An additional point worth bearing in mind is that many sites actually designate links on their site generated through user generated content as 'no follow' meaning that the link does not pass any page rank from that site to yours. Of course you would still potentially get referral traffic to your site via the links you have posted and that is no bad thing, but in terms of SEO benefit it would be negligible if the links are no followed.

Wow, that's a pretty comprehensive list of actions you've compiled there and you seem to have covered pretty much all the bases. I almost think your post should be promoted on Youmoz as a great step of actions for targeting regional websites.

My experience of hreflang is that it is not perfect in that you occasionally get the wrong versions of pages served in SERPs. I wonder do you specify the .com as 'en' in the hreflang mark up in order that it is the generic English language version as opposed to being country specific?

Hi Philip,

By all means add the last part if you wish to give you some consistency in the series, but make sure you append it at the end of the title. One thing to mindful of is not to make the title too long or it may end up being truncated by search engines. This SEOMoz guide should help.

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/title-tag

Why not differentiate each of your titles by the actual content so that you include relevant keywords in your titles?

For example if it's a blog about 'Beauty Tips for Women over 40' then make that the title rather than calling the post 'Beauty Industry News - today's date'. Page title is an important ranking factor so make sure that your title gives both the user and search engines a clue of what the content of the blog post actually is.

I can't see any reason why you would want to nofollow links to your own social networking pages. They are very much related to your site so why not pass pagerank to them. As Takeshi rightly points out, if you nofollow them then any pagerank they might have got from your home page just evaporates.

If you use Bing Webmaster tools you can see a complete list all URLs blocked by robots.txt. You can export the file and then filter.

Just go to Reports & Data > Crawl Information within your Bing webmaster account. I am not aware of this feature being in Google webmaster tools. Hope this helps.

I'm sorry I don't follow. If you go to that URL you will see the list of blocked URLs as I've pasted below.

User-agent: *

Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /forum/viewtopic.php?p=
Disallow: /forum/viewtopic.php?=&p=
Disallow: /forum/viewtopic.php?t=
Disallow: /forum/viewtopic.php?start=
Disallow: /forum/&view=previousDisallow: /forum/&view=next
Disallow: /forum/&sid=
Disallow: /forum/&p=
Disallow: /forum/&sd=a
Disallow: /forum/&start=0
Disallow: /forum/memberlist.php
Disallow: /forum/posting.php
Disallow: /classifieds/
Disallow: /forum/index.php
Disallow: /forum/ucp
Disallow: /http://muslim-academy.com/الا�%A..
Disallow: /http://muslim-academy.com/особенн%D
Disallow: /http://muslim-academy.com/ислам-ка%
Disallow: /http://muslim-academy.com/classifieds/ads/Disallow: /http://muslim-academy.com/значени%D..
Disallow: /.ifieds/
Disallow: /.ifieds/ads/
Disallow: /forum/alternatelogin/al_tw_connect.php?authentication=1
Disallow: /forum/search.php

You can view your robots file simply by appending /robots.txt to your site URL. Just put the following http://muslim-academy.com/robots.txt and you'll be able to view your robots file.

Hi Tom,

I wonder if I might question you on this point you raised:

"If Google notices that you're syndicating content with dofollow links to your site within them, it will think that the only reason you're doing so is to pass more PageRank to your site."

Is content syndication therefore an absolute no-no these days? I'm aware of many of the best practices for syndicating content such as getting the content partner to specify the originator as canonical version or getting a link back to your original version in order that your article is not usurped in SERPs, but is it really the case that syndicated content with dofollow links to our own site would lead to some sort of penalty?

Our quality content is used by many sites (quite often sites with high authority) and these sites will link back to us. Are you suggesting this could lead to some sort of penalty or even a site-wide penalty?

Thanks in advance.

Hi Mozzers,

Just wondering if someone could point me in the direction of some useful industry benchmarks stats. I'm currently looking at a healthy active living website but trying to find out some average benchmark stats (things like av bounce rate, av time on site, pages per visit etc) for this sector so I can compare this with the site analytics.

Having had a look around I can't find a great deal out there relating to average benchmark stats for this sector. Your help greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Simon

Thanks Irving. Yes, our marketing department would like to cross-promote our other sites, so the SEO element is not our main concern here. Clearly nofollow the links seems the best policy to ensure we cross link without falling foul of Google.

Thanks Malcolm and Don for your responses. My feeling it that we should avoid linking site wide from the footer and maybe just link from the home page and no other and also 'nofollow' these links.

We have five sites which are largely unrelated but for cross-promotional purpose our company wishes to cross link between all our sites, possibly in the footer.

I have warned about potential consequences of cross-linking in this way and certainly don't want our sites to be viewed as some sort of 'link ring' if they all link to one another.

Just wondering if linking between sites you own really is that much of an issue and whether we should  'nofollow' the links in order to prevent being slapped with any sort of penalty for cross-linking.