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Hi,

If you want fast indexation, your best bet is to promote it via Google+, as Google obviously has direct access to that database.

Facebook and Twitter certainly doesn't hurt, but Google+ is usually faster.

Yes, Google rolled out this update globally (which is rare for them to do. I think this is the first time they have done it on a big algo update, but I might be wrong on this one).

Source: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/04/another-step-to-reward-high-quality.html

Hi Lisa,

The only site I work with that runs on Wordpress is my personal blog, http://thogenhaven.com. So I don't need a lot of schema data on it. This being said, WP About Author, does a pretty good rel=author job.

I have also played around with GD star rating, which is good for product stars.

What are you using?

Hi Steve,

Avinash' Web Analytics 2.0 is by far the best place to start IMO: http://www.amazon.com/Web-Analytics-2-0-Accountability-Centricity/dp/0470529393

Two honorable mentions go to Bryan Eisenberg's A/B Testing http://www.amazon.com/Always-Be-Testing-Complete-Optimizer/dp/0470290633/ref=pd_sim_b_7 and Brian Clifton's Advanced Web Analytics: http://www.amazon.com/Advanced-Metrics-Google-Analytics-Edition/dp/0470562315/ref=pd_sim_b_5

Overseas as in Europe? I have worked with Distilled (www.distilled.net) on several occasions, and can vouch for them. But there are many good SEO companies. Luckily, SEOmoz did the work and compiled a good resource of good SEO companies: http://www.seomoz.org/article/recommended

Breadcrumbs are usually integrated in the site template. You can also add links in product descriptions when relevant. But you might want to A/B test it, to make sure it doesn't hurt your conversion rate.

If you use Wordpress, you can use this breadcrumb plugin by Yoast: http://yoast.com/wordpress/breadcrumbs/

Hi Greg,

Google usually discover pages via links. So if a page does not have any links, it is hard for Google to discover. This being said, you can try submitting XML sitemaps with the pages to Google, and they might crawl and index them.

However, if a page does not receive any links from your own site, it does signal that you do not consider the page to be particularly good/important, making it quite unlikely that it will rank well.

Hope this helps.

Hi Bill,

I have the same experiences as you. I have tried it for a couple Fan pages to build critical mass. But these pages have had a harder time getting started than pages where I didn't do it.

Thomas

Yes, it seems like Google has penalized a bunch of sites with unnatural link profiles.

Patrick Altoft has written a good post on it yesterday: http://www.branded3.com/seo/the-new-google-link-algorithm/

And both Alan and SEOclient12 are right: Do not send reconsideration request before cleaning up.

Best of luck.

Thomas

I think you need to invest time in implementing schema data eventually. When the SERPs you compete in start being filled up with rich snippets, you will have a hard time getting clicks without them.

Some blog posts report a 30 % higher CTR after marking up their snippets with schema / RDF. See for example: http://searchengineland.com/how-to-get-a-30-increase-in-ctr-with-structured-markup-105830

This being said, I really doubt the validity of such posts. It is very hard to measure, and before/after experiments are almost always flawed.

Using social media competitions to increase search demand for certain queries is very effective.

Full disclosure: I am a bit biased on this one.

If you are located in the US, you should go for MozCon. The primary reason is that the format at MozCon is presentations instead of panels. This gives the presenters a opportunity for greater depth, which I really appreciate.

If you are based in Europe, you might want to check out Distilled's SEO conference in London in the fall.

But it's a matter of taste - some people prefer panels over presentations. If you do this, SMX is worth attending.

I would not recommend SES (I have only been to one, but that was sub par to SEOmoz/Distilled/SMX conferences).

As long as there is plenty of unique content on each page, adding some redundant content is not a problem. Especially not if it will improve the experience for the users, thereby improving click behavior.

Yes I believe so. When you do a .htaccess redirect with the code pasted below, it should do both canonicalisations

RewriteEngine on 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^petra.at [NC] 
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.petra.at/$1 [L,R=301]

Oh by the way - there is a similar question here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/link-building-companies-for-super-hard-niches. You might want to try some of the companies.

Well the guide is still very good. However, one might add some sharing buttons for Twitter/Facebook, as these seem to be important rankingfactors nowadays.

The Rel canonical tag is always a good thing to implement. My preferred solution is to do a .htaccess 301 redirect from non-www to www by this code:

RewriteEngine on 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.com [NC] 
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

By doing the 301, all users are sent to www url. This means all future links to your site will be to the same URL. Hereby, you avoid the small link juice loss which occurs whenever you use the rel cnonical url to direct from non-www to www (or the other way around).

my experiences are that sitelinks only show up on queries where your site is very authoritative.

Obviously this means that sitelinks are query specific, but also that the only way to get them is to keep building authority - links.

I think Rand usually makes a very good point about non-pretty URLs: That there are some lost 2nd order benefits, because people find it hard to share them / link to them.

There is a great URL rewrite guide here that should help you edit the URLs easily: http://corz.org/serv/tricks/htaccess2.php

That blackhat is a really poor long term strategy