Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Tom,

There is so much more to this discussion, including local-language SEO in Korean. But here's my contribution:

1. you won't get penalised if you use rel=canonical extensively

2. Your developer is almost certainly wrong (though without knowing more, I wouldn't want to judge).

The answer is, rather unhelpfully at first glance, "it depends".

It depends on your overall objective for the content - what is the goal you are trying to achieve?

It depends on your audience location - are they organic searchers, social media sharers, youtube searchers, etc?

If your primary objective is to get people to your site (link building) and you're using the lure of video to incentivise this, then Phil's "don't do both" comment is spot on. If on the other hand you want as many people to watch the video as possible and make it accessible through as many channels (because you have a diverse audience base and you're not link building) then I think you can do both.

I would say that Phil has more experience at Video SEO than me so his comments certainly count double on mine for this topic!

Hi Bruce,

Just to add some detail into the mix here; for video hosting and embedding, SEOmoz uses Wistia (who you can a discount with your PRO package) which has some great SEO features and a very reliable (and cheap IMHO) transcription service.

I like this approach because, as Dana has pointed out, the content is excellent and the only way to get it is to come to the site - this encourages links, social shares etc.

The advantage to using YouTube however is that, in itself, YT is a gigantic search engine and therefore SEO opportunities are significant.

We host our video content using Wistia and embed on our site as well as posting to YT, but all of our inbound activity directs would-be viewers to the embedded pages.

Ultimately, depending on the content of the video, you have to consider where your audience is and what your objectives are in sharing it with the internet.

Good luck!

Whilst I can see you are looking to gain SEO advantage in your use of ALT text, your primary consideration should always be for the end user: If this image does not display, does the ALTernative text explain what was there?

You should be testing this with a text browser, or an emulator, to make sure it still makes sense.

Taking this approach should yield the best results.

Hi Bob,

As others have said, there are no hard-and-fast rules. If you want to use a particular style for link text my only other recommendations to the others so far is:

1. Be consistent - don't have all sorts of random colours / styles in your copy.

2. Test. Test. Test. - Give your design to someone and ask them to complete a task that might have them click on a link and see if it works.

Good luck.

Hi guys,

I'm reaching out here for what may seem to be a very simple and obvious issue, but not something I can find a good answer for.

We have a .com site hosted in Germany that serves our worldwide audience. The site is in English, but our business language is British (UK) English.

This means that we rank very well for (e.g.) optimisation software but optimization software is nowhere to be found.

The cause of this to me seems obvious; a robot reading those two phrases sees two distinct words. Nonetheless, having seen discussions of a similar nature around the use of plurals in keywords, it would seem to me that Google should have this sort of thing covered.

Am I right or wrong here?

If I'm wrong, then what are my options? I really don't want to have to make a copy of the entire site; apart from the additional effort involved in content upkeep I see this path fraught with duplicate content issues.

Any help is very much appreciated, thanks.

Yeah, sorry, bit of a basic response! Well, if the server admin took any sort of standard security class then you won't be able to see the file.

You could try this method if it hasn't been secured though:

http://andywolf.com/list-all-dns-records-from-a-public-domain-with-nslookup/

Hi Dan,

The way to know for sure is to get a copy of the Start of Authority (SOA) file for the domain.

Can you ask your host or server admin for this?

If by "How do you maintain the rankings of site A" you mean "what value am I passing over to site B once site A is gone", remember that Site A probably got its ranking through its link portfolio and that isn't going to go away immediately. The purpose of the 301 is to direct crawlers and humans to the content that has superseded the content that was originally linked to.

Hi there,

John Doherty did a really good whiteboard friday on this last year:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/smarter-internal-linking-whiteboard-friday

In addition to the 2 great answers form Dan and Matt, I would say: TEST!

But also: Define your objectives.

Then TEST some more.

Take a look at who is reading your blog now, segment them into demographics that make sense to what you're trying to achieve: are they social? What geographical location are they in? What languages do they speak? What other blogs do they read? Are they repeat readers? Are they a frequent commenter? Do they subscribe to your newsletter? Are they customers? etc.

Does any of this data match up to what you are trying to get out of blogging?

If so, great, carry on doing what you're doing and keep testing.

If not, figure out some strategy to bridge the gap, which may or may not include when you publish the articles.

Hi Ken,

I'm no definite expert on the duplicate content issue, but given that the other content on the page will be unique, my gut feel is that you will be fine.

With regards to the hosting, the answer is "it depends". Specifically, do you just want someone to watch the video, or do you want to get more value from it?

We use Wistia to host the majority of our videos and we get some great analytics (including heatmaps), can add email CTAs (priceless) to some of our content plus it looks more professional than YouTube. They do also have some great SEO tools that we don't utilise just yet.

Having said that, we also still upload all of our videos to YT (2nd largest search engine etc.).

You get a discount on Wistia in your Pro Perks.

Just a little tip: If you're planning on playing around with differing titles and character lengths, rather than "change, wait for index, google, check, repeat", you could always use something like Photoshop to check:

Take a screenshot of a SERP with a truncated title, add a guide at the trunc point, match the font in Photoshop and type away until you hit the guide.

This way you can play around with a few titles before you go live with any of them.

Hi Paul,

Despite the fact that it looks like I won't get this back (though I've asked for server logs, so who knows) that was a stellar answer, thank you.

I will definitely add another profile to the site and also set up a notification warning.

I'll also make sure I keep this handy and refer back to it every time I set up a site!

Thanks again.

I forgot to mention - I checked if there were any filters on there and there aren't.

Hi everyone,

I know this isn't the 'Google help forum' but I'm stuck and I hope someone here might be able to point me in the right direction.

For a period last month - Thursday 22nd to Sunday 25th November Google Analytics reports our site as having 0 visits.

In addition we have two days which were strangely low - Weds 21st 105 visits, Weds 28th Nov 78 visits.

We normally get between 1000 and 1200 visits on a weekday from a global audience (I know that was the Thanksgiving weekend, but the US accounts for ~10% of total traffic).

Has anyone else had this problem? If so, what did you do? The "report a bug" board on the Google help forum has a few entries like this, people with 0 visits shouting "help!" into the void with no response.

Ideas?

Hi Dino,

I know this won't solve the immediate problem you asked for, but wouldn't it be better for your client's site (and for SEO) to alter the PHP so that the title and meta data description are replaced with variables that can also be dynamic, depending on whichever of the 100 or so pages gets created?

That way, rather than worrying about a robot seeing 100 pages as duplicate content, it could see 100 pages as 100 pages.

Hi Nikki,

Some web servers are case sensitive (ours is) and it can cause problems with "duplicate" pages and even 404 errors for capitalised urls.

The first thing you should do is talk to the people responsible for managing that server and see what they can do to normalise the file structure of your website.

Be careful though that links to any capitalised version still pass through.

I have come to understand  (perhaps incorrectly) that the "nofollow" attribute doesn't actually prevent a crawler from following the link, but merely that it disregards any relationship between the content on the source page and the destination. On this basis, using the "nofollow" attribute wouldn't affect your site on a per-folder basis, only that your internal linking will be affected from a SEO point of view.

To prevent a crawler from indexing a folder or sub-folder requires modifying your robots.txt file (Harald kindly linked to a good article on this) and using "disallow" on a parent folder does affect sub-folders using this method.