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I would recommend **not**disavowing links that have a spam score of more than 3 in Webmaster Tools.
In this video - http://moz.com/blog/understanding-and-applying-mozs-spam-score-metric-whiteboard-friday - Rand specifically says 'don't disavow links just because they have a spam score of 7 or 8'. He mentions a link disavowal issue that Cyrus Sheppard had that really hurt his site for a long time. Doing the disavowal for all links with a 3 could cause serious damage.
I'm doing some competitive link analysis for a new client in the food industry right now and I've come across one of their competitors using this tactic quite extensively, and it seems to be working very well. They crush their competitors as far as domain authority. Most of the anchor text is branded (company name) but you can quickly tell that there are one or two keyword phrases that they have targeted. I can only assume that they were getting some of the bloggers to include the custom anchor text. It's definitely not overdone, so the overall link profile still looks natural.
The bloggers that they're targeted all seem to have relatively authoritative sites which I can only assume means their brand is getting a lot of quality exposure on these sites as well as referral traffic. I'd hazard a guess that the direct referral traffic and overall exposure is worth as much or more than the increase in organic rankings that they would see because of these links. None of these links were nofollow or affiliate links.
The general rule of thumb I've always espoused (with a few exceptions) is that anything that you are doing for SEO purposes should have an equal or greater benefit to you for _non-SEO _reasons. I guess that's sort of my test to see if something can be considered a legitimate white hat technique. But there's obviously still some grey area with this.
Just building on Jasmine's comment, the Google Analytics URL builder is a handy tool to created tagged URLs easily. It particularly makes it easy if you want to name a campaign something like 'Campaign #1'. You can't write '?utm_campaign=Campaign #1 in the URL. If you just fill out the fields in the URL builder, it automatically builds the proper URL for you, i.e., utm_campaign=Campaign%20%231
%20 = 'space'
%23 = #
In short, don't stress about why that particular URL is constructed the way that it is. It doesn't follow best practices. There's better ways of building/tagging URLs.
I experienced a similar issue recently with a client. A few 904 errors seemed to coincide with a notice in the client's 3d cart CMS that they were short on bandwidth. We also saw a VERY significant drop in rankings across the board. We upgraded the hosting plan and the 904 errors went away temporarily, and a very modest improvement in rankings followed, but not a return to normal. It's now about 2-3 months after we first saw the 904 errors and I've just noticed another one that has come up.
I hear ya. I don't know if you're from the western NY area or not, but not living too far away from there, I know that 'Seneca' means more to people than just the tiny city in NY. The first thing that comes to mind to someone in Buffalo when they hear 'Seneca' is _not _the city.
This is turning into more of a discussion about marketing in general than a discussion about duplicate content.
This particular situation is unique. It's not a franchise. It's not a company expanding into a neighbouring city. In order to _not _change the name while expanding into this secondary market, an awful lot of money would have to be invested into branding, which just isn't worth it.
I agree with all of that, but I feel this situation is very different. If you have a company called 'Albany Plumbers', it seems kind of weird to market 'Albany Plumbers' in Buffalo. That's basically what I'm dealing with. Client has the city name in their business name. Users are not going to think the site is relevant in this secondary market they're looking to target.
I have a client that operates a local service-based business. They are thinking of expanding that business to another geographic area (a drive several hours away in an affluent summer vacation area). The name of the existing business contains the name of the city, so it would not be well-suited to market 'City X' business in 'City Y'. My initial thought was to (for the most part) 'duplicate' the existing site onto a new site (brand new root domain). Much of the content would be the exact same. We could re-word some things so there aren't entire lengthy paragraphs of identical info, but it seems pointless to completely reinvent the wheel. We'll get as creative as possible, but certain things just wouldn't change. This seems like the most pragmatic thing to do given their goals, but I'm worried about duplicate content. It doesn't feel as though this is spammy though, so I'm not sure if there's cause for concern.
Most studies/reports that you'll see point to a slightly negative _correlation. _But correlation does not equal _causation. _One that I recently remember reading pointed to a negative correlation when Google authorship markup was present. It's obviously very hard to argue that adding Google authorship markup to your site _decreases _your organic search rankings.
When working with WP sites I generally use Michael Torbert's All in One SEO Pack. I've encountered a few examples where when the homepage shows up on a Google search results page the title/title tag shows up as {Business Name:} | {Keyword/Description}. In the 'General Settings' of the plugin in the 'Home Title' field, I have it listed as {Keyword/Description} | {Business Name}
I'm not sure why the order is getting switched and where the ':' comes from. I'm not sure if this even has any adverse effect. If anyone has had experience with this, your input would be appreciated.
Note - I'm not seeing this issue reflected on Bing.
Well isn't this a nice coincidence... Andrew Shotland just published this article on search engine land that talks about this exact issue...
http://searchengineland.com/the-smb-guide-to-changing-business-names-seo-128939
Hi Matthew,
As you've seen from the rich snippets testing tool, the author pic is showing up for your homepage - it's not just content-oriented blog pages.
It does take time though. Seeing the author pic show up in the testing tool, and having it not show up live is the norm. It can definitely take some time, so be patient. Personally, I believe it took me about 3-4 days from the time everything was properly implemented to the time I started seeing the author pic in search results.
There's been a lot of speculation about why some people implement the markup and see the author pic show up in SERPs in a day, whereas for others it takes a couple weeks. There was a lot of speculation that it had to do with your Google+ activity and the number of people who had circled you, but I've seen enough examples of people with zero G+ activity, and next to no circle activity that have their author pic showing up in SERPs.
A great resource (where all the really smart Authorship people hangout) is Google Authorship & Author Rank G+ community. AJ Kohn (Blind Five Year Old) Bill Slawski & Mark Traphagen are some of the go-to experts on the topic who are very active in that community.
In most, if not all industries, I would say: new site + less than 1 year + 250k+ links ≠ 'safe'.
I wouldn't sweat it too much.
I'd probably check out their link profile in OSE so you can see for yourself the types of links they're acquiring. If the client isn't that SEO-savvy, try to show them what they're doing and how they're doing it. Hopefully that can calm the client down a little bit if they're worried why they're not occupying the same spots as they were in teh SEPRs.
Don't be tempted to attempt to mirror the competitors' strategies!
Matt Cutts has gone on record as saying they don't use the meta keywords tag. Check out the video.
There's no hard & fast rule to how many links you want to have on a page, but if I had to toss out a number, you don't want it over 100 per page. There's likely a strong correlation with pages with hundreds or thousands of links on a given page and the spammy quality of the site.
Your issue in my opinion isn't as much an SEO issue as it is a usability issue. Your side navigation is just WAY too much. Once you click on one of those navigation items, you the user should be taken to another page. There's just way too much text there and it's difficult to read - it's difficult for the user to take in that information.
Try to follow 'The Rule of 7'. If you go beyond 7 items in a side navigation menu like that, it becomes increasingly difficult to take all of that information in. You should ideally try to divide up all of your products into about 7-10 categories. Those are the categories that you display in the side navigation menu. Then, when the user click on one of those items, they're taken to another page.
I provided a link to the help article...
Geo-related factors are one of the reasons that search results get personalized and the SEOMoz software doesn't (at least for now) have the ability to show personalized search results based on location, meaning, if your keyword is just 'pizza', it's going to show you how the search results will display for "most" people. So if you're in des moines, iowa, and your client, Des Moines Pizza, generally shows up #1 in the local search results for 'pizza' when the user is located in Des Moines, that's not going to show in the SEOMoz software. You'd have to input your keyword as 'pizza des moines' to get search results specific to that city.
Oftentimes what I'll do for small business clients of mine (service-based businesses) is have a few different types of contact forms through the site. You obviously want some type of form on the contact page itself. Depending on the type of business you may also have an actual page for a 'Request an Estimate'/'Request a Quote'/'Book an Appointment'. The latter type of form would typically be more detailed (i.e, more fields) than a basic contact form on a contact page, but what I've found effective on a homepage, or sometimes on every page of the site is some sort of 'Quick Contact Form', where you're asking for the bare minimum amount of information from the user in order that your client can proceed to the next step.
There's no silver bullet and what works for one site or one industry doesn't always work across the board. I'm a huge proponent of conversion tracking/goal setting and measuring the each form separately.
What I'd recommend is a 'tiered bidding' approach. Don't use different ad groups for different match types.
With tiered bidding you're setting different bid amounts for different match types - specifically, your exact match is the highest bid, followed by phrase and then broad. So it would be something like this:
[red shoes] - $1
"red shoes" - $0.75 (3/4 the price of the exact match)
red shoes - $0.50 (1/2 the price of the exact match)
This strategy helps ensure that you're paying a fair value for all different types of search queries that are bringing traffic to your site.
Assuming that in this example, you're an e-commerce site selling red shoes, we'll argue the term 'red shoes' is the most qualified search query available. As such, you're paying top dollar for that keyword - $1. (I know your actual CPC isn't your bid price, I'm just saying - for illustrative purposes). If a user searches for, say, 'shiny red shoes', your phrase match keyword will be triggered, and you'll pay $0.75. You're paying a little bit less because, let's say, your shoes aren't exactly shiny, but there's still a chance that user will convert. Lastly, if the user types in 'what are red shoes', your classic informational type of search query, your ads won't be triggered by the exact or phrase match version of the keyword, but they will be triggered by the broad match, and you'll pay $0.50. You pay the least amount for this search query because this doesn't represent a very qualified visitor for your red shoe, e-commerce website.
Hope that helps.
It's definitely not the easiest thing to wrap your head around, and I'm sure anyone who has ever managed a PPC campaign has thought the same thing.
When I first saw Hal Varian's video on Quality Score that gave me a better understanding.
He breaks down quality score as follows:
60% is related to CTR
30% is related to 'Relevance'
10% is landing page
The way that I've seen a lot of people talk about Quality Score & AdWords suggests that they think the landing page is a much more important part of the equation.
In my opinion, the best thing the focus on is CTR. If your clients' ads are getting clicked on more often, you're helping Google make more money. If the ads getting clicked on more often because it's more relevant to the user's search query, Google has a strong monetary incentive to serve that ad up higher. That's all very logical. Try not to get caught up in the minutiae of Quality Score. When you don't know exactly what their formula is, it can definitely get confusing/frustrating.
I'll chime in on the '**what is a good domain number authority'. **
I hope this is an obvious point... There's no magic number. I would suggest that it depends on your vertical, and the keywords for which you are trying to rank. Quick tip - use the SEOmoz SERP overlay tool . When you're doing searches for your target keywords, you can get a quick/rough idea of the type of domain authority/number of linking root domains that will be necessary to be in the conversation for page 1 rankings.