Not sure I see the problem, sorry.
has the title "Unique Monkey Business Card Holders" - is that the one you are concerned about?
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Not sure I see the problem, sorry.
has the title "Unique Monkey Business Card Holders" - is that the one you are concerned about?
+1
blog.domain.com is effectively a different site, so you lose out by spreading the love amongst two sites..
I followed the steps I read in some help forums - basically deleting it from one account and then claiming it again. I just had to answer my phone to get a PIN and it all took just a day or two..
http://www.google.com/support/places/bin/search.py?ctx=en:searchbox&query=transfer
I doubt that you have tapped out this avenue. focus on the customer - what else are they interested in? then find blogs for that.
for example; are they interested in ballroom dancing, thirties/forties/fifties themes, cold war, vietnam war, etc, etc. Interview some real customers and find out what they like - then target that niche.
The aim is to find those customers, wherever they are.
In my opinion you are wasting your time with article directories now. They all got hit big time recently, and google are very open about saying it's a waste of your time and money. Stick to using those articles in better ways - guest blogging, adding to your own blog/site, ebook creation, etc.
We saw Matt Cutts yesterday at SXSW and he was very plain about this. Even EzineArticles (the least spammy in my opinion) is almost pointless now.
Don't miss the obvious - title is a conversion tool not just for SEO. This is what makes your customers click on your page in SERPs and on your category pages. You should consider making the titles (and meta descriptions) better at "selling the click" not just from a keyword SEO point-of-view..
I setup a new Google account for each - I tried multiple in one, and was able to transfer them to a new account without any issue. In the end, I thought it was worth separating them just to keep everything tidy. I also added their Google analytics and webmaster tools to the same account.
Jaime, I'm a firm believer that there is no duplicate content problem except on-site - I would simply post the article on your site/blog and give a citation/link to the orignial source. I wouldnt bother but you could just post the first half and link on for the rest.
This is after all what Google News does.
"a lot more sites per visit" - I assume you mean pages per visit?
Don't rely on tricks like splitting the articles up over many short pages to increase your page views. You're only annoying your readers.
Instead focus on creating more and better content! There is no substitute for great topical content to keep visitors on your site!
In addition:
I would rel=canonical all versions of the page to point to one without querystring. You only want one page to be indexed.
I would also (sorry) reconsider your ties with a developer who wants to use inline CSS. That is just dumb...
I don't understand why you want the redirect at all? Why not put the final content on the home page.
Regardless, I don't agree that 302 should be used in this circumstance (no matter what a "google employee" says!) - it's a "temporary redirect" - is this temporary?
IMO, all redirects should be there to fix a specific problem - stop 404's, fix canonical problems, etc.
I would pick hypenated over anything but .com. I would nt even use .net - .org is the only one I would consider for a true non-profit organisation.
I have some hyphenated domains for ecommerce websites, and have found no big problem with them personally. Of course go with non-hyphenated .com's if you can!
The answer is almost always simple: more - and better - links.
Larry, +1 to Mike's advice. Press releases are the way to go with high quality content like this. I recommend PRWeb also. Have facebook and twitter accounts setup and primed before the first of the press releases.
Yes, I believe any http error response is a bad thing and could affect your ranking. Even 404's or 301's (when links on-site or in sitemap cause them) are cause for concern. You want to make your site as squeaky clean as possible.
I regularly use a site crawler to check my site, including sitemap/rss feeds, and fix any non-200 responses.
Linking from articles is still "worthwhile" - obviously don't spend a ton of time on it because it is still an internal link after all..
It's true that the first link to any given URL is the most important one - in other words there is no point in linking twice or more to the same place from a single page. This is a common problem with category pages that use a product image to link to the product first - it should be second (at least in the markup).
Now, to answer your question - yes, add links in the content part of the page (not header/footer/sidebars) to pages that you want to receive some love. Content links are the most powerful. Link from articles to product categories and/or product detail pages.
Do they or you have in-house developers? If so, going the open-source route will give them huge advantages over time when you want to modify the CMS. I wrote my own CMS years ago and I'm still finding things to improve - and many of my competitors with their OOTB CMS cannot keep up with changes.
Send links to the new (ugly) URL. Consistency is critical, all links to the same content must use the same URL. The actual URL is less important; more a "would be nice" rather than a "must have"
Agreed; I haven't read anything yet that the new tags/attributes have any effect at all in SEO terms
Acquiring links at a consistent rate is more sustainable; I've also heard (but cannot personally prove) that you should gradually grow links to make the link growth more natural - i.e. sudden spikes in growth may trigger some adverse reaction from SE's.
Personally, I think there are many natural reasons for spikes too - some event like a product launch, natural disaster or even something like being mentioned on the 10 o'clock news that I wouldnt worry about it.
But scaling up your link building sure makes it easier to build your systems and processes, adding more link building methods over time. You can't come out of the gate and expect to build a million backlinks in a month. At least not ones that will matter.
You should always link to the authorities in your niche anyway in my opinion. That shows google what network you are a part of..
Sounds like you should just pick the way the CMS renders them, upper case. And just redirect any lowercase/mixedcase to that? As I said, it doesnt matter at all which you pick - but everything on your site must match.
1.8mb is HUGE, what on earth is in there? I have a full background complex image for one of my websites - it's 90kb. Even the biggest CSS sprite image I have is just 30kb that includes most of my site template.
I recommend that you revisit this and use a different image format if not jpg/png/gif - for example never use tif or BMP online.
A background this size will really look poor to your first time visitors - this is exactly why Google want to start using speed as a ranking factor.
Are these URL's to categories/folders or product detail pages? Generally you'd expect the trailing slash on folders only, e.g.
/foldera/
/foldera/producta
The sitemap must match the exact URL's used on the site obviously - I would expect a slight penalty if your URL's in sitemap cause a redirect. That would be sloppy.
Having said all this, consistency is key - not necessarily whether there are slashes or not. You must be careful though that whichever someone uses (and they'll link to you both ways) you always redirect to the same style.
If you're looking for truly apache mod_rewrite stories I cannot help, but I have implemented site-wide redirect schemes so that (for example) all URL's are put into Title Case, all folders are redirected to ensure trailing slash, and much more.
It made a big difference and is highly recommended. Our duplicate content (that google wasnt even reporting but that we saw with tools like the IIS SEO toolkit http://www.iis.net/download/seotoolkit) dropped to zero and shortly afterwards our traffic increased as a result of increased keyword ranking almost across the board.
Too many people ignore this.
Agree with everything said above, but will add that https does have small extra overhead, so will make your server work harder and the site slower; very minor but it's there and one reason why most reserve it's use the cart and checkout..
No Edward, it won't hurt anything. Just make sure, as JoelHit said, to only use https or http for any given page. Most people use https for their cart and checkout pages, and http for everywhere else - but the important thing is to be consistent and redirect as necssary.
One minor note - https is slightly slower, so you could argue that would affect SEO since site performance is now being considered by SE's. But this is a minor concern.
Sorry but input buttons are built for this. Why wouldnt you use link buttons and style to match your existing UI?
Links of any kind are not the answer to this at all..
I really wouldnt take it offline - not for two months. Craziness
Make it read-only if possible - or schedule some new content if you can. If you truly want minimum SEO impact, then wait until the new site is out of beta then push live and setup your 301's..
#3 or #4. Think of about.com - getting a link or two from an article on there is great, and makes sense to google. Getting a link from the front page (content area) is a great endorsement too. #1 and #2 are easily discounted by bots and users alike as being lower quality.
General rule of thumb; make your decisons based on the customer, not the bots.
A descriptive domain name is always a good thing if you're telling someone what you do in the elevator. It helps with SEO too, if your keyword is in it. Just don't go spammy - not www.blue-green-red-widget-widgets.com
Or you can go for memorable; flickr.com, etc.
The best of course is when you manage to do both, but given the choice I would always try for my premium keyword.com!
It is a reciprocal link, no matter how you attribute it. nofollow works great to tell bots that the link is not recommended by you - for example on URL's in comments - but if you are trying to increase the influence of the inbound links I think you are selling google short. If I were them I would totally count that as reciprocal.
A better question is, if you are recommending those blogs, why NOT link to them? They are links you control, the fact you link to them tells Google what neighborhood you think you belong to. Not a bad thing.
I completely understand. But this is not good practice. rel=canonical is a band-aid, but I would definately try to 301 to that lowercase url if you can. Seriously.
if you can access the same page using multiple URL's this is BAD - you MUST 301 redirect all requests to a single URL - pick lowercase or whatever, but do not leave it as-is. It only takes one mistake on internal linking or a bad inbound link and you'll get all these indexed..
if any URL's work for upper and lower case, make sure you 301 one to the other. I recommend using lowercase, so redirect all upper or mixed case to all lower case.
oh, and dont forget sitemaps..
I think the question is about conversion too. Everyone wants to find the content they are interested in quickly. Smaller more specific categories do that.
Lumpng content into a flatter structure sounds like it's going to be harder to find the page they want. My 2c.
btw, #2, I still dont understand why sites bother with footer links other than the ubiquitous privacy/terms/contact links which are nofollowed anyway..
No difference if you use either style - BUT make sure you prefix with / or you will find many 404's being reports from pages where you are inside a folder
For example a link to widgets from your home page resolves to domain.com/widgets but that same link from folder /hello resolves to domain.com/hello/widgets...
Obviously the less clicks to your money pages, the better. Assuming an ecommerce site, can you reach all your product pages with 3 clicks? That's always my goal. I have sub-categories only when needed, and in fact just went through a re-write where I replaced some sub-categories with "richer" product pages that asked more questions. In simple terms I replaced /blue-widgets, /red-widgets, /green-widgets with /widgets that asked the customer what color they wanted.
The result was my conversion rate almost doubled - and traffic has increased so google liked something
I would remove footer links - just worthless noise at best, or viewed as spammy at worst..
Write the page for your customers, not google. As much great unique content as you can, including images and video.
Absolutely write a meta description - it's a great sales tool! Your page title and your meta description are shown to everyone looking at the SERPs - think carefully of what you put there.
To all your questions - you did exactly the right thing. I run ASP.NET sites too so totally understand the problem.
I add a noindex to all https pages, FWIW.
Not sure I understand the question, sorry - but I have added the microformat tags to my ecommerce sites (on the product pages obviously) and submitted them all the Merchant Center.
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=146897
To be honest though - I don't know yet if it;s made any difference. I do have significant traffic/sales from Merchant Center (i still call it google base, i cannot stop) and it certainly isnt doing me any harm.
Is the page indexed? That's more important than the length of that little green bar...
You're a star - I couldnt find that either
Ah, the classic unanswerable question.
Many people have asked - and many people have guessed at the answer. There are numerous ways people have approached this "problem" - some nofollow outbound links, some use javascript to hide the links entirely from bots.
I keep coming back to the advice - what would you do if there were no search engines? Building your site to make sense for people is still the advice that google offers.
Personally, I like linking out to relelvant topical sites from my ecommerce sites. I'm not being stingy with links to helpful places. I do however nofollow all my comments - for obvious reasons.
I've read numerous reports that Google effectively ignores (or perhaps not ignore; downgrades) the "site template" - so what appears on every page, e.g. header, footer, sidebar(s) has less effect than links inside the content area.
bear that in mind - a link from your home page content to a category may be more effective.
My 2c - it depends on the category. Some are indexed - and don't be put off by the annual fee. Everyone I know has bought this once, then never renewed and the links remain. So this is effectively (so far) a lifetime buy.
BOTW is a similar but (slightly) better directory IMO - but officially a lifetime purchase.
This is what I'm thinking too, FWIW. Of course, it's hard to remove links from real spammy pages since they are mostly auto-generated
Have you done this yourself and are talking from direct experience or is this just a "feeling"? Not bashing you, just curious because some answers like this are too easy to write what everyone assumes rather than real experiences. I'm very interested in this question too - I have a similar situation.