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Lots of times I'll Thumbs Up a question, blog post or response not only if I think it's high quality but if I think I'd like to revisit it in the future. Essentially, I want to use a the SEO Moz Thumbs Up as a bookmark.
Is there any way to see all the SEO Moz content that I have given a "Thumbs Up" to?
I know I can review all the questions I've asked or answered in the "My Q&A" page. Perhaps, I'm just missing a "Thumbs Up" page somewhere on my profile?
SEO Moz only gives out 20 Moz points per month for responding for asking or answering questions or leaving replies. After that I you can still thumbs up your own question, response, etc.
First off, congrats on your success! I think it's smart that you are getting people to pay more for timely responses.
In regards on where to go next with all these unanswered questions I'd be asking myself:
If you don't want to go with a forum solution for unpaid questions (and you feel like the pool of experts question answers you could attract to your site is large enough) consider a question marketplace where other experts get paid to answer questions and you take a cut of each transaction.
If you feel like the population of true experts is relatively small and you don't expect to get competition in the future from a competitor who answers questions for free I'd keep all the unpaid questions online along with your price for answering them within 15 minutes. I'd then make sure I marketed the heck out of myself as a true expect. Under these circumstances I don't think your site would seem spammy for leaving up free questions (and acquiring some SEO benefit from them). If your one of the few true experts online and you are filling a need then people will be willing to pay.
This is an interesting idea.To maximize your SEO benefits I would:
Image links have less value then text links. How much benefit will this stategy really give you is tough to quantify. It depends on how many sites are republishing content from your RSS feed, what the quality of those sites are and how relevant the are to your site's industry.
Having the image link back to a post on your site has the added benefit that if someone reads a post on another site on in their RSS feed and clicks the image they'll be taken to your post. Every additional visit to your site is a chance to capture another new reader.
Images don't have a ton of value.
It's tough to say what happened without knowing exactly what the page looked like before and after the change but I'd be asking myself the following questions:
1. How much did the text on my homepage change? How many words did I used to have on the page? How many words to I have now. Has the keyword density changed? Has the number of links gone up drastically.
2. Have my competitors received new links or changed their pages? This sounds less likely given the fact that you apparently dropped about 20 slots.
Can you simply link to your blog, remove the post excerpts and see if you move back up the SERPs? That would give you a pretty accurate idea if the blog is an issue.
I personally would not start each blog post with the same seo keywords. That may or may not seem fishy to Google but will certainly seem fishy to your blogs readers. I'd focus on writing legitimate content and trying to get links to it.
There's been some of discussion on these forums recently about WordPress tags. The general consensus seems to be stick to Categories and avoid Tags unless you can figure out how to SEO tag pages and how to avoid duplicate content issues with post and category pages. I personally don't think that Tags help or hurt that much with SEO. I'd use Tags and Categories if you can present them in such a way that your blog readers will find them useful. Otherwise avoid them.
Google Analytics can track outbound clicks with using their Event Tracking Mechanism. However, you'd need to add javascript to each HTML tag.
http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55527
I recomment using jQuery to add the javascript.
You can do something like
jQuery('a[href^="http://"]').not('[href*="yourdomain.com"]').each(function(){
jQuery(this).click(function(){
recordOutboundClick(this, 'Outbound Links', thedomainhere);
});});
If you are not technical this Google Analytics add on can help
Sites that work hard at Web Accessibility often reap large SEO benefits.
If you think about it, search engine crawlers have a pretty limited view of any give web page. They can't see the images. They work mostly by indexing text strings and ignoring large components of any web pages presentation.
There's a ton of simple tips for accessibility that help with SEO. For instance, add captions to your images and create navigational components out of HTML lists.
Google's SEO Guide touches on Accessibility
The W3C has Accessibility Guidelines for HTML which is also worth reading.
A quick little tip, whatever SEO plugin you choose, make sure you choose one you like and want to continue to use. If you write a bunch of meta descriptions in one plugin and decide to switch you'll need to figure out how to migrate your existing descriptions or you'll lose them. This is not so much an issue for categories as it is for posts and WordPress ages.
Spiders from search engiines "crawl" the web by following a link from one page to another. Using a rel=nofollow HTML attribute on a link tells the search engine not to follw the link and crawl the page that the link points to.
Search engine rankings by sites like Google are based on the premise that the best content has the most links to it (this is a super over-simplification, I know). "nofollow" links aren't counted by Google when they assign value to the page being linked to.
Most often sites use "nofollow" to block links from user generated content that might be used to manipulate search engines. An example of this might be a blog that nofollows all the links in it's comments so that spammers don't show up and flood the comment section with links to sites they'd like to rank higher in google.
If you decide you absolutely must use tags I recommend creating or buying a wordpress theme that only shows post excerpts on the tag pages. That should help with duplicate content.
Categories in WordPress are better for SEO b/c wordpress stores a description for categories and SEO plugins can grab this descrption and add it to the meta descrption tag in your posts HTML header.
I'm a big believer in blog rolls but not necessarily for SEO. If you've got a blog that provides really good content getting on the blog roll of other bloggers in your niche can really help drive traffic to your site. Readers of blogs still use blog rolls to find other sites they'd like to visit. This is especially true of for blogs that serve a small niche were there are not lots of blogs that can easily be found.
In regards to SEO I think blog rolls would have the effect you'd expect: each link provides a very little benefit. If your blogs title has some keywords in it this effect can be greater. Still it's nice to get links from lots of different domains. Lots of bloggers list blogs alphabetically so in theory there's a benefit to having a new earlier in the alphabet. Other blog rolls show blogs who've most recently published an article first.
You could try harder to get on blog rolls that are listed in the sidebar of each post of a blog vs one that just lists all it's favorite blogs on one page. This would create lots of links from one domain to your site. That said, I'm not the value of this strategy. If I were Google I'd be trying to minimize the incremental benefits of tons of links in the sidebar that point to different domains.
This article might be able to help a little. It does not use SEO Moz campaigns to track keyword performance but does discuss how you can crawl search results from google for a to group keywords and then pair those results with data from Open Site Explorer. You would not necessarily be interested in the second part. Perhaps the spreadsheets discussed in these articles can help?
The first article references the second and third article. The second article talks about how to use spreadsheets to scrape sites (include google SERP). The third article mentions automatically grabbing data once a mont or so. Seems like you could get a solution for what you are looking for with these three articles.
I don't believe it's possible to see historical data for more then one keyword at a time.
You could export current data for your set of keywords with a given label every week or so to csv, combine the data and you'd have historical data going forward. Obviously this is not what you are looking for but could help if there's no better option.
If you are happy with any URLs with query strings not being indexed your robots.txt will work fine.
Do any or your URLs with question marks in them have links to them? If so you might want to be careful blocking google from indexing them. I would think you'd lose the benefits those links would pass to your site.
I don't know if there's a good solution with robots.txt given your URL structure. However, you could use the rel=canonical link tag in the header to force google to treat many of your URLs the same way. This would help you avoid duplicate content penalties.
More on rel=canonical:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=139394
You are very welcome!
Short Answer: If you change your category slugs in WordPress, you will potentially lose links
Long Answer...
WordPress is pretty decent at taking a URL from a request that it doesn't have a match for and trying to match it to a post or category even when the category slug has changed slightly.
Google is also pretty decent at figuring out that your content hasn't changed but has a new home.
That said, I never rely on WordPress + Google to do the right thing in this case. I always end up writing rewrite rules in my .htaccess file that performs a 301 redirect. If people just link to the first page of each category then do
RewriteRule ^category/foo/?$ /category/bar/ [R=permanent, L]
You can see the mod_rewrite documentation for more info.
Of course check the number of inbound links you've received before doing any of this to make sure that it's worth the effort.
This WordPress plugin might work out-of-the-box for you
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/like/
Just download, unzip it and put it in your wordpress plugins folder. Once you've done that login to the wordpress admin area and locate the "plugins" menu on the left side bar. Click on the word "Plugins". You'll be taken to a the "Plugins" dashboard page. Once you are there use the search box in the top right corner to find and activate your plugin.
I know you don't want to deal with PHP but if you have to here's how you'd do it. It's pretty easy.
You'll need to add some markup to the header (i.e. inside the "" tag) of your posts.
The old way was just to just use a "link rel" tag in your header. I believe it still works but is deprecated.
The new way is to use Facebooks open graph tags. See the "og:image" attribute in this document.
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/
Here's an example of the new markup:
property="og:image" content="http://tctechcrunch.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/bb2.jpg"/>
You can test out your new markup using this tool.
Interesting theory! I just checked us on in trends. It says we got whacked too. Still I'm seeing pretty good traffic to our site. I wonder if those graphs are not as bad as they look.
Personally, I would avoid this strategy. If the site selling the dofollow comments is caught by Google then Google could determine that you bought a link and penalize you.
Can you find any sites in your industry that remove the nofollow tag from comment of users who participate a lot on their blog? I'd focus my efforts on such sites.
Not that I'd necessarily recommend this, but you could always report your competitors to Google if they are indeed buying links. Before you do this I'd make sure that you were playing by Google's SEO rules.
If possible you can list pages that have similar URLs on your 404 page. Some CMSs can help you do this. WordPress certainly comes to mind.
Anyone have any thoughts about whether or not I should attempt to reduce the number of links in the sidebar via javascript? I've got 160 navigational links. Should I try to load these in via Javascript? How would Google react to that?
Hey Ryan, thanks for taking a look. nofollowing the comment links is a good idea!
I'm under the assumption the assumption that nofollow links are still hurting my SEO efforts do to how Google passes page rank through links.
Thanks for the tips on looking at other blogs and seeing how they use nofollow. Again, I guess the big guestion is should I be reducing the number of links on my site (including the number of nofollow links).
Can you give a more specific example of "hooks for people to link back to"?
That seems like a pretty practical solution. Some people won't stop by any more but those are the people who are just trying to promote themselves. I wonder if it might actually increase comments b/c now the form will be even shorter and simpler to fill out.
Thanks EGOL. To be clear, we remove most comments with links embedded in the text (unless they are relevant). However the "website" field of the comment form creates a nofollow link to a site if filled in.
I don't want to remove comments. People really do contribute in our comments section. Having comments show people stopping by our blog that we have a nice little community of readers. While there is some abuse we work to remove spammy comments and blacklist domains that continue to spam us.
Hey Domaon,
This happened to me once and I was furious. I would contact the publisher and show them this article.
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/
Basically it explains that the site gains no additional PR to it's other links by nofollowing your links. Who knows maybe they'll chance their stance on nofollowing links to use submitted articles.
That said there are good reasons why a link can have a nofollow attached to it. However, if you contributed an article to an ezine that selectively publishes user submitted content you deserve a "dofollow" link.
I'd like to optimize my blog better for search. The first reccomendation I got from my SEOMoz Pro Campaign Crawl was that I needed to reduce the number of links per page on my site. I have lots of links from navigational items in the sidebar that people do click on. I'd really like to keep some or all of the tags and categories I list. Comments are another issue. Most of our posts get about 10 comments. However, our best posts get 50-100 comments. Those comments create a lot of links.
I was planning on attempting to reduce the number of links using javascript but I guess Google understands javascript now. I may still do this b/c our pages are huge and some progressive rendering would likely help the user experience.
Can you use javascript (ajax or otherwise) to limit the number of links on your page in a way that helps your SEO efforts? Any specific suggestions for reducing links that come from comments and navigational items?
How much will reducing the number of links on a given page help with SEO? Any simple way to estimate or quantify this without diving in?
Thanks in advance!
Be sure to view Rand's recent webinar The Future of Link Building.
You can also try the Juicy LInk Finder tool from SEOMoz though I've had trouble getting it to work recently.
You don't have to create anything to start planning out your URL structure. Lots of times when building something I think about the keywords and then just start laying out the URLs that I think will suport those keywords from a search and overall usability perspective. I'll do this even before I start mocking things up.
From your design you could put all mowers by one company on the same page and then have tabs to separate the content. Implement the tabs in javascript so that they just enhance some good solid HTML lists or divs. That would create one page for each mower brand. Are you hoping to SEO well for "mowers" or "toro mowers"? Perhaps you are already planning on doing this?
In regards to the anchor text, can you just link to "Toro Mowers" and then have people click the tab they want. Othewise perhaps you could do something link "Toro Mowers - Home", "Toro Mowers - Commercial". At least that gets the keywords at the front of the anchor text.
The structure of your site will be important for SEO but start by finding the list of keywords to target. Consider keyword competition and search volume when making the list. Come up with one page for each of those keywords. Then try to come up with an overall URL structure where you can SEO all those pages well. Finally, don't worry about SEO on each and every page you create. You are going to have some pages that add to the overall experience of your site that might not target keywords.
You are smart to think about creating only the pages that you have good content for. I wouldn't force myself to create any other pages.
Could you be more specific? I'd love to see the full URL path before of the categories and sub categories before I weigh in.
I always thought Google's policy towards the Yahoo Directory was strange. However, perhaps it teaches us that if the directory charges for something other then placement (i.e. pay us and we'll expedite adding your listing to our directory) then the paid link is "legitimate".
EGOL is hinting at something I"ll say more explicitly; why don't you split your site design into two phases?
Once the dust settles from Phase 1 and you've seen how Google has responded to you updates, consider whether or not you really want to do Phase 2.
All that said, I have implemented both Phase 1 and Phase 2 at the same time before. I was careful to add lots of 301 redirect rules to my .htaccess files using mod_rewrite. I did not experience any kind of rankings penalty from Google.
Again, great resources, Daniel. The first link provides some empirical evidence that ajax based links do get interpreted. SEOmofo had a nice recommendation that should stop google from indexing your JS if need be. He basically said put your JS in an external file that you disallow in robots.txt.
From your second link
The search appliance only executes scripts embedded inside a document. The search appliance does not support:
document.getElementByIdNot exactly sure what "AJAX execution" means. However, if it means downloading JSON or JS and evaluating it that makes sense. Perhaps not external JS gets executed by google?
The third link discusses the "agreement" you can make with a crawler if you have an ajax based site using hash bang urls. Not super relevant for me but good to know so thanks!
Thanks very much for this. Can't wait to check these resources out.
Hey Daniel,
Would you mind diving into that statement a little more? I didn't realize that Google could execute 90% of javascript. Do you think they will load in external javascript files? Does google make ajax calls?
I only ask the questions b/c I have a web site who's home page that has too many links and too much HTML. I'd love to use javascript to do some progressive rendering and keep some links and additonal HTML out of the initial HTTP response sent back when someone requests a page on our site.
Thanks in advance!
Tait
You could definitely redirect URLs using .htaccess and mod_rewrite. An example rule would be something like
RewriteRule ^q/(.*) /?question=$1
or
RewriteRule ^q/(.*)-(\d+) /?question=$2-$1
See the mod_rewrite documentation or just ask a competent developer about the rules above.
One quick aside: categories in WordPress are easier to SEO then tags. Wordpress collects category descriptions. Plugins like All In One SEO Pack can use this info to write a meta description for you. Wordpress doens't collect descriptions for tags so plugins can' use this info to write out a meta description for your tag pages.
Here's 7 "directories" (using that term pretty loosely) where you could try to get listed.
1. Dmoz
2. Yahoo! Directory
3. GetListed (for businesses)
4. NetworkedBlogs (for blogs)
5. Crunchbase (if you've got a start up)
6. Technorati (for blogs...kind of outdated)
7. Wikipedia Categories (Rand discussed this in the most recent SeoMoz seminar).
There was a really good Whiteboard Friday on this topic.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday
Rand discusses the tradeoff of the approaches you mention above. Be sure to also read the comments. Some commenters mentioned they had really good results using geotargeting in Google Webmaster Tools.
Search engines can't really tell the difference between types of pages.
Do you want your tag pages to rank in search results? If so you could add a description. The All In One SEO plugin I mentioned could help with this. However, as I alluded to before, it's tough to get lots of tag pages to rank well in google. I wouldn't worry too much about adding meta descriptions for them.
Some of those headers might help you serve your page faster. They might save you and your users some bandwidth.
I guess if you think that page load time is super important (most say it's a small factor) then you could argue those are important for SEO but genrally speaking Marcus is right.
I run a wedding blog. A few of our categories rank highly in google. None of our tags do. Of course to Google tags and categories are essentially the same thing.
There are some simple WordPress plugins that allow you to noindex or nofollow your tags if you decide you're worried about duplicate content or want to do some page rank scuplting. I recommend the All In One SEO Pack.