is not bad practice, it will fix the issue with your URL's

However it is good practice to use the rel=canonical tag on your site additionally to prevent any other duplicate content issues.

In short the rel=canonical tag tells Google which URL you wish to use, preventing Google from thinking you have duplicate content if multiple URL's exist for the same page.

An easy way is to use RedirectMatch, example:

RedirectMatch 301 /-c-25.html http://www.domain.com/new-category

Drop the above in a .htaccess file, test it works how you expect first

I always use rel="canonical"

Personally I would do the following:

• Set rel="canonical" as Brent says below
• 301 redirect the preferred URL, so if you are using www.example.com redirect example.com, that way if anyone points links at example.com "most" of the juice will pass over (this will probably fix the issue you have posted about)
• Set the referred URL in Google web master tools

If you are using  CMS like Wordpress rel="canonical" will probably already be taken care of for your website, you can check this by viewing the source or using SEO Moz's on-page keyword optimization tool.

It depends, if it's a .com you are going to be waiting a month at least probably 2, same for a .co.uk

You can use godaddy to back register domains then as soon as the domain is available it will register it for you, I think it costs around $10 per domain.

If you have links to dead pages on your site remove them from the HTML.

301 redirects are used when you are moving pages / changing URL's.

Quite simply, is it best to allow index of category / tag pages on a Wordpress blog or no index them? My thought is Google will / might see it as duplicate content? Thanks, K