Welcome to the Q&A Forum

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

Hi there

There won't be any first order SEO difference. But there are some second order benefits to the hyphened URLs. As they are more readable by humans, they tend to be clicked more often in SERPs and gain more natural links.

Best,

Thomas

In my experience, there are two ways to pull off the B2B badges tactic:

1. For B2B badges to work with big brands, you probably need to be some sort of industry leader being able to give out awards that actually mean something.

2. If you are not an industry leader, you can give awards/badges to those companies not receiving a whole lot of attention usually. They tend to be used a lot.

The best example I can think of is Google's AdWords / Analytics certifications used by quite a lot of SEM agencies.

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.

I agree with Robert. The ranking difference between .com / .net and no-hyphen / one-hyphen is going to be minimal. So go for the domain that is easier to read. That will probably benefit you in the long run.

I don't attribute too much value to page-rank sculpting. It's based on such a flawed understanding of SEO - that SEO is about sending PageRank to a few but important pages that will then rank. Good SEO is about making the website easy accessible for users and crawlers. And internal linking is great for this.

Internal linking is a great way of doing SEO, whenever it's done with a user perspective in mind. I'd be thrilled to work with internal linking on news websites, as it is possible to do so much relevant inter linking.

So I guess my advice would be, that all links should be based on relevancy, not PageRank sculpting. That does NOT mean, however, that you cannot optimize the anchor text on the links, or place them strategically (e.g. links to most important pages in the top of the page; lower priority in the bottom).

I do that too! Only little problem with that is it often creates some significant bumps in link acquisition rates.

Here is a Facebook question: I would like to hide some content behind a Facebook wall - i.e. only make it visible to users who press the like button.

Something like the New Yorker did with a Jonathan Franzen story.

My question is: how do I do that?

Thanks!

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

Interesting question. I have tried several top SEO companies for link building. And none of them have really delivered anything. As Tom Critchlow usually says, the problem is "you can't outsource giving a shit."

What usually happens is this:

• You pay premium for a reputable SEO company

• They pass you on to a junior level SEO to do the link building

• They send a monthly report with all sort of on site metrics and keyword tracking you probably don't need

• They send a list of links- Turns out that the links are sidebar links from irrelevant websites (or worse) with way optimized anchor text.

Sorry about being so pessimistic on this one. But after trying multiple reputable companies, I have given up on outsourcing link building. The risk of receiving low-value-for-money or a penalty is too high for me.

One more thing: building a community and optimizing their contributions. That is the very future of SEO in my opinion.

It is very hard to us them as absolute numbers, but they are great to show clients in competitive analyses.

Knowing their website has DA 71 might not say a lot. But if their nemesis have DA 73 they are going to be willing to spend ressourcing on link building.

Hi there

I don't really see any usability nor seo reasons for using English keywords in your folders. Why not just translate it all into German? That is, in my opinion, the best long term strategy.

You are probably considering keeping the folders in English because it is easier. But it is a thing you'd probably want to change eventually. So although it is a hassle, you can aswell get it done

Hi Greg,

In my experiences, direct outreach is better long term strategy than guest blogging sites. Not even do you get access to better blogs, you get a network of people who'll help promote you on social media.

It does take some months to build outreach this way, but totally worth it.

LinkedIn groups seems like a very good idea too!

Thomas

Hi there,

I am afraid there is no way of not working with a script, when using rel=canonical. Either you have to develop a script that generates the canonical URL by itself, or you have to insert the meta tag with the right URL manually.

I would strongly discourage NOT spending any time on rel canonical, as it can mess you up site's rankings completely. Read this post by Dr. Pete if you need to convince yourself to spend some our doing the proper development: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/catastrophic-canonicalization

Best,

Thomas

Hi Stevene,

OpenSiteExplorer - which is powered by Linkscape - is only updated around once a month. So there is some delay between getting links and these links being crawled by SEOmoz.

Furthermore, SEOmoz does not cral the web as deep as Google. Low quality pages (and good pages with very few good links) are not necessarily going to show up in OpenSiteExplorer.

You can see the update calender here: http://apiwiki.seomoz.org/w/page/25141119/Linkscape Schedule

Well. It's a lot of work and entails some risk to redirect many files. That being said, I have redirected thousands of URLs over the last couple of years and have yet to see it fail.

While it is a lot of work to change many URLs, I really appreciate consistency on a website, and prefer all URLs to follow the same structure. So I would probably redirect all the URLs.

I suppose you are working with the Bruel & Kjær website - and I can see there are several types of URLs now - no hyphens and with space as a separator. Adding yet another type of URLs will be at least somewhat confusing.

Needless to say - gaining Twitter through sincere outreach and good content is the right way to do it.

This being said, it can be a bit hard to get started on twitter. One tool that lets you buy "real followers" is Twiends.

It's a points based platform. You can either earn points by following other people or buy the points if you don't want to.

Hope it works for you!

Best,

Thomas

Yes, the name of the sitelinks are most often (or maybe always!?) based on anchor text, so go hunt for Anchor Text to find the error.

You can generate a list of links to the url (internal and external) from GWT or Open Site Explorer.

The simple way to do it is to 301 redirect it from blog.activenewswebsite.com to activenewswebsite.com/blog. Whenyou use a 301 redirect, the users will not notice anything and their commenting behavior shouldn't be affected by it.

I'll go with this post by Rand: White Hat SEO: It F@$#ing Works

I guess the NYTimes article gives Googl a pretty good reason for the -50 filter:

"Someone paid to have thousands of links placed on hundreds of sites scattered around the Web, all of which lead directly to JCPenney.com."

Seems like they did the majority of their link building over a year ago - http://www.majesticseo.com/reports/compare-domain-backlink-history?d0=JCPenney.com&type=0

And btw, congrats SEOmoz for getting OSE mentioned in the NYtimes article

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.

To be honest, I only read SEOmoz regularly. Besides that, my reading effort is spread out wide and primarily influenced by twitter. So instead of following blogs, I prefer following Twitter people - especially those who don't just link to their own blog. My top 3 there would be:

@crazyegg

@KISSinsights

@dr_pete

Ooops I meant plugin - Wordpress Plugin

@SEOmoz - maybe an edit feature would come in handy - the same as available in the blog comments!?

The website is not severely penalized as it still ranks for its domain name - http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&biw=1239&bih=869&q=discoverhookah&aq=f&aqi=g-s1g-v1g-sv4&aql=&oq=

It wouldn't do that, if it had a filter penalty or was deindexed.

The home page doesn't have any text on it besides text link. The sub pages are super poorly optimized. So no, I don't think it has a penalty. It just needs some SEO love.

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

As Goodnewscowboy says, it is a matter of taste between rel canonical and 301.

My personal preference is to gather everything on the same domain (move the back end) and then do 301. Then all links point to the same domain and users (and staff!) are not confused about too many options.

I wouldn't worry about adding the links and logos. I'd be happy to link to all my customers (do follow links) to show my appreciation.

Hi Rick,

I just needed the same kind of data for a book I wrote, so I know a few resources that can help you, although I'm a bit uncertain if they meet all your needs.

http://royal.pingdom.com/2011/01/12/internet-2010-in-numbers/

http://www.seomoz.org/dp/free-charts

http://www.slideshare.net/randfish (update - forgot this one - Rand usually has tona of data in his slidedecks, so if you bother clicking a lot, I'm sure you can find interesting stuff in these ones too)

Hope they can help you a little.

Best,

Thomas

Hah yes I noticed the same.

Ah okay - well I think the second order benefits are quite substantial. Even savvy web users get confuse when facing a URl with blanks in it. They look different and ugly when you paste them. So I would definitely make it a priority to get them changed to something prettier

Hi Gareth,

From my experience, it doesn't really matter that much. The second one looks slightly less spammy, which might work for your advantage in terms of interacting with users.

Also, you might want to look at the SERP before developing the domain. if there are already similar exact match domains ranking on the keyword, it's harder to get a top ranking.

Best,

Thomas

I am going to throw in a single purpose site: http://kimjongillookingatthings.tumblr.com/ .

I don't think it's intended as link bait by any mean, but it has almost 250.000 FB likes and 827 LRD. It even ranks number 5 for Kim Jong Ill in Google and number 8 in Bing.

I am about to start some research on software for experimental design on websites. So I'd really like to know which A/B test software do you prefer? Howcome?

+1 for Rackspace. Very good uptime + super quick and dedicated support.

Happy to help. I think the problem might be, that it looks too much as a lead gen site, and too little as a site with great content / serious services.

3 layers isnt too bad.As long as you have decent domain authority, indexation should be okay.

Just make sure you that all category pages are structured nicely, and link to the pages in the subcategory.

Hi Bill,

I am sorry if this sounds a bit harsh - but I would not like to give any information to your website. Although the design is simple, it looks kinda spammy to me. It looks like a site that wants my email address and then sell it to other.

Good CRO starts with data collection. What I'd do if I was you is to ask a bunch of Amazon mTurkers some questions about your site. A good list of questions is the one Google uses - you can find it here.

Also, a small thing is the moving fav.ico - would definitely find a new, static one.

So the short answer to your question: invest in better design. But do it on the background of data.

Best,

Thomas

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 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