Okay yeah I see what you mean. I guess it really comes down to how much of your objectives are based on the local advertising then. If it's a huge portion of your revenue then maybe the separate sites. Although I still wouldn't. I would have assumed the benefits of one site would outweigh the advertising issue, as I would have thought it wouldn't make that much difference, but then I don't know enough about the market and what advertisers might want.
Best posts made by SteveOllington
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RE: Targeting specific Geographic areas. Use 1 large.Com or several smaller country specific TLDs?
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RE: Link Request Email on Site`s Link Pages
Well there is, but you want to only use it for reference as one of the biggest issues with it being successful is how personal it is (so never stick to a generic template). There's tonnes of tips out there, this URL should do the trick
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RE: Isn't unfair that Keyword domain Exactly Match just overpowers every domain and page authority?
lol, worrying at the same time though I think. Of course there's always bound to be other factors unknown... but if CTR and traffic data is indeed playing a much larger part now, the sites already up there will always have a big advantage, and big brands or companies with large marketing budgets will once again trample over the little guy.
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RE: How Important is Placement of Anchor Text
Link placement is pretty much the whole point in block level analysis so it's definitely important. But all I know is that links from within the body content surrounded by relevant text wins against footer, side bar, and links page links. I "think" but could be wrong, the only link worth more is a link from the main nav... but I assume that would only be for internal links anyway?
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RE: Could we have gotten penalized?
It depends when it was too... the Panda/Farmer update affected plenty of websites like that. It looks like ALL of your anchor text is the same which probably wouldn't help matters.
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RE: Best Place for Share Buttons
Just personal preference for me but I like the ones that come out of the side, like the feedback tab on here
See sidereel.com to see what I mean.
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RE: Http://www.springmetrics.com/ vs SEOMOZ.org
Google Analytics can do most of what springmetrics does and none of what the SEOmoz tools do. They're quite different pieces of kit... for SEO, I mean not just measuring but doing, there's no way I'd trade SEOmoz for anything, let alone something that can't do any of the stuff I need it to.
The Q&A alone on here is worth the spend, then you've got the crawl errors, OSE, a whole host of other tools... and that's not to mention the stuff they're working on at the moment to come out soon. You'd be mad to swap out, especially as the two options are miles from "like for like" in terms of what they do.
Spring Metrics = Analytics tools
SEOmoz = SEO tools
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RE: I have a great idea for a contest that will generate links...but how do I promote it when I have little traffic?
That's what Social Media is for Use Digg, StumbleUpon, etc... to promote the contest. As long as it's done well you'll get some traffic and submissions... there's bound to be some well targeted platforms for it too.
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RE: Anyone use and like Brute force Evo 2
It is a little different yes, but it's still something to be avoided as it follows the whole wrong concept of what SEO is.
Imagine this...
There are two people who make kids toys. One wears a white hat, and one wears a black hat.
The white hat guy hand makes lots of stuff but one of them is a beautiful dolls house out of wood, with furniture inside, lots of detail, loads of decorations, etc...
The black hat guy sits on a factory over a conveyor belt just churning out replica plastic, tacky junk.
The black hat guy will sell a few of his junk but soon enough it stops selling on the basis that it's cheap tat.
The white hat guys doll house, along with many other of his creations is picking up in pace... it's value has gone up instead of down. It's attracting attention from media outlets, having photo shoots, and will one day be considered an antique of high value due to it's individual and original craftsmanship. Because the dolls house is so amazing it's attracted attention to his other creations too, people are noticing and buying other things of his now.
The black hat guy is still trying to find his next product that will sell. He's tried a few different ones now but they all work out the same as the last, their low quality just doesn't get them anywhere. He may find another temporary fix but that won't last long and he'll just be searching again and wasting time over more that don't last soon enough.
So there you have it, my little analogy Which guy would you rather be?
Linkvana is not something the white hat guy would use.
A little tip for future reference too, try to avoid typing in all capital letters. I'm sure it was accidental but some people consider it as shouting in forums, etc... so it won't help with getting questions answered
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RE: Tagging URLs Linkbuilding and anchor links
It's fine... Google offers a URL builder tool itself, and of course Google Analytics is where you might use tracking like that... it knows it's just tracking code
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RE: Redirecting One Page of Content on Domain A to Domain B
I suppose it's not really much difference from moving a website from one domain to another, it's just that it's a page instead of a whole site. I've done that before under instruction from clients. I cautioned against it due to the older domain having a bit of trust through age and the new domain being brand new, but thankfully for them their older domain didn't rank that well anyway so it wasn't too much of a loss. I guess it happens any time a company changes its name and therefore its domain for branding purposes. In that sense I suppose it all depends on just how strong the new domain is compared to the older one whether it's a good idea or not.
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RE: I'm aware that spamming tools can lead to ruin..what do you use as a backlink strategy.
Careful EGOL, he doesn't like being slammed like that
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RE: SEO ethical practice in question
Are you sure the site is fully ready and released yet? When we used to build sites for people, we'd host them like that on our own site in a directory just so the client could see the site, etc... up until it was ready to go live, at which point it would have it's own hosting.
If not that, then yeah it's ridiculous and your friend should tell them it needs its own hosting.
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RE: Weird Indexing Question
It will come out of the index once G realises you've told it that both pages are one and the same. So yeah it will come out.
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RE: What will happen after I 301 this domain?
Have you been link building to the practise sites? If not, don't bother with the 301's at all, just put the real site on to the practice domain that is ranking well (if you're okay with the domain name). Exact match domain isn't everything, and in some instances it can be seen as spammy. Exact match bonus is a lot less now than it was anyway.
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RE: Keywords Ranking Secret?
There are backlinks, it's just the OSE hasn't picked the site up yet:
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Recommendation for a company to make a site more mobile friendly?
Hiya,
We have a client who uses us for SEO, and a separate company for web development. They have a fairly large site on a bespoke CMS. They're happy with the site, but the user experience on mobile devices is not right.
Can anybody recommend a company specializing in that area? Preferably a UK company but not essential.
Thanks
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RE: What are the top three CMS providers you suggest?
Joomla, Wordpress, and Drupal. Just don't get a bespoke one made, pick the wrong company to do it and you'll be stuck in an eternal nightmare.
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RE: Should I do something about this duplicate content? If so, what?
I don't know the answer to the actual question but I do know that you should never have the title and h1 match... or have dupe meta descriptions but you already know that
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RE: Recommendation for a company to make a site more mobile friendly?
Thanks Donnie, yeah I contacted Cindy... just didn't know if there was mobile SEO only, instead of Mobile UX. But it sounds like she deals with both.
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RE: Google & Separators
How interesting. Why do you think the underscores bring video results above, making the serps mismatch all the others?
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RE: What will happen after I 301 this domain?
Ah, tricky situation. Well, if no links have been built to any of the domains and one is ranking at no.1 for this particular keyword, then it would lead me to assume that it would be very easy to get to no.1 for it with the other domain once you have a few incoming links for it.
Therefore, it would seem most logical to build some links for the domain you want to use, and do like you said with the 301 until the proper site domain hits no.1
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RE: What is the best way to manage backlinks?
Well I actually don't use Raven anymore (though I would like to) because I was ending up with too many memberships and software subscriptions, etc... and I couldn't afford it. So the choice was clear and simple, SEOmoz membership wins hands down, every time!
The thing Raven does have though is the project management side of things, and the link management... the link management IS the best feature in my opinion... and at the same time, the only thing lacking from SEOmoz tools (it would need to be similar though to the Raven Tools one if they made it though as that was really well put together).
You get tonnes more from SEOmoz than you do Raven... this community for a start! lol
I learnt literally every last thing I know about this stuff from following SEOmoz's stuff. When it comes down to it, knowledge is more important than any tools, and knowledge is what you get from SEOmoz.
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RE: How to work with US Website and UK Website?
You don't want the content to be the same, it's still dupe even if in different countries (even if in different languages from what I've read on here once) and whatever you do... don't have a pop up that asks people to choose a country when the page/portal first loads up. Lot's of sites seem to be doing that now with some CMS plug-in, not realising that it makes it difficult for the site to be crawled (Googlebot can't choose and click, etc...). Maybe have a call to action for people to choose location, but don't force it on page load.
I would keep them on their current servers, if you move one to be hosted with the other it will likely affect the rankings for that countries serps.
Don't forget to 301 EVERYTHING!!! So when you change any addresses with the new page URL's you don't lose link juice, etc...
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RE: What are the top three CMS providers you suggest?
Hmm, so you could be held to ransom for your own site?
I'm not saying for one minute that the company is bad or anything but the problem with this type of thing is never about how much they charge, it's about the level of service... if staff changes or they take on a bigger client, or any number of things that result in you getting low service, what are you ever going to do about it in that situation?
What if the site and CMS used is no good for SEO purposes, what if they don't allow changes and don't allow others to access the source code. What if things go wrong with hosting or anything else to do with the site?
I would just get the whole thing built in an open source CMS by someone and hosted somewhere you have full access to if I were you.
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RE: Why should your title and H1 tag be different?
Righty... in the interests of defending my original position
I've looked around a bit, and granted not all of these are credible sources but again Todd Malicoat is as I'm sure you'll agree. Jill Whalen in one of the below links says she'd prefer them not to match and the others are people of whom I don't know their knowledge or experience, but (and admittedly this is hearsay) one guy says he heard Matt Cutts at PubCon say they should be at least a little different.
One guy (again I don't know how credible he is as a source) said he tested it and found it can be found as more spammy if they're the same.
Anyway, it appears this debate has happened before in other places and there are some good points made, so here's the links
http://www.highrankings.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=41271
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4078221.htm
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=0a4f386adacc7769&hl=en
Over all though, I think we need to know if the test Rand and Todd spoke of ever happened, and if so what the results were.
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RE: I'm seeing that open site explorer seems to do a good job analysing backlinks
The holy grail of all that is analytics: http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/
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RE: Google & Separators
Ahhh of course... that's pretty cool. And the video file/save names possibly do have too. That's a quality experiment, you should expand it and do a YouMoz post!
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RE: Why should your title and H1 tag be different?
Haha, yeah Matt should be a politician
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RE: Outreach Approach
I got a guest post purely from ripping into someone elses in the comments once. Some business guru lady was recommending people "stick to larger companies for SEO... like BT SearchSmart"
Infuriated I went on a rant about how no-one should ever advise such a thing (I hate BT SearchSmart... they're rubbish and they just rip people off), and blah, blah, blah. Then the blog owner emailed me and said I could write a post on what to look out for to avoid getting stung by dodgy SEO companies
So yeah I'm with EGOL about the enthusiasm thing, I was certainly enthusiastic about tearing BT services a new one
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SEO Faith Shaker... help!!
Something has happened which is, well inexplicable to me... I'm stumped!
We have a client that has two sites which compete for the same keywords. One is a .com, the other is a .co.uk. They have different content so there's no dupe worries.
We have, for the past few months been carrying out SEO for the .com site. It's doing great. We don't do anything with the .co.uk site, which, incidentally dropped from 2nd (under the .com) to 9th after Panda for its main keyword.
The owner of the site has switched the .co.uk to Wordpress and now that site, with the same content, same links, same social signals, etc... (nothing was done to it except the platform being changed) has suddenly shot up above the .com for not only its main keyword but most of the others too.
What gives?? It doesn't even have a link from the .com site!
So, the .com which has undergone SEO is now being beaten by the .co.uk which hasn't. The .com is still directly underneath it. It feels like all of the things we know about SEO, all of the ranking factors and everything are being totally undermined here, just due to a change to Wordpress. Surely that can't be it?? The .com is an older domain, has more content, has always done well, has more links and from better places, and all the social stuff surrounding the business is targeted at it.
This isn't a penalization issue or anything like that, this is simply a matter of the .co.uk suddenly blasting above everything for no apparent reason.
Any ideas?? I know that there "might" be a tiny, tiny, tiny advantage of the country TLD but that's not enough to do this, and the .co.uk always did worse before.
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RE: Google & Separators
You probably already know this but there's a FF plugin called Google Global which you can use to search from other places if you wanted to check the differences easily
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RE: Panda Update - Challenge!
We're seeing massive changes in rankings now. Not so much drops but far less in rises, and a few drops. This seems to be happening more recently and not immediately after the update.
We've guesstimated that it is down to the update, despite the delay in effects.
We've come to the conclusion that a lot of the links (both existing links and ones we've been building since) are not holding anywhere near as much weight as they once were. Especially links that were "easier to come by" i.e. blog comments, articles, etc...
Due to the fact that the sites the links were and are on, have been hit themselves it's logical to assume those links are now devalued. Lots of article sites were hit, and "low value" sites. Thankfully not all links were from such sites but some were, which explains the drops I think.
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RE: Dofollow Blog Comments
You'll probably get some complaints by blog owners, and it really doesn't do a lot anymore anyway. Most of the links will be either removed fast, the ones that stay will be on blogs that aren't maintained and are therefore full of thousands of other spammy links for Ugg boots and viagra, and the rest will be on blogs that are both irrelevant and practically worthless in terms of what it will give you.
You could always just find a few decent blogs that are dofollow, give a good response and add the link yourself More likely it will stay that way.
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RE: No-follow tags on links in the footer...do it or don't do it?
It depends... are these links the only direct links to those particular pages? I mean, would you have to go an indirect route through the main menu or something (i.e. via a category)? If they're the only direct ones, keep them. You want the pages linked to from the homepage so they're as shallow as possible to get crawled.
Also, if they are not the only direct links, do the other ones have the appropriate anchor text?
It might be a good idea to keep them for the anchor text alone.
Are there any other links you could get rid of... how many links are there on this page?
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RE: One Keyword Rank Inexplicably Blasted Into Oblivion
It raises a big red flag for black hat link building/spamming.... in other words it looks totally unnatural to the search engines. If you had links grow naturally they would have a range of words such as the domain name, the company name, words like "view site here", etc... as well as variations of keywords that are relevant.
If you've got a high percentage of keyworded anchor text links that are all the same, you didn't get them naturally, you built them trying to rank for that word
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RE: Mozpoints not updating
Weekly or daily limits would be far better I think
Anyone else getting " " showing up over their "cancel" button when they go to post?
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RE: Retail Searching Patterns
There's tonnes of research out there on the purchasing/buying process/cycle.
Here's a good one: http://www.searchengineguide.com/jennifer-laycock/understanding-t.php
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RE: Site problem
You kept the domain name and all the page URL's the same right?
When you say a "better" server, is it hosted in the UK, and is it a shared server? These things can make a bit of a difference.
Did the rankings drop very soon after the change?
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RE: Can backlinks negatively influence your ranking, or worse, cause a penalty?
Dejan's answer on this thread will help you with this question: http://www.seomoz.org/q/any-recent-discoveries-or-observations-on-the-official-line-of-incoming-link-penalization
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RE: SEO Triage - What matters most?
A bit of each if you're limited like that... if you've already got the A grade for the keywords then I'd focus on link building mostly. Maybe an hour on the on-page (as long as your content is right already) and the other seven on links?
You'll still need to do more later though.
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RE: Hello, i need a estimation
Yeah they're just not top level TLD's. I don't think it's a huge no-no as I've got those TLD's to rank before but there's certainly some disadvantage due to the amount of spam sites that use them. If your content is good enough though then it shouldn't matter
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RE: Should I set up a disallow in the robots.txt for catalog search results?
Totally agree with Alan, it can cause circular navigation problems for crawlers too.
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RE: Service Keyword in URL - too much?
I'd check others' opinions too, but mine is option 1 without dupe service keywords for the win... why must every page have that same keyword at the end, are they all landing pages you're optimizing?
Anyway, if option 1 without doing that then it's not spammy as far as I see and do, it's descriptive, allows link architecture to map site architecture... and you've got your keywords in there. Gets my vote, but yeah I'd wait for clarification or disagreement from others on that before taking any action
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RE: Building a link building team
I hope they're good links then. $50 is cheap for a great link, expensive for a worthless one... do they not provide anything so you can see the value of the links?
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RE: Rejected Yahoo! Local Listing Submissions
It's because of abuse of local search. There's a range of possibilities that it could be.
- Your IP submitting too many
- Too many of the same email address or phone number between them
- etc, etc...
Do the agents have actual locations in each of the places? Are you putting in one national phone number and email address or are they getting their own individual ones?
Did they get rejected seemingly randomly or did all the rejections start after a certain point?