No point in irrelevant linking.

There's no harm in going back and adding links once you have relevant content to link to, sometimes you even change where links are pointing, but I wouldn't aim to have X amount of links in each article.

For my own sites the more powerful the page the more likely I am to put extra links in but as a rule I try not to have more than 3 links in the body of an article. But, simply linking when it seems useful is a good rule of thumb.

You want to place banner ads on them or you want your stock to appear on their sites?

If the former you're looking for an ad buying agency (assuming you don't want to do it yourself), if the latter you're probably going to have to provide the sites an API into your product database so they can query stock and prices.

I've been having a think about this one and while I'm not sure, I'm going to say I don't think it wouldn't have an effect on link juice passing. As in if there were 4 links and an empty anchor the juice would be divided by 4 and not 5.

Current W3 anchor use - http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/links.html#h-12.1.3 - allows for various parameters in the <a>tag, however I'm willing to bet (not a huge sum of money though) that the href itself triggers the link part of a link (and am I right saying even js links need href="#" or similar to trigger?).</a>

<a>Plus I think older versions of HTML allowed things other than links within anchors (though I may be making that up) so if the engines have grown around those older versions it makes sense they look for something other than the 'a' in the tag to work.

I can't think of a good way to test though, maybe somebody can clarify my thinking or tell me if I'm wrong.

I agree with you though that it's not wise to put quirky elements like this on a page, especially if there's a lot of dropdowns. How do the navigation links work if there's no href?</a>

Probably going to need the URL on this one.

I presume you can access the site as a user? What's in your robots.txt file? You using the SEOmoz tools?

Yup, in theory.

I mean that's how it's supposed to be used, so if it was set up correctly that should be right

You can also tell Google to ignore parameters in Webmaster Tools under Site Configuration > Settings > Parameter Handling but only do this if you're confident it won't mess anything up. Canonical should be fine.

Starting to use them how?

You want to build a comparison site?

Actually a pretty neat feature of the Q&A forum is that you can mark answers as helpful (which highlights the post in green and gives the person a shiny 3 MozPoints).

There should be a text link saying something like 'This answered my question' with a tick at the bottom of their posts which you can click (at least I think that's how to mark them, I've not asked a question yet :D)

There are certainly a lot of worse things you could do than follow this guide by Oli Gardner - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-noob-guide-to-online-marketing-with-giant-infographic-11928

With Google traffic estimator / keyword Tool you get the data from the SE itself.

Which is all the more reason not to trust it!

if you don't have data for long tail keywords that is probably because the search for those terms is very low as far as volume.

Because Google only now reports on keywords that make them money

There can't / won't be another better source for this kind of data.

Your own analytics are the only thing that will give you a truly accurate data set, however I appreciate that it's not predictive for the most part For future reference as well, once you have top rankings for something always compare it against what you thought you would get and judge for yourself how accurate the tool is.

Anyway, yes, use the tool it's still one of the best resources you have access to.

Not black hat, but on the other hand, perhaps not worth it - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-the-microsite-mistake

But if you go for it, then eyepaq has a lot of good advice.

Not Joomla I don't think, but it's a more than unusual way to make a site

Anyway, it works. I've never tested what commas do with regards SEO, so can't say if it will help or hinder.

Was question 7 about internal link structure or gaining external links? (or, as I first thought how to actually code a link?)

is it smart to simply add the tag to every page and redirect to the same url.

No. You'll end up with a mess of a site. See - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/catastrophic-canonicalization

In doing this would that solve the problem of a single page having many different entrances with different tracking codes?

As stated, no that wouldn't solve it, but this is the sort of thing canonicalization is for. If you can get to product A via site/colour/product-a and site/brand/product-a then the canonical tag is to tell search engines that both of these pages are the same and then you state which is the 'official' one. Same situation if you had site/brand/product-a?affiliate-id=12345.

Is there a better way to handle this?

Must be I assume that each page is it's own entry in your CMS, rather than there being an identical entry for each path into it. As you said each page should reference itself on the desired absolute URL (and not the one displayed), how you determine what that is and impliment it site wide though will depend on your CMS and require a bit of planning.

So how is your site structured?

Are the commas the same a folders/categories?

As in is tutorials-photo,14,replacing-parts.html equivalent to category,id,filename.html?

Is the site built in Joomla?

How similar is the content?

I'm pretty sure you're not going to pass any link juice or authority to the new page using a canonical tag, especially if it has different content; it's just not a great way to fix anything.

Useful if the URL changes depending on how you end up at a destination page, but if you just happen to have 2 different pages about 'widgets' then sharing a canonical tag between them won't do too much.

Can you give me an example of what it is you're actually doing and why you think the pages should be the same? (I'm just not getting the impression they are the same page, sorry if I'm wrong)

How have you managed to get commas in your URLs?

It's not that they won't work but they should be reserved as special characters - http://www.apps.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3986.html

How are you building your site?

I want to say yes

You seem to have a grasp of the basics, Keyword Research > On Page Optimisation > Link Building but there's no substitute for experience.

There's no single formula for doing SEO, there's some best practises but even if you do everything perfectly there's no guarantees you'll rank for the words you want to (not trying to put you off :D)

You seem to have read a lot of relevant articles and sources so I'm only going to give you one bit of advice.

GO FOR IT!

Even if you don't get it right first time you'll learn so much by doing it and if you love SEO you'll just keep trying to get better. Stop by and ask if you have more specific questions and good luck!

I'm not convinced syndication via other players is the best link building tactic because if anybody links to or embeds them they're linking to the host site and not your site.

If the aim is to let people see and talk about the content (as in, if they're likely to do a blog post or otherwise talk about your site with a link when using these videos) then it's not bad, but there will almost definitely be some leakage.

So, definitely do it for exposure, especially if you think it's the only way people will see your videos in the first place. Not the worst thing in the world if you're selling something or it's the type of content people blog about.

However, if you can host your own player (or something like Brightcove) and have a link back in the player then that's going to be better in terms of link acquisition.

If you've made an entirely new page with the same content and it's in the one location and you can change all your links to look there, then 301 the old page to the new page, don't just use rel=canonical.

If you've added a new category, so the old page was, for example, site/colour/product and you now allowed navigation like site/shape/product, then you may want to change the canonical tag if the 'shape' route into the page is the new "official" page.

http://duckduckgo.com/

Quite often get better results for what I'm searching for.

Did the very same thing a couple of times and went with the 301 option.

If you 404 them and remove them then you're relying on Google fully crawling your new structure in a timely and thorough fashion. It'll take time for them to process these new URLs and I'd imagine that even if the pages never had many or any links into them you don't want what authority they had to be lost entirely.

Users will scarcely notice as long as they get to a page with the info they want.

It took almost a month for all the URLs to be replaced in the SERPs but I think it was definitely the right way to go about it. Otherwise I think we would have taken an even bigger hit to the search traffic (and we already lost about 40% for those 3/4 weeks).

Wait, wait, wait!

First anchor text to the same page is the only one that counts. Two links to the same domain should get both to count unless I'm both reading that wrong and been linking wrong for years

I'd still put what I want to link for most first in the copy but I think the second will still count.

Disagree?

Technically no, Google will only crawl pages that are publically available.

However, you could use their first click free feature - http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=74536 - depends how much you think you would gain from doing that or what sort of non-payment abuse it opens you up to.

2 sides to this, 1. Protecting brand and 2. Just want more results for a keyword.

With regards protecting brand, using other sites worked best for me.

Putting YouTube content on mydomain.tv, putting company info on a .info, creating my own affiliate sites with brand name in the URL. A few of these and you can control the first page for your brand quite easily.

Also with language Googles assigning a folder to a language in WMT and building links from those language sites into it seems to give me an easy 1-2 with /county/ first and plain dot com second.

For getting more results in on a specific keyword, yes pdfs or other media types (either youtube videos or host my own and make a video sitemap). If you can get into Google News (depends what kind of site you have) that's good. Plus getting a few Twitter accounts to tweet about the keyword can get you to show up.

Both ideas kind of overlap but I find the domains provides more stable control where as the other media varies wildy by search.

You got analytics on it? Can you see what the referral pages to it are?

Alternatively if you run Xenu - http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html - you should get a report with what pages link to the broken page.

WordPress does it automatically if you've got your permalinks set up.

WordPress .htaccess should look like this:

BEGIN WordPress

<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]</ifmodule>

END WordPress

And it should be .php not .html anyway in WP

Is WMT finding links to .html pages from pages on your site or from external links?

Well, that's a slightly different question

In the above example, yes I would redirect them. It's the same website, same content and Google, I'd imagine, can figure out LA = Los Angeles.

I definitely wouldn't have the same site on multiple domains as, generally, only one of them is going to be credited with creating the content and shown in the SERPs. Also redirect all the other TLDs to the dot com.

If the site was widgets.com and I had bluewidgets.com (where blue widgets was a popular item) I may consider putting blue widget content on the second site as the exact match domain gives (for the time being) a reasonably big advantage with ranking for that term.

Additionally, if I had say LALawyers.com, I may create a faux affiliate style site comparing LA lawyers and pushing my companies to the top.

Unless you're putting significantly different content on the sites (and I'll again refer you to the microsite Whiteboard Friday above) I would always redirect the other misspellings, TLDs and synonyms to the main site.

Forwarding the other TLDs to the .com is fine and even recommended. You definitely won't be penalized, there will be no duplicate content (as the content is just on the .com), indeed the search engines won't even really know those other domains exist, they will only be useful if people type in the wrong URL or link to the wrong one.

You can do this most likely at your registrar, as setting up a site and using its .htaccess isn't the neatest way.

The only reason I can think of that you'd want to make those domains active is for brand protection.

If you sell something and you affiliates are all over the front page for your brand, making a YouTube channel and putting the content on mysite.tv with links from the official site should push them down a position. The .info you could put some corporate info on and the location you could put location specific content on, etc.

If you put the same content on each though then the search engines have to decide how many of the sites they want to show so make sure these microsites are unique in some way.

If you don't have to protect your brand then making them sites is not really the preferred route. Check out this whiteboard Friday for why - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-the-microsite-mistake

Yup.

And in case you have any questions about what that does for your SEO - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u55Rn1mYgO8

"Whoa, dude, you just blew my mind!"

• Matt Cutts

Are you asking for the code to redirect index.html to / ?

This should work (put the whole thing in your .htaccess and replace example with your site)

RewriteEngine On Options +FollowSymLinks

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.html
RewriteRule ^(.)index.html$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

However, you should also change your internal links to point to the redirected version (/) and not /index.html

I see.

Well, I certainly used to put a few keywords in titles using commas assuming it acted as a separator, however (and again anecdotally) I now write (as does everybody I'm comparing myself to) titles in the format "Cheap Books and Free Books".

Stick 'poker' into Google and look at everybody's titles. A few years back that would have looked like 'Poker, Online Poker, Texas Holdem | PokerSite" where as now it's "Poker and Online Poker including Texas Holdem at PokerSite".

However, stick 'travel' into Google and you'll see everybody still using commas.

So, as I say, I can't think how it would adversely effect you but I think with Google trying to extract meaning from people's searches that, in the long term, more natural sentences over a list of keywords would serve you better.

Hmm, I've not tested conclusively but I can't think how a comma would adversely effect you. However, anecdotally, I've seen lots of sites move away from commas and pipes in titles so I'd have to assume that something was up.

I don't think stop words are being treated the same as the used to be with Google trying to figure out intent more and more, plus I'm not a huge fan of special characters (not that a comma is that special) in the title so unless it looked ridiculous I'd consider not using it.

Hi Rosa,

while staff do patrol these forums it's mostly just other users.

As far as I'm aware though when you stop paying for Pro all your data is deleted.

However please email customerservice@seomoz.org for an official response.

First thing to do is head over to the webmaster central forums (though I'm not sure which is best; malware and hacked sites? A mod should help you) - http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters?hl=en - as being pre-emptive is about your only option here.

For the short term you'll probably see a decent boost in SEO traffic, but if you decide just to roll with it then if you do get penalised, you've little comeback. Although an old post, points one and two here should be of interest - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/learning-in-london-some-fantastic-material - specifically "Unless you can remove those external links (by whatever means neccessary) or become a major brand in your space (such that Google will overlook any past indisgressions), you're basically up a creek."

Now this generally refers to a site after it's penalised in some form, but realistically once you're caught it's going to be a bitch to remedy unless (even if?) you can prove you were trying to fix it.

You could try reporting all the sites for spam - http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html - but I'm not sure if that would end up harming you as well. You could try contacting the webmasters that the links are on and asking them to remove ir (and any others on their network). You could try setting a redirect based on incoming referrer to state that this site is not authorised to link to you (shows you're actively trying to combat it at least).

But definitely try to get in touch with somebody on the official help forums for more advice.

A link with "KWA KWB" pointing to a page trying to rank for KWA is not going to be as strong as if it was just a link with 'KWA' as "KWA KWB" is effectively saying the page is about 'KWA+KWB' (if you appreciate the difference).

If KWA was 'monitors' and KWB was 'keyboards' then a link with "KWA KWB" would be a signal that the page was about "monitor keyboards", not either monitors or keyboards.

So if the page was trying to rank for both KWA and KWB you would almost certainly have to build links with just 'KWA' or 'KWB' anchor text in order to attain high rankings on either.

While you need a more robust selection of anchor text in your general link profile, it would be advisable to use the power of this link with an exact match anchor link for just one of your keywords.

Should just have a single keyword anchor text ideally.

The guys above are pretty much right, but to try and explain:

Domain authority, if you don't already know is really just an indicator of the total number of links and unique domains linking to your site (as opposed to just a single page). The more domains the better and works very similarly to PR.

Here's a Whiteboard Friday on Domain Authority and Trust - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-domain-trust-authority - (about 7:45 fo DA)

And here's the Whiteboard Friday on how that's used in the SEOmoz tools - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-domain-authority-page-authority-metrics - (part 2, round about the 8 minute mark, but worth watching it all).

Now, your question about whether linking out to pages effects DA we need to think about how PR works (as it's kinda the same) and as shown in the first video it doesn't matter how you interlink at the page level, but more the domain level. So links coming into your domain, on any page, determine your DA (to simplify it). And as such linking to low PA pages shouldn't have any effect.

Also linking out to other domains shouldn't effect your DA either and if I had to try and prove that I would probably turn to this YOUmoz piece from Hamlet batista - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/training-the-random-surfer-two-important-adjustments-to-the-early-pagerank-model - which is not as easy to digest, but if we assume DA works like PR then there's be little to no benefit in cutting those links out.

If you are worried about how you link then you may get some advantage from is streamlining the pages by consolidating them. Have a read of this and see if it helps - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-consolidation-the-new-pagerank-sculpting

Also, the best way to improve your site's DA is to build links from more domains wherever possible into these pages with low PA.

I'm going to publish this and have a read in case I need to edit or have wandered off topic, but hopefully it's useful for you

So can you just change the links to look at the new URL? Still best to redirect them though.

Curious about why you have to change them now though as I just assumed you were using a competitors trademark in a domain before

I outsource some link building TO an agency (or 3) primarily in other language territories so we get somebody with a bit of local knowledge and can respond to webmasters in a timely fashion.

I don't think it's wise to just fire and forget when doing it this way though (obviously) and always check what's being done, strategise which words are going to be targeted and if there's any other promotions or content you can build links round as well then keep the agencies informed and use them to bolster and seed some social media stuff.

In some countries it is a bit cheaper than running it all in house and I know some of the people we work with offer a white label deal of sort to other agencies, so seems to be quite common.

Duplicate content is not an issue for which you will be penalised.

If all the pages are the same then chances are that only one page will rank for the content, but it's not black hat to have several pages with the same content (just usually a poor choice). However it doesn't seem as if every page is the same.

I don't see anything against Google's guidelines going on on that site (I've not looked hard) so your best bet is to just keep building more links adding better content.

Can you tell when the pages you got links on were last cached?

You can do this manually by searching for the url and clicking the 'cached' link beside the URL.

If they've not been cached then they're unlikely to show up at all in any of those tools (and after a couple of months it would be a pretty poor page if it hadn't been).

If it has been cached then it's a bit up in the air as to when it'll show up in WMT (or the other checkers) and even then if it's passing it's full value straight away.

If it's not cached then I would point a link at it from somewhere (not necessarily your site) just to send the spiders along to it and get it counted again.

A few things to think about.

If done right I don't think this will effect your rankings much, if at all. You're certainly not the only site that does this and although I've never done something similar with a php header redirect, georouting of visitors based on IP is something I do all the time (and could be something you might want to look into? - http://www.maxmind.com/)

Your concerns here should be how is Google getting around your site? Is your homepage just a location select screen which it then has to crawl individually (a la paradisepoker[dot]com) or is there a default site they'll see and only later find a link to the location versions? If I (or specifically Google) don't accept cookies what can I see?

People linking into your site will be splitting the value a bit, even if you use the canonical tag. What version of the site do you get links to and is that ranking better than the location variations? Would you be better not using the canonical tag but targeting links into each with location qualifiers to keywords?

As I say, if it's done right I don't think you'll be hurting yourself, but would need to look into it a bit more to say for definite.

Yeah it would seem to be a flat over or under 100 links tool.

I don't think it even takes into account the nofollow links (as in, they still count as a link) as they still reduces your PR flow - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-consolidation-the-new-pagerank-sculpting

It's not really a metric that you should worry too much about unless you're going overboard with it but here's some of the underlying reasoning behind it - http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-many-links-per-page/

Well, the biggest protip is that international version search algorithms are a bit behind the .com

Ultimately there's not too much difference, but be aware of location specific sites. For example if you're in Brazil get on Orkut rather than (or actually as well as) Facebook. Be prepared to switch off your anglo-centric brain, the sites we all know and love could be completely different to the big sites in other countries. This should be discovered through analysis of competitors and any real engagement with customers though.

Ultimately the same metrics are used to evaluate ranking, so getting quality editorial links from ccTLD specific sites is the long term way to go.

The way you approach people in each country is generally a little different though (and with your local knowledge you should be well placed to adapt to this), for example in the Scandinavian countries they are all very web savvy, know the value of a link and don't respond well to straight up link requests.

In these countries it's best to avoid buying links (were you to do such a thing anyway) as you'll very quickly burn through your budget and instead focus on offering people you want links from exclusive access to something. In your case, maybe an exclusive gameplay video or could even go as far as giving them a code for their site that if people put in game will unlock an exclusive costume, that kind of thing.

Other countries have their own particular idioms but it's hard to just give you a overview of what people are like in each

Are you linking out to these sites you have to get rid of?

In fact are they even sites or just other pages on your main site? I have maybe misunderstood

EDIT - I'll go ahead and assume I've just got the wrong end of the stick and it's pages on your site that you need to get rid of.

In that case if you can't redirect them can you change the links to point to different pages or even just remove them?

Just to add though that I think having your phone number in the SERPS would result in less click throughs, so if CTR is or becomes an important factor (I don't think it is or Google wouldn't be trying to show more and more in the SERPS) but you're still going to get less visitors.

So if you rely on showing traffic to prove SEO is working go with David's idea of a trackable number.

Redirecting them won't help the main domain rank for these brand terms, but it will capture the type in traffic and pass most of the link juice coming into these other sites.

Ultimately it shouldn't take your web development company long (unless you have hundreds) and indeed you could maybe even do it at the registrar easily (if not efficiently), so don't pay through the nose for it.

On the other hand, unless you rely on links from those other sites it won't harm your main site in any way by letting them die.

Until MichaelC shows up

Sounds reasonable, I would also put a canonical tag on it saying the / is the official page.

What might also be an option is to put a parameter on like ?hm (if possible) and in Webmaster Tools - Site Configuration > Settings > Parameter Handling you can tell them to ignore the ?hm. However I'm not sure how well that works and I would have the canonical in there as well.

Well, it has been claimed that the spam team has been asleep at the wheel a little bit recently (but then again I hear SEO is dead these days as well) but I'm sure I saw something where Matt Cutts said they're going to be putting more man hours back into fighting spam and if they should have learned anything then I would guess part of their time should be looking for new ways their SERPS are being abused.