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Hi,

Personalisation, generally refers to the personalisation of the search results. So somebody searching for a restaurant in London will receive different results to someone searching in Birmingham.

On top of this, if you are logged into a browser or on your phone, results will continue to differ depending on what you have clicked on before or previously searched for. So for local listings, personalisation tends to be quite an important factor.

Thanks

Hi,

There isn't a limit to the amount of 301 redirects you can have on your site. 300-600 redirects might be seen as pretty small to a large ecommerce site that has to redirect 1,000s of urls.

Thanks

Google has rolled out the Pigeon update to some countries outside the US including the UK, which has changed the landscape of local SERPs.

The top listings will now often be sites such as Yell, Yelp, Trip Advisor, etc with the local results then coming in underneath.

Hi,

I would use a redirect in this instant, redirecting the /index.cfm page to the main page

thanks

Hi,

A directory shouldn't be used for SEO purposes, only if they are relevant and used to help customers find relevant site, especially in niche industries.

The damage of a link penalty would be more of a threat that any lost link juice from the links changing to nofollow. If your site's authority is determined mainly by directory links then you may need to look at some other methods of creating quality links.

Kind Regards

I would say it isn't a valid practice to use for SEO. Some companies will have directories in their link profile, but these could be either from previous practices and they're now disavowed and also from a submission to a directory years ago, which is continually duplicated on new domains. Some people still will use directory submissions for short term gain but they will usually be caught by an algo in the long run.

There are few directories which may be relevant, DMOZ, BOTW and maybe some human edited local and niche directories which are used for actually creating relevant traffic rather just from SEO value, but I would suggest only using these if they use no followed links.

Kind Regards

You can add a link to the website in external links, but as it's no followed it won't pass any link juice anyway.

The whole point of a wiki page is to give customers more information about a brand and will help to build your brand presence. I've previously had trouble with Wiki trying to get a listing as there was too much bias and not enough references.

I see this sort of thing a lot and will not respond to companies who request payment to remove a link but instead just disavow the domain. Google will often ignore some of these sites as they are often aware it is happening but always best to disavow.

If everyone just chooses to ignore sites that charge for removing links then they will eventually just die off anyway, but whilst they are getting paid, they will continue to operate.

Hi,

It's definitely worthwhile having a brand page on Wikipedia. Links are no followed and it won't massively increase your traffic but it will help to build your brand and if someone searches for your brand it will more than likely also show on the 1st page.

The Google Knowledge graph also uses information from Wikipedia, so if you aspire to have the knowledge graph show in results for your brand, you will first need a wiki page.

It isn't straight forward getting your brand on Wikipedia though as submissions need to be unbiased and have authoritative citations and references to back them up or Wiki won't publish the page.

Kind Regards

If it is unlikely that a webmaster will reply or looks as though the site is trying to hide contact details then you may not need to contact webmasters before disavowing as it is a waste of time. But in a lot of cases it is more beneficial to you to have a bad link removed than to just disavow it, so it can be worth contacting a webmaster to remove a link.

If you are under a penalty though, Google will want to see you are doing everything you can to remove unnatural links and may want to see evidence that you are trying to contact webmasters to remove links rather than just putting everything into a disavow file, because links that are disavowed can just be taken out of the disavow file and be 're-avowed'.

Kind Regards

Google has rolled out the Pigeon update to some countries outside the US including the UK, which has changed the landscape of local SERPs.

The top listings will now often be sites such as Yell, Yelp, Trip Advisor, etc with the local results then coming in underneath.

With the majority of these techniques you're asking for trouble as they revolve around old school SEO.

Since I will be having several different long tail keywords, do I need to have a separate webpage on my site for each?

• Yes it will help having a separate page per keyword as long as the keywords are varied enough, relevant, and you have enough unique content to justify a page.

If yes, does that mean that each long tail keyword needs to have it's own back links to bring in traffic?

• Having QUALITY backlinks will always help you to rank, but they need to be relevant and natural. Going out and buying links with keyword rich anchor text will only lead to a penalty.

Should I optimize my homepage for a long tail keyword as well? or should I optimize it for the more broader keywords and create sub-pages for the long tail keywords?

• As long as your site is well structured and written it should naturally be optimized for a couple of key terms and longer tail keywords will usually be picked up for your more specific sub sections e.g.

Home page - Refurbished Laptops
Sub - Lightweight Refurbished Laptops
Sub - Refurbished desktop computers

Just don't OVER optimize!

One of my site's main products is a very popular item and has high competition and search volume. Would it make sense to purchase a domain name that spells out the item (ej. HP-Pavillion-DV6.com) and publish reviews, specs and information about the item there (using a blogging service like Tumbler or Wordpress)?

• I'd recommend not to create an exact match url, it would be better to create a product page off your main url. But a blog is always good to help promote your site and create some unique and shareable content.

Hi,

Have you tried setting url parameters in webmaster tools? This can help you to tell Google which urls not to crawl depending on certain parameters, such as if the url has "?p"

Hi,

Google will decide what it displays a knowledge graph for and it does tend to be for established brands. First though you will need to ensure that certain things are in place for Google to be able to retrieve the information it needs to produce the knowledge graph:

1. Google plus page which is verified and linked to your site.
2. Wikipedia entry.

3. Supporting info in Freebase.

Having all of these in place will help Google find the info it needs but it's still no guarantee of the knowledge graph displaying. Contacting Google certainly won't help.

Kind Regards

Hi,

Personalisation, generally refers to the personalisation of the search results. So somebody searching for a restaurant in London will receive different results to someone searching in Birmingham.

On top of this, if you are logged into a browser or on your phone, results will continue to differ depending on what you have clicked on before or previously searched for. So for local listings, personalisation tends to be quite an important factor.

Thanks

It will often take multiple requests for Google to remove a manual penalty to ensure you put enough effort in to cleaning up your link profile.

What tools did you use to find your links? It's best to use a combination of tools to find all of the possible links to your site. The amount of links you remove/disavow is relative to the size of your link profile, some sites have had to remove or disavow 1,000s of domains.

Ensure the links that you remove are exact match links or those from directories and guest blogging etc.

It's best to remove more links than not enough as even having poor links will result in Google marking you down. If you're not thorough enough, there's every chance you could get penalized again in the future. Also make sure your recon request is clear and simple and clearly demonstrates the work you have done to remove or disavow any offending links.

If it is unlikely that a webmaster will reply or looks as though the site is trying to hide contact details then you may not need to contact webmasters before disavowing as it is a waste of time. But in a lot of cases it is more beneficial to you to have a bad link removed than to just disavow it, so it can be worth contacting a webmaster to remove a link.

If you are under a penalty though, Google will want to see you are doing everything you can to remove unnatural links and may want to see evidence that you are trying to contact webmasters to remove links rather than just putting everything into a disavow file, because links that are disavowed can just be taken out of the disavow file and be 're-avowed'.

Kind Regards

Hi,

A directory shouldn't be used for SEO purposes, only if they are relevant and used to help customers find relevant site, especially in niche industries.

The damage of a link penalty would be more of a threat that any lost link juice from the links changing to nofollow. If your site's authority is determined mainly by directory links then you may need to look at some other methods of creating quality links.

Kind Regards

John Mueller recently confirmed that engineers are currently working on the update, but no time frame for when it will be rolled out.

http://www.thesempost.com/googles-penguin-algo-update-worked-engineers/

I see this sort of thing a lot and will not respond to companies who request payment to remove a link but instead just disavow the domain. Google will often ignore some of these sites as they are often aware it is happening but always best to disavow.

If everyone just chooses to ignore sites that charge for removing links then they will eventually just die off anyway, but whilst they are getting paid, they will continue to operate.