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Hi guys, Now I have always been against this, and opted to noindex internal search results pages to stop the waste of link juice, dupe content, and crawl loops... however, I'm in a discussion with somebody who feels there may be a solution, and that the pages could actually be optimized to rank (for different keywords to the landing pages of course). Anybody come across such a thing before? My only solution would be still to noindex and then build static pages with the most popular search results in but that won't suffice in this case. Any recommendations would be much appreciated 🙂 Thanks, Steve 🙂

Title says it all really... if a site has a normal H1 and a bunch of: class="h1">...... tags as well, does this count as more than one H1 tag even though it's not really an H1 tag??

I got to thinking earlier... I know obviously footer links are always going to be the bottom of the barrel but does the rest of block level analysis still mean as much... I mean, everybody went nuts with getting in-content links only so there's a billion and one badly written spammy blogs with useless content on just for the sake of getting in-content links instead of blogroll/sidebar links. I just wonder if maybe due to that, things might have levelled out a bit for link location and we hadn't noticed... or at least there's not been much discussion over it lately. Thoughts anyone?

I mean, like the complete opposite of what Panda is supposed to be doing... We've just had a discussion here and each went through a bunch of examples of sites that have sprung up and are ranking with the worst, spammiest backlink profiles ever, and poor content with little to zero on-page SEO. It's not accross the board by any means, and certainly there is no obvious pattern but there were a fair few examples we just looked at (I best not provide them for ethical reasons). It just "feels" like there's something going on...

I was just thinking, now that YSE is finally about to become no-more, that's likely to mean OSE and Majestic get an influx of people who previously used that mostly... I wonder if there will be numbers enough to clog things up and slow things down? Maybe it just seems like their are millions of us SEO's in giant herds marauding the plains of the web when in-fact there's not that many of us really, and we get a distorted, non-relative view of numbers due to being immersed in it. There's definitely ten times more than there was three years ago... I know some of you old fogies (just kidding) have been going a lot longer than that but the UK had a tiny fraction of agencies offering SEO of what it does now. *I reckon there should be a new question topic added for people like me, called random nonsense or something... I didn't know what to select for this question 😄

Do SEOmoz Pro members get the discount code for the SearchLove videos? I've looked on Pro perks but can't see anything 😞

There is more covered (in terms of checking on-page factors) when using the external report tool than when using the actual campaign one... will the external features be added into the campaign one?

I've recently come across this: A site changes the URL of one internal page to something more search friendly, and 301's the old to the new as you would expect. They don't change the link on the homepage in the navigation. Instead they keep it to the old URL so they go through the 301 to get to the page even though it's internal. They say if they change the URL it will reset the internal flow of link equity to that page. I've not come across this before and so am not sure what to think. I mean I can see what they're saying but I would have though that it being internal would mean it's different and that the flow to internal pages would just kind of resume as-was quite soon afterwards. Any views?

How come there's no reference to link velocity in the Search Ranking Factors, 2011 or prior? We know that we have to continue building links for a client even if they're already doing well, not just because of the competition nipping at their heels but because if we stop they slip down anyway, so we know that stopping link building will often times have an adverse effect... meaning link velocity right? So how come there's no mention of it? Just curious 🙂

I'm looking forward to it and fidgety in apprehension 😄 Can't wait!!

Up until today I was anti PageRank, believing that it was a useless metric which just caused obsession and misplaced working effort... however, as of today I have done a complete u-turn and been shown how it is still useful as a trigger monitor type thing which is awesome. Just wondering what others views were on this?

So now that Google are going to remove 3rd party citations from listings, will they still carry the same weight for local rankings or will this be reduced? If so, how much and when?

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.

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 🙂

I've noticed something in the forums. Many people are asking the wrong types of questions with regards to SEO and having success with their sites on it. This is understandable since many of the questions being asked are by those who have only just got in to SEO. But it does show that the emphasis of the industry must still be very much focused on getting links and changing META data, etc... with little mention out there in all those resources of what actually matters. Thankfully, the questions are answered with people explaining that the wrong questions are being asked, and that it's not just about random traffic gained through rankings for general keywords. Do you think that in time we'll see an evolution of the questions, as awareness grows, moving from questions of how to rank to questions on how work out the best KPIs to measure, and how to action strategies for improving them?

Please forgive my stupidity if there is something obvious here which I have missed (I keep assuming that must be the case), but any advice on this would be much appreciated. We've just acquired a new client. Despite having a site for plenty of time now they did not previously have analytics with their last company (I know, a crime!). They've been with us for about a month now and we've managed to get them some great rankings already. To be fair, the rankings weren't bad before us either. Anyway. They have multiple position one rankings for well searched terms both locally and nationally. One would assume therefore that a lot of their traffic would come from Google right? Not according to their analytics. In fact, very little of it does... instead, 70% of their average 3,000 visits per month comes from just one referring site. A framed version of their site which is through reachlocal, which itself doesn't rank for any of their terms. I don't get it... The URL of the site is: www.namgrass.co.uk (ignore there being a .com too, that's a portal as they cover other countries). The referring site causing me all this confusion is: http://namgrass.rtrk.co.uk/ (see source code at the bottom for the reachlocal thing). Now I know reach local certainly isn't sending them all that traffic, so why does GA say it is... and what is this reachlocal thing anyway?? I mean, I know what reachlocal is, but what gives here with regards to it? Any ideas, please??

I could do with some help if anyone's got a minute. We've got this one client, no matter what we did (and we worked very hard on this site), nothing would really move. You'd get the usual fluctuations, and maybe some very small progress at times. This went on for an age... much, much longer than usual (and it wasn't even that competitive for keywords). Then suddenly, "Bam!" it shot up like a rocket for all it's main keywords and has stayed there since... more or less (and this was over a year ago). It was as if all the work we'd been doing was building up behind a door and then the door flew open so it could take affect. Anyway... it seems to be happening again, just to a different client with a different website (at least I hope that's what's happening or it might just stay non-affected by anything we do forever). We've checked everything. There's no crawling problems, again it's not all that competitive, the site already has some pretty good trust and authority, and it already ranks well for a bunch of stuff. The site and pages have plenty of age behind them too. Any ideas?

I'm assuming it wasn't targeted at just me... I certainly hope not anyway lol: ................................................................................................ RE: sarahudah@yahoo.com Message sent by sarah4u on Yesterday, 04:25 Hello i am sarah udah, i saw your profile to day at (seomoz.org) and became in trested in you,i will also like to know you more and i want you to send an email to my email address so i can give you my picture for you to know whom i am my email address is (sarahudah@yahoo.com) (Remeber the distance or colour does not matter but love matters alot in life) please contact me here sarahudah@yahoo.com .................................................................................................... It appears inbox spam knows no bounds, even on this sacred of grounds 😜

This is probably going to sound a bit strange but I'd like it if I could "opt out" of the 200 MozPoints in a month giving a free months worth of membership. The reason being that I am enjoying using the forum but feel like every time I click on a thumbs up for my stuff to get MozPoints, it's like I'm trying to take advantage of the offer... when in actual fact I have no interest in that. Don't get me wrong, I want MozPoints because I want an SEOmoz t-shirt lol, and maybe one day I'll get to find out what the "something really special" is (I don't want to have one of whatever it is, I just want to know what it is.... the curiosity is killing me!) Anyway, what I'm saying is that I would feel more free to use the forums without having this kind of uncomfortable feeling that it may look like I'm just in it for the points to skimp on cash lol. I use the service, I love the service, and so I am happy to pay for the service... not only that but the forums are part of the benefit of the service, so I'd rather not worry that every comment I make may look like I'm doing it for reasons of greed, rather than reasons of interest. So, can we have a thing where we opt out?

I know this is always a contentious issue and that the official, or shall we say semi-official line is that you can't be penalized for incoming links, as you can't control who links to you (aside of course from link buying, and other stuff that Google feels it can work out). I was wondering if anyone had any recent discoveries or observations on this? Obviously there's the problem that is usually brought up where you could damage a competitor buy link building to them with spammy links, etc... hence the half denial of it being an issue... but has anyone seen or hear anything on it recently, or experienced something relevant?

Okay so I keep on seeing stuff like this, I know it's been going on for ages but it seems to be increasing in intensity. Anyway, thanks to Facebook knowing I click on their ads to do with SEO it shows me pretty much just those ad types now. I'll get to the point. I saw an ad for the "Search Marketing Business Academy", or "SMBA" so I was curious and clicked. There's a chap who professes 12 years experience in internet marketing and has a bunch of companies and blah, blah, blah. Anyway, he's offering himself up as basically an expert of experts, one that can show other search marketers how to make it. www.searchmarketingbusinessacademy.com/ There's a few things that look fishy though. The testimonials have common names and no business names There's no mention of what these companies he runs are There's no work to see in the form of case studies or a portfolio Under "Meet Lee Gilbert" it states that they've been supporting other SEM companies since 2004, yet a quick Google of the company and the name shows little to support this. Googling the chaps name just gets you his own website www.leegilbert.co.uk which professes more of the same and just a bunch of products Of just a few pieces of advice given for how to rank on Google it includes keyword density The chap seems to still place a lot of importance on Page Rank (As in the old PR that we all know means nothing now, and his blog about this is only a month old) From searching, it doesn't seem that there is any history at all, let alone this history of mass success There doesn't appear to be any social presence for the company or the man, except that ad. It seems just like an average SEO (albeit one that's a bit behind on the times) who knows an average amount, trying to say he can tell other SEO's how to master the arts. He's not even a member on SEOmoz, that's the biggest give away haha. So, could I be wrong? Am I being too harsh?

I love it, it's brilliant. You get to peruse through the questions to see real world examples of SEO issues, and help with things you do know the answers to, as well as learn loads from seeing others answers on things you don't know the answers to... I'm getting addicted to coming on here! The instant-ness of it all makes it much better than any other SEO forum out there in my opinion.

All in the title really. One of our clients came up with errors with a server header check, so I pinged them and it times out. The hosting company have told them that it's because they're blocking ICMP requests and this doesn't affect SEO at all... but I know that sometimes pinging posts, etc... can be beneficial so is this correct? Thanks, Steve.

Hiya, I saw that someone asked something similar to this here but I'm wondering if anything has changed. I've found some stuff exclaiming that siloing is a must, and should always be done. But then I've seen that you guys don't really endorse it, or at least in that Q&A you didn't and I can't find anywhere that you give instruction on the best way to do it, except a tiny bit by Richard Baxter here... and usually you do a lot more with everything that is worthwhile. So I guess my question is, where do you stand on it? and if you are for it, will Rand do a tutorial on the best way to go about it, with lots of diagrams and stuff at some point? 😄 Thanks, Steve.