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The keywords meta tag is not being used by any of the major engines as a ranking signal.

Investing time into that is at first a waste of time, and secondly you are actually providing your competitors with valuable information about the keywords you're targeting. More on the subject in one of my presentations and on my blog.

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View the: official statement by Matt Cutts on this subject.

I'm pretty sure it only applies to anchor text. PR will be evenly split over the links you put on a page (both internal and external), where not even a rel="nofollow" will change the distribution of linkjuice that a link will pass.

"If I duplicate the article that I wrote would I then risk getting a penalty for duplicate content?"

Not likely a penalty, but no benefits either (unless people start linking to the version on your site of course)

"If so, then what is the best way for me to include the article on my site for the benefit of my readers, but not lead to the duplicate content problem?

Would it be better to use a canonical tag? Or to noindex the page?"

Both would work I think, though canonical would be the neater option (assuming it isn't harming you to help the other website).

"If I use the canonical tag, am I helping to make the article on the external blog stronger? Where is I use the noindex tag I am not helping my site nor that article I think, is that right?"

Right and right

"What about the comments that people write on the article on my site?"

I think (this is the toughest one) you're getting the visitors that search for phrases in your comments (Google can't send those visitors to the other site as it doesn't contain the particular phrases) with the cross-domain canonical solution, as with the noindex solution nobody gets these visitors.

Tough one. While I do see the value of having some added text, it also seems very 'engine targeted' rather than 'user targeted'. Is there any value in this for the users? If there isn't, could you try to improve the text so that it is? If the sole purpose of this text is to please the engines, I might consider getting rid of it, otherwise it is a nice sub-fold semi-useful piece of text for both users and engines and I would keep it.

Far, far more than 3kb. Somewhere halfway this blog (http://www.finishjoomla.com/blog/41/does-source-code-ordering-still-matter-for-seo/) you'll find some references to sources on this same issue, they might be helpful for you.

I would suggest to limit the number of keywords targeted per page. Having just one (or just a few) keywords per page allows you to target them better on-page, and you'll have more targeted incoming links (both in terms of relevance and anchor text) as well.

Targeting the same keywords on all pages might result in so called keyword canabalization as well. Read more on that subject here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-solve-keyword-cannibalization

You should change the meta refresh to a real 301 redirect for example using htaccess or PHP.

You can learn more about this topic here: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection

Not sure whether they pass value or not, but a likely reason to do this is to keep track of click-outs. By passing the links through the internal system they can view what links are clicked and how many times.

Aren't these conversation rates a simple representation of the type of user that is using a specific browser? Chrome / Firefox tend to be more tech savvy users, that are probably more likely to convert no matter what your conversion goals are (especially if your primary goal is to sell stuff online).

This one might be a bit outdated, but it contains some great directories: http://www.seomoz.org/directories

If you want to get in contact with them, you can just use the Twitter account or Facebook fan page? What additional benefits does having an email address over having their Facebook and Twitter data? If they wanted you to be able to email them, they would've put their email address or a contact form on their website.

Dr. Pete wrote an excellent blog about this a while ago: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-keywords-do-i-rank-for

You could have a look at the full rapports as generated by the keyword difficulty tool by SEOmoz.

It provides a pretty complete pictures of many of the factors at play (on-page optimization, inlinking data, anchor text distribution, etc.) and might help you to figure out what is causing these lower DA domains to outrank you.

Unfortunately you can't, as Dr. Pete explained in the following blog post: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/6-extreme-canonical-tricks

From now on link to your homepage as http://poolstar.net/ and set a 301 redirect in place from http://poolstar.net/Home_page.php to http://poolstar.net/

Not that it is any of my business, but I would really recommend to have someone redesign your website. It looks rather 1998 at the moment which is most likely costing you new customers and possibly (after Google Panda) is making it harder for you to rank high in the search engines as well.

Tough call.

I think the main point is how well these websites can manage to become unique, useful (and link worthy) on their own. Having to maintain 30 websites, of which neither one really has unique content, is both a burden their developers, editors and finances as it is virtually worthless to visitors.

The ranking for local searches could be handled via a sub folder structure, where each 'branch' has their own sub website such as www.example.org/new-york and www.example.org/orlando which could be optimized for that given city. Having the (future) authority of the main domain behind it, ranking may actually be easier for those sub sites than it is now for the actual separated websites with thin content and (presumably just as thin) link profiles.

Conclusion based on the information available: merge.

There is a great resource on the SEOmoz blog about this. It takes you from 'start' to 'finish' regarding the marketing and optimization of a website: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-noob-guide-to-online-marketing-with-giant-infographic-11928

Especially since Google Panda takes user experience into account when ranking website, investing in a redesign would be a double-edged sword (as it might increase your rankings and/or your conversion rate).

You could use OpenSiteExplorer to see if any of those pages still has incoming links. If so, I'd recommend to redirect those pages to (in order of preference): an updated version of that article, the category page for this article or your main page. This would make sure the least amount of dead links turn up on the internet (and on Google) and the most link value is saved for you in one move.

Given the current state of the Internet (with the shorteners you've mentioned, etc) I would suggest to use English characters so a maximum amount of people can read the URL.

What exactly is an 'external' or 'internal' menu? Every menu that is on your website is internal by definition that it is 'on your website'?

Menus should be fully accessible with Javascript turned off. With that in mind you could add Javascript to make the menu function better for users that have Javascript enabled.

What I can recall from Matt Cutts is that Google is pretty much ignoring all meta tags besides the 'description' one. Given the fact that I've never even heard of this one, I think it is pretty save to assume it is of no value (atleast to search engines).

Coding this yourself (or having it done by your developer) is a pretty simple job. It requires not much more than reading the 'q' parameter from the URL, which in PHP for example can be done by reading the $_GET['q'] variable.

For what purpose do you plan to use this parameter?

This depends on quite some factors, most importantly if this is a local site targeting only the Farsi language or it is an international site written in Farsi?

If this site is local, then having Farsi keywords in your URL (which should be displayed properly in most modern browsers these days if I recall correctly) might boost both your CTR from the SERPs and possibly even your rankings (though I must admit this is just a hunch and I don't have any data to support the ranking hypothesis).

On the other hand if the site is international, I would certainly go for the English URLs. Using them would enable a vastly greater amount of people to be able to actually read and understand the keywords in the URL, causing for example a higher CTR from the SERPs. Even if your site is local, but occasionally has international visitors, I would probably still go for the English characters to help both search engines and human visitors understand the contents of that page better.

It is not absolutely necessary to choose a local server in the UK. However, these servers will serve the content faster to visitors from the UK than servers from (for example) the USA will.

There was quite a good Whiteboard Friday on the subject on international SEO a couple of months ago, you might wanna check it out: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday

Having globally closely related links to your website mainly contributes to local SEO. This applies both to national scale SEO (Dutch inlinks are good to rise faster in the Dutch Google SERPs) and city based SEO (links from pages about a particular city will make you rank faster and better for that given city).

Regarding international SEO ('google.com') I don't think it really makes a difference from which country these links are coming. The quality of these links (in high PageRank, MozRank, TrustRank, etc.) will have a much greater impact on the value it provides to your website.

The actual PR shown in the toolbar is rather useless these days. See for example a blog I wrote on PR.

What is far more important is if the amount of visitors have gone down/up, whether the rankings have gone down/up and most importantly if the conversion rate of the website has gone down/up after the change?

PS: any chance you can change it back so the root domain URL actually loads the root domain?

I'm afraid I can't give you any specific number to aim for. Perhaps there is somebody else with experience on what a truly natural amount of new links is for your type of website (which we don't know yet by the way)?

What you could try to look at: Would (any) of these links have occured if it wasn't for your manual effort? Without your effort, at what rate would this particular domain have acquired links?

For example: if this is a site about one specific type of highly niche screwdrivers, it would be far less likely to attract a significant number of backlinks per day than a tech blog that regularly has big scoops.

Are you referring to incoming links or to outbound links on a page PH292?

Assuming it to be incoming links, there is no magic number. As you said yourself: natural is best, and considering you're worried about too much links too fast I doubt this process will be 'natural'. You could try monitoring the results for your domain on majesticseo.com and see if the increase in links shows a natural curve (when compared to other similar websites in your niche).

If you visit the pages yourself and the website shows the correct (new) title in the title bar and address bar of your browser, Google will find out sooner or later and start using the new titles and URLs. Patience is all it takes!

You can find out your desired meta robots setting by asking yourself two questions:

noindex or index: do you want this particular page to show up as a listing in the Google results for a query? Yes: index, No: noindex.

nofollow or follow: do you want the links on this page to be crawled (followed) by the search engine robots, thereby allowing them access to the deeper pages it links to (even though that particular page might even be noindexed). Yes: follow, No: nofollow

Not even the customization page (http://code.google.com/apis/+1button/) mentions anything about changing the looks of the button.

It does make sense for Google to force this design how from their perspective. This way everybody will connect the looks of this particular button with the +1 service, even though this is indeed unfortunate for end users who want it to blend in with the rest of their design.

You could use enviromental variables (for example in your env.ini or config.ini file) that are set to DEVELOPMENT, STAGING, or LIVE based on the appropriate environments the code finds itself in.

With the exact same code, your website would either be limiting IP addresses (on the development environment) or allow all IP addresses (in the live environment). With this setup you can also set different variables per environment such as the level of detail that is shown in your error reporting, connect to a testing database rather than a live one, etc.

[this was supposed to be a reply, but I accidentely clicked the wrong button. Hitting 'Delete reply' results in an error.]

I'm sure there is, but I'm guessing you don't want any human visitors to go to your development subdomain and view what is being done there as well? I'd suggest you either limit the visitors that have access by IP address (thereby effectively blocking out Google in one move) and/or implement a .htpasswd solution where developers can log in with their credentials to your development area (which blocks out Google as well).

Both are equally good and neither are preferred more or less by the search engines. Just choose which one you like more (for whatever reasons) and redirect the one you don't choose to the one you do.

My personal choice is www as it looks more 'classic', but various reasons could be given for the non-www as well (such as the fact that it creates shorter URLs for example when Tweeting one)

Link directories will probably still matter, some. That value it provides is depending on which directory, how old the link is, the anchor text etc. They haven't matter very much ever though, and after Panda even less.

If you run the URL through SEOmoz' latest toy 'Keyword difficulty' (http://www.seomoz.org/keyword-difficulty) you should get a pretty complete picture of why this page is ranking for that term.

Using the site:-command in Google images works as expected for me (as it shows all the images on the domain I entered). Have you tried it?

Yes, you can track your internal search engine usage with Google Analytics.

Go to 'Analytics Settings > Profile Settings', click the small white 'Edit' link in the gray bar, set up the 'Site Search' fieldset based on your configuration.

After setting this up correctly, in the 'Content' section of GA, you should now see a 'Site Search' link that should take you to the new data.

Assuming the website we're talking about is the same as in your email address, I find the meta robots tag

For the page https:// webshop . acsi . eu / en / checkout / onepage / (spaced to prevent indexation of this post).

Are you sure the right meta tags are in place?

I personally doubt these links (or any links for that matter) are 'decaying'.

Knowing that SEOmoz only crawls a portion (however large, but still a portion) of the pages on the web, these pages that were once showing up containing your links, may simply not be crawled anymore due to being 'not important enough'.

To either strengthen or break the theory above: are these 'decaying' links coming from authorative / strong domains or from weaker domains that could possibly be fallen out of the crawling range of the SEOmoz crawler?

I would suggest to noindex,follow all the pages beyond page 1. This way the paginated pages will not show up as individual results in Google, but still pass on link juice to the items themselves.

This way the only thing you'd have to worry about is whether putting that category description up is helpful on these pages for your visitors, rather than have to worry about the search engines as well (the page won't be indexed anyway).

I was talking about the same concept you're describing when I mentioned category listings. The next / previous and related items sound exactly like the things that I would recommend to get links to the page > 1 items! Lastly, yes the canonical URL should be the page we're actually viewing and not always page 1.

You're welcome! It is a link from one page of your website to another, thus an internal link. I don't see how noindex,follow would change that. Yes, they will receive link juice. Because of the follow in the robots tag the pages (even though they aren't indexed) still pass link juice. Like I said in my original post, it is best to have other pages (such as category listings for example) link to these items as welll though.

"What you describe is ok, no policies are violated."

I strongly disagree on this one. What he describes sounds an awful lot like Google's description of a 'doorway page', which are explicitly against Google Webmaster Guidelines:

"Doorway pages are typically large sets of poor-quality pages where each page is optimized for a specific keyword or phrase. In many cases, doorway pages are written to rank for a particular phrase and then funnel users to a single destination." (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66355)

In light of the above I would advice against the practice your describing. Instead I would optimize (sections) of the main site for such keywords or set up independent (complete and value adding) domains for these keywords you'd like to rank for.

If I understand correctly what you're trying to achieve, then you could use OpenSiteExplorer and click on the tab 'Anchor Text Distribution'.

From what I've read on the internet, it is best to "noindex,follow" all pages >1. This issue had bugged me for quite some time as well, and I've struggled to find good resources explaining why their solution was the best. Now that I've actually given the subject some thought, and finally managed to read some quality material on the matter, it all makes sense.

It's basically a checklist. Do you want search engines to

• index your paginated result pages: yes / no

• reach the items that are listed in your paginated result pages: yes / no

In most cases you don't want your paginated result pages to be indexed. With our without Panda, visitors get little value from actually viewing 'page 7' in your result pages. That actual page provides little or no value to those visitors. However, you DO want those items listed on these paginated pages to be crawled, especially when you don't have any other pages linking to them (which you should by the way). This boils down to:

• Don't nofollow your paginated links (because you want search engine spiders to reach them)

• Put "noindex,follow" in the meta robots tag for all pages >1 (thus page 2 and greater) so the engines will no index these paginated results, but will crawl on to the pages that are behind the listings

Good luck!