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Hi

If I understand your issue correctly you have run a SEOmoz campaign and one of the things it has picked up are 326 Rel canonical issues highlighted in the blue notices section.

If this is correct then you should have nothing to worry about as it is just informing you that the Rel canonical tag has been used 326 times on the site.

The Rel canonical tag is used to indicate to the search engines that you are aware of 2 or more pages with similar content and that they should take more notice of the one you indicate the Canonical tag looks like

This needs to be added to the header of every page that is a copy (or near copy) of the main page you with to promote.

So if you have a number of pages that are similar to each other you want the Rel canonical in place. Some CMS automatically add Rel Canonical tags to every page and this may be what is happening. I am happy to look at the site for you to determine if the Canonical tags are set correctly if that would help.

Sean

Hi

I have checked the canonical link on your blog, on the duplicate content post (I assume this is he one)

It looks like

This looks good to me.

Is it possible the error report was looking at one of the examples in your text, the 5th and 8th use of the word canonical in the article could have confused the checker.

Let me know if I am checking the wrong information or if you would like me to look at anything else

Sean

Hi Diane

There are paid tools that will help with things such as keyword research, visitor numbers, organizing paid traffic and checking rankings, all of these can be used to boost the value of your website business.

However there are also tools that will help you automate the link building process and I think these are the tools you are asking about, as a general rule of thumb I would steer clear of these as the quality of the links they build will probably be low and against the guidelines laid out by Google.

They may work for a time but as I am sure you have read hear and on other forums many people who used short cuts in the past to get higher rankings are now seeing their businesses devastated by the changes in the search engine algorithms. The question to ask yourself is are you looking for some quick wins or a sustained long term business?

One short cut that does work and that should work for ever is to find out what your audience wants and then work out a way to give it to them.

I hope this helps

Sean

It is a while since I set mine up but I do believe there was a delay before the snippets showed up, so it may just be a time issue.

Here is a checklist of possible problems that may help http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1093493

Hope it helps

Sean

If you are worried about the links contact the sites that currently link to the site and tell them the site is not what it was and that they should remove the links as they will not be helpful to their audience.

If you want to make the process more likely to succeed you could suggest another site the person could link to that offers content similar to the one you are replacing.

I hope this helps

Sean

If you are adding them to the clients site I would tend to use the clients profile, assuming the client was ok with this.

If it is for guest blogging then again as long as the client is ok with the quality of the work you are producing and are happy to have their name used on the other sites I would use the clients profile.

If the client is not ok with this you should learn why as this could be an indication they do not like or understand what you are doing. If it is because they want their name only associated with their content (as an industry expert might) then you need the profile setting up of an employee of that firm and use that in your postings.

I hope that helps

Sean

Hi

When you say "All of the domains in question are keyword/brand name similar only and do not exist as actual websites." does this mean they are just registered domain names rather than websites?

If that is the case then you do not need to do a 301 redirect you just point the nameservers to the new site rather than where they are at the moment and I do not think there is a limit to the number you can do this for.

Hope this helps

Sean

You have 3 different measurements here

A hit - should be any file requested from the server, so an image would add a hit, if you have a page with 2 images and 1 block of text that is 4 hits, 1 for the page, 1 each for the images and 1 for the text.

A visitor is best thought of as a person or IP address visiting the site, 1 visit is recorded each time the IP address visits your site.

A unique is recorded the first time an IP address visits the site but not the second or third, this is normally in a 30 day period. So if I visit your site 3 times today and then again in April you would see 1 unique from me this month and 1 in April.

You would expect to see the Hits being the highest followed by visitors and finally uniques.

I hope this helps

Sean

If I were you I would add the new content and put a plan in place to build up your links then use the disavow tool to cover yourself with Google

Doug Raises some good points, however I would also urge you to consider that you may want to stop some people clicking on your ad.

For example if you offer a service that is priced at £100 per hour and in the market there are other services (not the same quality as yours) that are £50 per hour you would not want to spend money (Via PPC) on those who do not have the budget to pay for your service.

Again if there is no website on the domain name then it does not matter what the domain name is that you redirect, so if there is no website on the domain name

Plumbers.com could be pointed at fishing.com and there would be no problems

Does this help?

Sean

You can enter the competitors yourself, you set competitors for each campaign

You can not set a different competitor for each keyword, but you can have unlimited (I believe) campaigns running so you could split your keywords into categories that have the same competitors.

You also only pay for the terms you check, so if you have some long tail terms you only need to check occasionally you can add these to a separate campaign and pay only when you run it,

If you have other questions let me know,

Sean

Hi Kirstaian

As you point out in your question there is more value to a link than just the link juice passed, there is also the credibility factor.

Being seen on a page with other respected sites in your industry builds brand awareness and credibility for your site.

Hi Tyler

You are exactly right in what you say, the outreach, just like the social media needs to be built on relationships, so yes you should have different approaches for each niche.

Hi Courtney

No you do not just want the home page to get the "link juice" you want the whole site to be visible to the search engines, or at least all the pages and posts that you want people to be able to read for free.

Remember that every word you write on your blog has the chance to send more people to your site, so the more pages you can get Google to index and rank the more chance you have of getting traffic.

I hope this helps

Sean

Hi Dana

If all you need is the extra rank tracking capacity a tool like webposition.com might be a more cost effective solution, you can set up keywords to track, enter competitors for each keyword and choose what Search Engines to check, all the data can be exported and the reports can be set to run on specific days or immediately.

You will need to check the numbers and make sure it does what you need, the pricing info is on this page,

http://www.webposition.com/support/faq-frequently-asked-questions.htm#Pricing

I use it for several smaller campaigns but have not used it foe thousands of phrases.

I hope this helps

Sean

I am not seeing the same as you but I have seen it before when doing a product search and just got pages of Amazon results.

I think it is a glitch in the Google algorythem because they would not want to show results from just one site even if they were the most popular.

You need to point the site to one option or the other, there is no benefit one over the other, but people are used to saying www.

In addition to that SEOmoz use www, and for this sort of question I tend to use this site as a rule of thumb guide

I hope this helps

Sean

Hi Edward

I have not noticed any slow down in the speed of Google indexing Wordpress sites, the point from Paul about adding a blog sitemap is a good one, also ensure you submit it to webmaster tools.

I do not know if it will speed up the indexation times but it would not hurt to have the author attribution connected to a Google + account, it is another signal that the content is important to the blogger.

I hope this helps

Sean

Possibly the best advice I have seen on SEOmoz

"If it ever happens again, rush to you client and demand a bonus"

Hi Dominic

Do you know what penalties you were affected by?

What dates did you see the effects?

What messages have you received in Webmaster tools?

There are different  responses to different penalties and knowing what you have been penalized for is the first step towards recovery.

Probably not the answer you hoped to hear but it should be the first step you take.

Sean

Hi Elissa

It looks like you have 2 plug ins each producing a canonical tag on your Wordpress site, I will have a look at the plugins you have installed and report what I find.

With a little luck we can get this issue resolved later today.

Sean

I would not be disavowing your links at this stage, you do not say if you received a notification from Google or not in your WMT.

If you did then take action to remove and then disavow if they can not be removed, but if you have not received the notification / warning then keep the links in place.

Build some good quality links and add new content.

I hope this helps

Sean

Hi Peter

Yes that is correct, if the page you are trying to rank is for the phrase "dog training" a keyword rich anchor text would be one that had dog training as the anchor test

Hope this helps

Sean

I would imagine the reason they are still showing up is a combination of the sites not being crawled often or deep enough and the delay on the  updating of the links tools.

You could try getting the sites that used to link to you but no longer do re-crawled especially the pages that used to have your links on.

I believe this should see a refreshing of the links tools in time.

I hope this helps

Sean

If I have understood this correctly you wish to rank a page for terms that you are not going to use on the visible part of the page.

Using the Meta Keywords tag will not help as this is a tag that Google no longer looks at

Every landing page needs to ad value to the visitors experience, you need to have a reason for having the page on the site and to help get better rankings is not an acceptable reason.

You can target 6 - 8 related keywords on an individual page as long as their is relevant content on the page and it makes sense when you read it. This would only be practical for the longer tail or keywords with very little competition

I hope this helps

Sean