I would say use the content as is (regular text) and work on adding additional content on top of that. Most marketplaces and etailers (including Amazon) use the descriptions provided by the brands. Google understands that. The idea is to provide additional value on top of that content with things like user reviews and additional features that make your site stand out.
Best posts made by TakeshiYoung
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RE: Duplicate Content - What's the best bad idea?
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RE: Site Interlinking - footer and menu - whether to nofollow/remove
Maybe Google sees them as suspicious because they are international sites and also use keyword rich anchor text across hundreds of pages. They stand out more to me than your internal links. It may be worth it to contact them and get the links changed to your brand name.
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RE: Why is GG analytics showing so much (not provided)?
Unfortunately, (not provided) keywords has been a growing trend, and can be expected to grow for the foreseeable future.
One thing you can do to try to get some data out of (not provided) traffic is to look at the landing page, to get a better idea of what kind of term drove the traffic. This is a good resource for getting a better handle on (not provided):
http://econsultancy.com/us/blog/8342-how-to-steal-some-not-provided-data-back-from-google
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RE: Paid Directory Value
I think both directories are overpriced for the value they offer, but it can be worth it if you have the budget. It also depends on what category you are submitting to-- some category pages have higher authority than others.
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RE: Auto generated meta description tag in Drupal
It's really not necessary to auto generate a meta description. They have zero SEO value.
The only thing they are used for is the text that shows up in the search results. If you don't have a meta description set, Google will just pull the text from your site that it thinks it is most relevant. If you want to override that with a custom description, that's fine and can increase CTR, but this is something you would want to do manually, not auto generate it.
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RE: Job Rich Snippets
A page does not have to contain semantic markup to display rich snippets. Semantic markup will help Google determine what your page is about, but if Google can determine what your content is about without semantic markup, it will display rich snippets if they feel it will be useful for searchers.
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RE: Multi-Site Analytics Dashboards?
To answer my oan question here, just came across a cool tool called cyfe that allows you to pull data from multiple GA accounts (as well as other data sources). A very handy tool for just $19/mo - http://www.cyfe.com/
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RE: Backlinks outside my country
Directory links aren't worth very much link value to begin with, so I wouldn't invest much time in them, if any. Links from sites that are in your country are generally the best links to get, but a good link from an international site is still a good link.
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RE: Www vs. non-www differences in crawl errors in Webmaster tools...
Is the non-www version redirecting to www? If not, you should configure your htaccess file so that it redirects. Then you can see if the not found errors persist.
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RE: Pinterest links have been growing in Webmaster Tools
Google Webmaster Tools doesn't distinguish between dofollow and nofollow links, so just because they show up there doesn't mean it's doing anything for your SEO. If you're seeing an increase, it could mean the page authority of your Pinterest page has increased, leading it to get crawled more.
Pinterest switched to nofollow links in March of 2012, then switched back to dofollow links for pins and profiles in July 2013, before switching back to all nofollow links in November 2013.
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RE: PR1 and PR2 backlinks
Link building is a necessary task, as links are still the primary factor that Google looks at when evaluating your site.
I would go for the highest PR links you think you can get. PageRank is logarithmic, which means a PR3 links is roughly 100 times higher on the PR scale than a PR2 link. It can be easier to approach smaller sites when you are just starting out, but if you have the chance at getting a PR5 link, that's worth a lot more than getting a dozen PR2s.
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RE: Is all in one seo getting rid of my google authorship?
Gina is correct. Google does not guarantee that it will display your photo in the SERPs, even if you have the right authorship code. Author snippets are pretty finicky, and can disappear one day then reappear the next.
It looks like the code is set up properly, so just focus on continuing to build up your author profile, and the picture should start showing up again.
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RE: How fast to change non-branded anchor text
I would space it out to one every couple weeks, that way if that change has any sort of negative impact you can isolate the cause and reverse the decision.
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RE: Google Analytics shows most referrers as "Direct" -- What are some better tools?
Interesting. Do you know if Google Analytics is installed properly? Is the code in your header? Are there any javascript errors on your page? Do you have multiple analytics scripts installed?
May be some kind of tracking issue there.
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RE: Do I have to be worried about listing my events on third-party sites with the same content?
I've used various directory sites such as Zvents with no problems. If you can, try to use a different description on the event site than you do on your own site, this will keep your site from running into duplicate content issues, as well as help the content on the event sites get indexed.
Including links is somewhat risky in the post-Penguin world. You should be fine as long as you don't overdo it, but sites like Zvents will syndicate their event listings to dozens of other sites, so you can quickly end up with a bunch of links pointing to your site. If you're worried about Penguin, using the URL as a link is a pretty safe approach. Just don't be spammy about it and go submitting those links to hundreds of sites, they probably don't carry much link value anyway.
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RE: WWW and Without WWW Backlinks
You'll want to add a 301 redirect to your htaccess file redirecting non-www URLs to www. This will pass the link value to www, as well as prevent potential duplicate content issues. Here is the code to use:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://yourdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]
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RE: Is Link Building Pretty Much Irrelevant Now?
I'm sure that's a strategy that can work over time, but it's not one that I would recommend to a client or present as a link building strategy.
Great content attracts links and improve in rankings over time. That's the way the web works. SEO is about accelerating and amplifying that process for maximum results.
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RE: ROI in SEO
The two main KPIs I would report on would be the amount of organic traffic you are bringing in, compared to what the site was doing before you started your SEO efforts, along with organic conversions. If you have conversions set up in Google Analytics, you will be able to see multi-touch attribution, so sales that didn't originate from organic but were influenced by it.
Basically, if traffic and sales are increasing as a direct result of SEO, that should be a pretty clear indicator of ROI.
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RE: What are the best initial things to do for an offsite strategy?
If directories are all you can think of, this list should get your head buzzing with new ideas:
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RE: Best URL format for pagination
Honestly, none of these URL structures is going to have an impact on your rankings, but my preference would be for www.website.com/apples?page=2.
The more important thing is to make sure that you have your canonical tags and rel=next/prev implemented properly.
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RE: Site DA and squeeky clean link building
PR1 is a good minimum, but it really depends on your niche and how much resources you have to do this outreach. If you want to make sure you are only getting links from quality sites, I would do a manual review to see if the site passes the sniff test, and also run a backlink report to make sure they're not doing anything shady.
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RE: Moz Local Form Clarification
I just went through this process. You just leave the day out, like in the example in the documentation:
https://moz.com/local/help/documentation#Hours
So if the business is not open Sat or Sun, you would just put:
2:9:00:AM:5:00:PM,3:9:00:AM:5:00:PM,4:9:00:AM:5:00:PM,5:9:00:AM:5:00:PM,6:9:00:AM:5:00:PM
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RE: Question about links on blogs
Google has devalued sitewide sidebar links over the years, but they shouldn't be hurting your SEO. However, if you want to pass the maximum amount of link value, you'll want to include links from within relevant pieces of content rather than throwing them in your navigation.
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RE: Cross domain canonical, pros, cons, and link popularity?
Canonicals do work cross-domain. We do it with a number of our own sites, and it works exactly like you would expect it to.
http://searchengineland.com/google-supports-cross-domain-canonical-tag-32044
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RE: Changing the relevance of the homepage
It shouldn't affect domain authority, but could impact relevance to the keywords you're currently ranking for.
Here's a question: Do these sweepstakes have to go on the homepage? What percentage of site visitors visit the homepage? Maybe it makes more sense to have a separate landing page for the sweepstakes, with prominent graphical links from the homepage and navigation. Or use a lightbox like you said.
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RE: Same posts on facebook and google+. Is this a problem?
The answer depends on what you're trying to accomplish with the posts. Are you trying to get them to rank in Google? In that case, then publishing the same content twice would be duplicate content, and likely only one of the posts will show up in the search results.
From a social media perspective, if there is a large overlap between your Facebook audience & Google+ audience, then your users may see the same content twice, which most users won't mind but some could find annoying.
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RE: What is the best way to pass link juice?
Definitely don't use nofollow. Using nofollow won't solve the problem of having too many links, and will just end up hurting your site. It is almost never a good idea to use nofollow on internal links.
What you should consider instead is to have navigation that changes in response to what section of the site the user is in. For example, if the user is in the automotive category, it makes sense to have links to tires and oil, but it's not necessary to link to a subcategory for perfume. Having contextual navigation is great from an SEO perspective, and also provides for a better user experience of not overwhelming the user with a hundred choices.
That being said, limiting a site to having 100 links per page is a very old Google recommendation and is not a hard and fast rule. Having a lot of links on a page makes it more difficult for Google to crawl and dilutes the link juice on a page, but is sometimes necessary. Amazon.com, for example, has 300+ per page. How many links Google is willing to crawl is a factor of your site's Pagerank.
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RE: Error in webmaster tools
Do you mean soft 404 errors? If there are no links going to those pages, then you don't have to worry about. If there are links from your site, fix them. If there are links coming from external sites, 301 redirect them to a relevant page.
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RE: Why is this site have a PR 0 rank? Anyone can figure this out? LegionSafety.com
You don't have any links from high authority sites. Focus on getting good links, and your PageRank will go up.
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RE: Same posts on facebook and google+. Is this a problem?
Ok, I don't really see any problems in that instance then. It's nice to provide content every once in a while that's only available on one network or the other though. Don't just always post the same content on both sites.
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RE: How long does it take to get links indexed?
I believe Matt Cutts once said that the backlinks in GWT are updated every 3 months or so. I'm not sure if the frequency has been changed since then. I don't know how often OSE updates.
It's best to keep track of your own backlinks. As long as the page that the link is on has been indexed by Google, then it is likely already being taken into account from the algorithm's perspective.
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RE: Removing sitemaps.xml from the SERPs
Why would you want to remove it from the SERP? There's no harm in it being there, and it's unlikely to outrank your actual pages for your keywords.
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RE: My landing page changed in google's serp. I used to have a product page now I have a pdf?
What kind of optimizing have you been doing? It could be possible that you over-optimized your anchor text for the keyword, causing your landing page to fall out of the SERPs, and Google is displaying the next relevant page on your site, which happens to be a PDF.
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RE: Google manual penalty?
Rankings for individual keywords change all the time, but in my experience drops to specific keywords have usually been the result of link over-optimization (too many links with the same, unnatural anchor text).
Other potential causes: losing links that you used to have, competitors optimizing their pages, any changes you have made to those pages which may impact relevance, changes to your internal linking, or Google updates devaluing previously values links.
There are many reasons why keywords fluctuate. Google controls the SERPs, and your position is not guaranteed even though you may have been there for years. If there are any obvious site errors, fix them, but beyond that you just have to focus on building authoritative links and creating high quality, relevant content.
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RE: Video SiteMap Updating
Google looks at the URLs in sitemaps, not the titles, so if you changed the URL then Google will see it as a new video (multiple videos can have the same title, but URLs are unique to each piece of content).
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RE: Canonical tag problem
The canonical tag looks fine, you can include it anywhere within the section of your page.
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RE: Duplicate content across hundreds of Local sites and they all rank #1
It looks like the sites are just taking the content from their site, and putting it onto other blogs to generate backlinks. It's hard to imagine links from all that duplicate content helping much, but apparently it's working well enough for them. What keywords are they ranking for?
To answer your question, though, you absolutely should not give up on these niches. These sites barely have any PR. You should be able to easily outrank them with a decent site and a few authoritative links.
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RE: How is your social media profile?
Are you asking what social media profiles have an impact on SEO? As far as I know, only Google+ has a direct result on search results. Your company absolutely should have a profile on Google+. Adding Google+ buttons to your site can improve your page's rankings for logged in users if people +1 your content, and Google authorship markup can introduce author snippets in the SERPs which can increase clickthrough rates.
Another great social network for SEO is Tumblr, which is the 5th largest social network in the world, but unlike every other network has dofollow links. It's a great source of social media traffic and backlinks.
Finally, if you are on Pinterest you can get a dofollow link from your main page.
Beyond that, none of the other social networks have a direct impact on SEO, but many of them can have an indirect benefit. Focus on the ones that the majority of your users/potential customers are using.
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RE: When do I use no-follow links to interlink on my own site?
You almost never want to nofollow your own links.
Nofollowing your own links does not result in more link juice being passed around, it just results in link juice "evaporation" where you lose the value that would have been passed to that page without the nofollow. See:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-maybe-changes-how-the-pagerank-algorithm-handles-nofollow
If there is a page on your site you don't want indexed, use noindex,follow in the header instead. That will keep the page from getting indexed while preserving link equity.
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RE: My Alexa ranking dropped after a 301 redirect is that bad?
Alexa rankings are not used in the Google algorithm, and should have no impact on your search rankings. I wouldn't worry about it.
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RE: We haven been hit by penguin 2.0 what to do?
The Penguin updates primarily target sites that have a lot of spammy external links with exact anchor text match.
So if your keyword is "klokken", and a large number of your external links (let's say greater than 40%) use the keyword "klokken" as the anchor text, then Google will think you have an unnatural link profile, and that you're just trying to game the search results.
The only thing to do with Penguin is to remove all the spammy/unnatural links coming to your site. For those links you can't remove, use the disavow tool in Google Webmaster Tools. Then file a reconsideration request, once all the links are removed.
Expect your site not to rank as well even if you recover from the penalty, since you've lost a lot of links. Then it's time to start building links.
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RE: Authorship on wrong page
It's hard to tell exactly what's going on without looking at your site, but the file you want to edit is called single.php. If you add the authorship code there, your snippet should show up for every post in your blog.
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RE: SEO And Images: 2014 Tips
Google Images doesn't send much traffic anymore since it was updated, and the quality of traffic was never that good to begin with. However, if you have a lot of high quality images, using an Image Sitemap can help them get indexed:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/178636?hl=en
Also, in addition to the alt tag, make sure to give your images a descriptive file name, so "panda-eating-shoots.jpg" vs "IMG0001.jpg".
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RE: URL or sitemap submit to search engines?
Your sitemap should be updated whenever you create new pages. That's the point of having a sitemap.
If you're feeling impatient, you can try submitting your new/edited pages via Google Webmaster Tools, but I haven't noticed that having much of an impact. The best way to get new content indexed is to point internal & external links to it.
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RE: DMOZ how long?
The best way to get listed in DMOZ is to become an editor. Start with a minor sub category that is related to your topic, then work your way up the hierarchy by building a track record of good edits.
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RE: How Should I Optimise Feature Images for Google+ Interactive Post Snippets?
You can use OpenGraph markup for images that you want to use as a preview in Google, but don't want displayed on the page:
Just place that code in the header, and the image will show up as one of the options when you share your link on G+.
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RE: Is there a way to control a crawl?
Are you asking about crawls or indexation?
I can't think of any reason why you would want to decrease crawls, but you could probably do so by getting backlinks removed, blocking sections of your site from being crawled through robots.txt or nofollow links, and decreasing the change frequency in your xml sitemaps.
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RE: Image centric site and duplicate content issues
UGC is probably the best way to go, by allowing users to rate images and leave comments. Also, spending some time to add descriptions to images as well as relevant tags can provide more text content that Google will appreciate.
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RE: Site Navigation
My personal preference when it comes to navigation is fewer options than too many. The tendency is to want to put everything in there, "just in case", but most users will not even click on a fraction of those links, and you can end up confusing people with too many options.
I would install a click tracker such as CrazyEgg or ClickTale (or use Google in-page analytics) to figure out which links people are actually using, and then remove the ones people aren't clicking on as much. I'm also a big fan of changing the navigation based on what section of the site you are, so when you're on the homepage the navigation might only display the top level categories, but when you drill down it shows you more categories.
As for SEO impact, there are both pros and cons. On the one hand, you reduce the number of links per page (general recommendation is around 100 links per page), but you will no longer be linking to those sub-sub-categories from your home page. My suggestion, as with any large sitewide change, would be to test it. Test removing the links for a week or two, and see if it has any impact on SEO or user metrics. Then decide whether to keep them or leave them based on actual data.