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Thanks. Do you know if it would make more sense to link from every post to its corresponding post? I would love for someone way into PageRank sculpting to comment or at least point out a good methodology for determining the answer somewhat mathematically!

So I have this client who's got a killer blogger blog—tons of inbound links, great content, etc. He wants to move it onto his new website. Correct me if I'm wrong, but there isn't a single way to 301 the darn thing. I can do meta refresh and/or JavaScript redirects, but those won't transfer link juice, right? Is there a best practice here? I've considered truncating each post and adding a followed "continue reading…" link, which would of course link to the full post on the client's new site. It would take a while and I'm wondering if it would be worth it, and/or if there are any better ideas out there. Sock it to me.

Now I am curious where people are sourcing their search volume figures. Google Traffic Estimator or Wordtracker? Do we know which is more accurate? Do people average the two? Is there another source?

BTW just peaked at your site. I love your design for Pinot for the People—so cool!

I've only seen that 2006 AOL dataset, leading me to believe your expectations are ballpark. But he's right—I think a 2.3% conversion rate is standard across the web (varying dramatically), so without considering other factors I would expect 2-3 sales on those figures.

You're Wikipedia's SEO! Dang dude you are good at what you do!

Perfect; thanks!

There's a ton of directories. Has anyone had success with a program that will take your info for a site and submit it to all of them at once? Bonus points if you can vary the anchor text and description.

Paid or free.

And whether there is anything like that, which actually works, I am wondering if there is some relatively authoritative, relatively comprehensive list of non-spammy directories.

Any other directory advice would be awesome!

Thanks!

Just so I can understand the question let me try to rephrase it back to you. You want to know how to prioritize your keyword targets. Specifically you want to know how much _less priority _you should give a given keyword that you are already ranking well for.

If I am understanding your question correctly, then I have to say that I don't have enough information to fully answer it.  I agree with itrogers in that I think you need to factor in the traffic of each of your keyword targets. And I would add that you should factor in the difficulty of each, too. And consider factoring in the commercial intent (on noes, the tool's down!) of each. And if different keywords reflect an interest in different products or services that represent different profit margins for you, that should be taken into consideration. And ideally if you have enough conversion rate data for each keyword, that should be a factor too! And for that matter, if you can figure out how to group related keywords together such that would lend synergy to your on-page SEO, all the better.

But without a clearly defined metric for finding the efficiency of each keyword or keyword cluster (KEI isn't good enough—this is a step in the right direction, though), and without the values for each factor for your keywords, I still want to say something along the lines of "yeah, you want to target a mixture—some keywords that you are already strong in, since an improvement from position 10 to position 1 represents a ginormous (if anyone knows of a better dataset, let us know!) increase in traffic, but you also want to be working on some longer-term keyword targets that might represent more traffic in the long run, but are more difficult and so require some longer-term planning".

Is that helpful at all?

Yes, they are! You need to do it like this:

<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
' Permanent redirection
Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader "Location",  "http://www.example.com/"
Response.End
%>

If you use Response.Redirect instead of Response.Status, it won't return a 301 (permanent redirect) header, it will return a 302 (temporary redirect) header instead.

Other permanent redirect methods are PHP, ColdFusion, Perl, and mod_rewrite. JavaScript and meta tag redirects cannot send a 301 status code.

Hope this helps!

Actually that post is exactly the type of answer I was looking for. Thank you very much!

When you perform a search in Chrome, click through to a result, then hit "back", you get a nice little option to "Block all example.com results" listed next to the result from which you backed out. I am assuming Google collects this information from Chrome users whose settings allow them to? I am assuming this is a spam signal (in aggregate)? Anyone know?

Thanks!

I think you're right; I think I'll split things up. Thanks!

Make sure you are using a server-side 301 redirect and you should be golden!

So anyone out there disagree with the consensus and think it doesn't matter or else is particularly advantageous to be forthcoming with client specifics?

Right, sure. Yeah all of this is helpful.

Dude you are delivering today!

So would you recommend going by entirely different nicknames altogether? I think of SEO nicknames that have stuck in my mind for some reason: Graywolf, Stuntdubl, Copyblogger, Randfish, Yoast, The Oatmeal, NotSleepy, etc.

For that matter, should I go by entirely different pseudonyms and conceal my real name while writing or executing in certain industries?

Thanks Vinnie.

Right, that makes sense.

I read a lot on SEO, but I read way more on another unrelated subject matter (and have way more to say). Should I split my Twitter account into two distinct accounts (one for each subject matter)?

Do you keep a private, personal Twitter for screwing around with your friends and/or getting the word out on social issues pertaining only to your social circle? Or do you just use your professional account for this? Or do you somehow manage to not "waste time" on purely personal social networking?

[UPDATE: To abstract my question a bit: should I cultivate distinctly branded personal nicknames for different spaces that I am interested in? I have gone by "Loudogg" all my life but I am now afraid that as I grow professionally in different unrelated sectors that I will dilute my personal brand by Tweeting (and doing other activities) along too many different subjects as "Loudogg". To complicate matters, I am actually involved in more than 2 fields, and would like to grow in at least 3. Should I develop multiple personalities entirely? It just feels wrong.]

Thanks David; that makes sense. Do you keep an SEO or other company blog? What benefit do you get out of it?

On one hand it seems like having my cake and eating it too: blogging about SEO using my clients as case studies in order to give them a couple backlinks. On the other hand it seems like asking for it from Google or from competitors. Got any advice?

And what of mentioning actual domains and brand names when asking questions here in the forum? One one hand it seems like I'd get more specific advice, on the other hand, once again, it seems like it comes with some amount of risk. Any advice?

Thanks!

I see. Have you considered putting it behind an htpasswd?

I do not think it is still entirely true that sites who sell links will not themselves be penalized (cf. Forbes). On the other hand I recently saw Graywolf joke about how the paid links from this high PR site pass PageRank. I would be curious to know whether anyone out there could demonstrate that paid link penalties for either the linking site or the site being linked to were algorithmic. And if they're not, we should expect them to be sporadic and inconsistent. In which case, if you are trying to be squeaky clean, it seems you should nofollow the links, and it seems that such would necessarily put you at a disadvantage to your competitors who are not. However, some of them, if successful enough, could get hand penalized by Google.

I would consider either excluding the PDFs from the index with your robots.txt in conjunction with resubmitting your sitemap (which you're all over), or placing a text link at the bottom of each PDF pointing back to the HTML version of that page (which, all things being equal, should cause the HTML version of the page to rank instead). I am not sure about serving 404 headers to Google instead of the PDFs that are currently in the index. Why not 301 to the HTML version of each PDF? Obviously that can't be a permanent solution, as you will eventually want to restore the functionality to users, right? But it will tell Googlebot that the content of each PDF is to be found from here on out at the URL containing the HTML version. This is a case where it would be handy to serve one thing to the bots and another to the human viewers, but I am afraid that doing so could get you into trouble.

I am interested in your case though—let us know what, if anything besides the 404s and sitemap resubmittal, you end up trying and what happens with it. I'm also curious to know what other mozzers suggest.

Does bounce rate affect your rankings? Here's an oldie but goodie: http://me-in-seo.blogspot.com/2009/02/does-bounce-rate-affect-sites-google.html

How can you lower your bounce rate: http://searchengineland.com/two-simple-rules-for-fixing-high-bounce-rate-pages-35125

What happened with Google's Panda update? http://www.seomoz.org/blog/googles-farmer-update-analysis-of-winners-vs-losers

Note that Chrome collects direct user feedback on bounces. After you hit "back" from a SERP result it lets you block that site. No doubt doing so signals spam to the algo.

Do you need to control access to the site beyond the SERPS? I would not rely on robots.txt to shield any sensitive data.

For a breakdown of robots.txt and robots meta-tags checkout: http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html and http://www.searchtools.com/robots/robots-meta.html/, and for a great post on using these standards in SEO check out: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/serious-robotstxt-misuse-high-impact-solutions

I am also concerned that you are unable to control your robots.txt! If your CMS doesn't let you do that and overwrites it when you change it manually, you have some major control problems on your hands that you should remedy.

Have you tried PRLeap, PRWeb, and Vocus? I've seen tons of articles get picked up by Google news and displayed at the top of the SERPS without too much work using PRWeb, and Vocus can help you find journalists responsible for syndicating content in all kinds of big name channels. You can also try googling creatively with industry-relevant keywords and advanced search operators to find sites that Google itself currently sees as authoritative, which are also publishing guest articles, then try submitting your articles to them. I would also consider becoming a syndicator of content yourself. Google has guidelines to follow to get yourself recognized as a source for Google news (you have to apply), and it may behoove you to set yourself up to syndicate other people's content (and your own). It would give you tons of control, the opportunity to crowd-source content on your own site, etc.

"Does Google update often?"

Google unrolls minor algo updates roughly every two weeks.

"Is a jump from a PR of 0 to 3 reasonable?"

Maybe this will help you conceptualize what PageRank is and how it behaves: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/

"If my site does go to a PR of 3, will I see a noticeable change in my keyword rankings?"

Since PR is only one value in the overall ranking algo, the answer to this question depends on how strong your other signals of authority and relevance are in comparison to those competing for the same keywords.

Basically www. is just a subdomain that people used to use to host their web-facing content, as domain names were not used for hosting web-facing websites by default. They were used for tons of other junk. Now almost every domain name has web-facing content, and people host it randomly at either the www subdomain or on the root domain. For marketing purposes a lot of people intentionally redirect to the www subdomain because people are used to seeing it.

It makes no difference for SEO, though it is a best practice to redirect either the WWW version or the non-WWW version to the other one, to keep things clean. You can do this with a mod rewrite in your htaccess, and in your Google Webmasters account.