Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi,

We're currently reviewing one of our clients backlinks in Google Webmaster Tools, Majestic & OSE as we can see many toxic links. However we cannot find the links on the webpages that are listed on Google WMT. We have searched through the website along with checking through the source code.

Should we still disavow the domain?

Thanks,

Edd

Hi everyone,

The quick answers box can be really helpful for searchers by pulling through content which answers their question or provides a clear description of an item or entity.

Our client appeared in the quick answer box for a period of time with their description of a product, but have since been replaced by one of their competitors. Previously, the answer was provided by Wikipedia.

Is there anything we can do to help get our client's content back in there? We've been looking at possible structured data we can use but haven't found anything. Also suggesting our client ensures they have a paragraph within their copy which is a clear, concise description of the product that Google can pull. Can anyone give any suggestions?

Thanks

Laura

Hi

We're running a Magento store which doesn't have too much stock rotation. We've implemented a plugin that will allow us to give products custom canonical URLs (basically including the category slug, which is not possible through vanilla Magento).

The sitemap feature doesn't pick up on these URLs, so we're submitting URLs to Google that are available and will serve content, but actually point to a longer URL via a canonical meta tag.

• The content is available at each URL and is near identical (all apart from the breadcrumbs)
• All instances of the page point to the same canonical URL
• We are using the longer URL in our internal architecture/link building to show this preference

My questions are;

• Will this harm our visibility?
• Aside from editing the sitemap, are there any other signals we could give Google?

Thanks

I'm surprised that they're not keen to link through - you're a reputable brand, and I'm sure they're making the same margin on the sales anyway.

Anyway, good luck!

PS. Links from here are followed! http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en_uk/chrome/devices/

Aaron

Thanks for the response Andy

I guess it's easier for an agency to create these back links from a handy link on how to check snippets than it is for an ecomms site. If I get round to trying, and can even get some vague idea whether it's worked or not, I'll let you know! Shame nobody else has anything to contribute so far!

Ou of interest, which 'stockist pages' were you referring to?

Thanks

Aaron

Hi guys

I've just seen a website get a link from Google's Webmaster Snippet testing tool. Basically, they've linked to a results page for their own website test. Here's an example of what this would look like for a result on my website.

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.impression.co.uk

There's a meta nofollow, but I just wondered what everyone's take is on Trust, etc, passing down?

(Don't worry, I'm not encouraging people to go out spamming links to results pages!)

Looking forward to some interesting responses!

Without mentioning names, we're noticing a shift in many of our clients ranking pages.

Previously many of them held page 1 positions with their home page. We've been building brand only anchor text to these pages for some time now and there's a noticeable change in visibility to the domain as a whole displayed in GWT and there's an uplift in organic traffic too.

It just happens that some of our clients already had pages in the root directory that were very optimised for the clients' head terms, but all of a sudden, these sub pages with very few inbound links have started ranking in the place of the home pages. I've attached a screenshot of the landing page organic traffic. The pages in question have been there for at least 8-10 months.

These inner pages would not normally have been able to hold their ground in this position and I'm concerned that this is a temporary change. I can see this going one of two ways; (i) home page beings to out rank sub page as before, (i) sub page loses ranking ability and home page rank does not come back.

My questions to the community are therefore;

• **Has anyone else noticed this shift in ranking behaviour? **
• What are everyone's thoughts on this? - Will it remain this way?

From this query I can easily ask another wider question;

Good advice across the internet says we should be building strong brand links and citations to our clients' domains. Typically brand links go to the homepage, which should provide the homepage and (to a lesser extent the domain) with a ranking/traffic/visibility uplift. However, as I'm noticing other pages now picking up ranking boosts as a result of this;

• **Should we still be trying to gain links to these more commercial landing pages? **
• How are others building high quality links to pages full of commercial copy?

I hope this can spark a little bit of a debate. I look forward to hearing everyone's thoughts.

Thanks

yPOEjVA.png

Moz.com mods - do we have a new URL since the domain change? I can't seem to find the URL anywhere

Hi Mozzers,

I've been looking around online for some pricing for Zemanta, but have drawn a blank. It's a service that's been recommended by Rand in the past, and there are loads of users out there on the service.

I know they will provide a price over the phone but right now I can't call them as a third party have us signed up already.

Any help would be appreciated!

Thanks

Have you checked these links? Are they still there?

Hi guys,

We're trying to get Rich Snippets for videos on our pages. I feel comfortable-ish with getting this set up, but I have a few questions. I was wondering whether anyone had any experience with this?

1. Is there any additional markup to the <video>tag to get rich snippets</video>
2. How do you handle multiple qualities - i.e. HD?
3. Does the ogg and mp4 file need to be included?

Any help/links to articles would be really helpful.

Thanks!

Hi guys,

Just an open discussion. I don't want to be told to use directories or just 'guest blog'.. What is the best method you are currently using? A lot of my competitors are using older techniques for quick wins but we're wary to do that due to the long term consequences...

Thanks

Thanks for the PM, I can now appreciate the problem a little more.

I think it's something that you should not rush. What you've done seems the best thing you can do for now.

Longer term, I'd look at your CMS options!

Thanks, I developed it myself

This is as much a business decision as it is an SEO one.

I would personally continue only with one generic domain, such as propertyanywhere or worldwideproperty, then direct any of the other domains to the country landing pages as you suggested.

From then onwards, focus all of your time on the one domain, as you'll have better chances of ranking with a single authoritative domain rather than 4 or 5 weak ones.

This question is really site specific. I've recently had to deal with a similar issue after our new website was put live a little ahead of when we would have liked it to be.

There might be a few things you can do:

Robots txt disallow all archive pages,

De-duplicate any duplicate content on pages (SEOMoz will tell you which ones)

Check the image below, with some hard work it is possible to get the errors down to 0!

WM6kA.png

Hmm, this sounds very strange.

If removing the places page will fix your problem temporarily then perhaps this is something to do then, but continue to look online to see whether there are any other things you can do to get those listings back!

If you could put a conditional meta tag in to the source code, that will show the nofollow tag if the URL contains more than 3 GET elements, then that might help?

You seem to have already thought hard about your options, and they sound ok. Let's just wait to see whether any Gurus are about to shout stop!

If I were you I'd keep the same URL structure. You're correct in thinking this won't be a quick fix.

First, use the robots.txt to disallow robots access to the search pages.

Don't remove all results just yet from GWT, this will be a long task and might damage your sites performance.

Could you provide some links to your site? I'll have a closer look.

Thank you, it's only been up a month or so and we're noticing a lot higher conversion rate and stickiness.

We've got a news article each day (coming soon), so I can't provide feedback just yet, but they seem alright, and have some big clients on board.

For the £200/day we got a lot of value for money, it wasn't just online copy

Technically, yes, removing the Google Page will remove the results, but I'd think twice before doing it personally.

Have you checked all of your on page content to make sure your page is fully optimised for your location? I've found that our Google Places listing compliments ours, but yes the places listings get a lower click through rate.

There is an amazing list here: http://www.seoresearcher.com/articles-directories-list-alexa-rating-ordered.htm

Also check out: http://www.seomoz.org/directories

That said, these article sites will only go so far towards helping your link building efforts. I wouldn't submit more than a couple of articles to each (all unique, too), as it will pass some Authority and increase your unique number of linking root domains.

Once you've exhausted that list to a good degree, try guest posting on other blogs if you have spare content!

What keyword was that for? Has anything changed with your site architecture? New website? Are the pages still followed (nofollow, noindex, etc) A little more information will allow me to help you more

Is Google indexing all of the news pages individually. If they are all indexed, then what we can do is make it so that the individual page is more relevant than the news archive page. I'd suggest removing the h2 tag from around the news title, and replacing it with another inline element such a span. This would make the index page less relevant for your title term. Then make sure your individual news article headline is a h1 to make that the most relevant. Other than that, I'd just go through all of the on page optimisation check lists on SEOMoz and make sure everything is in order. Ultimately you can't choose what Google will show for you, but you can influence it. I'll have a look at your site when I'm on my computer to see whether I can suggest some more changes for you

You migh have a little room in that title tag to get another phrase in there. Title tags are up to 70 characters long

There's no harm in getting the yahoo link if it's within your budget. It's certainly not a bad link to have! If its within budget, then it's something you should do! Edit: I should also add that yes, it will increase your number of unique c blocks, unique number of linking root domains, and it will add something to your overall link profile and DA, whether or not it becomes immediately noticeable though I cannot say.

Soobum, If I were you I'd go after the search term with the highest traffic volume. Check google Adwords keyword tool to see which is higher. From your description of autocomplete, I would suggest you go after the plural. You won't lose too many positions in the serps for the non plural version, but you should see more traffic coming from the plural keyword. Try changing your title tag and h1 to reflect this, if it's something you want to go ahead with!

Claudio, What is your annual link building budget? From your concerns I would assume that Yahoo shouldn't be a priority of yours right now. Guest ousting on blogs should be your main focus, and then, once $300 is a smaller portion of your link budget, it may be worth adding it for completeness in the long run.

There was a post on the blog really recently about this if I recall correctly. Although some people say that through embedding a single video from YouTube onto a relevant high PA page will do the trick, the best method is to host your own videos on your website. A quick search online for HTML5 video hosting (with flash fallback) should be your answer! With doing so, you will makes up your content so that Google knows the content is of the type 'video' and will display as such.

Don't worry too much about including the specfic phrase match "home insurance" link. Get reviews of your service, and generic information attributes to "your comany" [link], and just make sure your page is about home insurance.

A few links like the above will help, but if all of them look like that then you're going to see some negative impacts.

We are about to sign up for a London based company called content plus. We have previously paid £200+/day to outsource a copywriter.

Hope this helps!

Hi guys,

I've noticed in my crawl reports that some URL's seem to have inline Javascript in them... The JS doesn't work, but it does cause the link to 404.

I'm not sure where the links have come from - it's only affecting really old blog posts made before my time here.

I'm contemplating deleting them...

Here's an example:

| http://www.evoenergy.co.uk/blog/author/aaron/page/76/ window.open('http%3A/www.lime.com/redirect/pubs.acs.org/'); void(0) |

Any help would be appreciated!

Thanks

Generally in the UK the industry average is 12% of monthly Adwords spend.

Thank you Ian,

What do you think about the exact match domain, just leave it as is?

The best bet is to start playing around in Photoshop! Perhaps you have a contact that you could call in a favour from?

Hi guys, a friend of mine has two sites. They both have a fair few links pointing to them, so I think it would be a shame to lose/ignore one of them.

Some of the links are low quality, from previous link building efforts, however at the moment I can't see any real penalisation from Google, so my guess is that it's currently ok... I'm aware that I'll have to remove some of the legacy low quality links soon.

My question is what should I do? Will combining the two websites help?

The main site is Gazebo Shop, but there's another exact match domain to consider... I'd like to keep the main website on the first URL, as that's the one I'm redeveloping now.

Thanks for any help!

Edit: I should add to my question: Should I redirect individual pages to my new category pages to pass Page Authorty/Rank?

Based on what you are saying, I'd suggest getting an Agency to set this campaign up for you, as it will take a lot of time. Getting the feed in of your products will help a lot, but there will be a large number of ads you'd want to run alongside your individual products to your category pages etc.

SEOMoz probably isn't the best place to ask about PPC, so I'd recommend asking some more questions on a PPC forum.

You'd be best to lead with a USP - perhaps free delivery, next day delivery, local call centers, live chat, freephone numbers, etc.

All websites render in HTML and CSS, regardless of what they are programmed in!

In terms of site structure, it may be easier to have issues with Canonical URLs, broken links, missing redirects etc, as these sites are unlikely to have any form of Content Management Systems.

Be careful with inline CSS and Scripts, as these can dilute your actual meaningful markup in your files and give a bad content:code ratio.

In reality, there is no reason that a completely flat HTML website could not rank number 1 for the most competitive term in your niche

Google shouldn't penalise you if that is legitimately your brand name, however the example that you have given looks very suspect. I've be very careful with focusing your link profile anchor text to just a small number of phrases, as it looks un natural.

It's better to come up with an awesome brand name/identity that consumers will love, then invest in the right areas online to succeed - that's the best way to go about it in the long run!

The only way this would really be beneficial at all would be if the content did not already exist on the internet.

You should ask your client to allocate some budget for media, if that's the route they want to take!

Thanks Guy.

Great, there are a couple of ideas that already spring to mind. Obviously these suggestions come from much larger corporations, but hopefully they will inspire you!

• http://www.forbes.com/special-report/2011/migration.html
• http://www.mint.com/blog/trends/infographic-plastic-surgery-is-giving-the-u-s-an-economic-lift-042012/?display=wide

Putting together smaller pieces like this can still work for you. Spend time on building a network of 'seed websites' i.e. websites that already distribute your type of content, so that you have a rush of publicity and visibility as soon as your content is launched.

I hope this helps!

Guy, there are two aspects of SEO to consider. One could save you a little more than the other, however neither should cost the earth.

In terms of on site optimisation, many factors can be edited by the webmaster (in small businesses, typically the owner). A lot of suggestions can be found through the PRO campaign management tool, however there are plenty of suggestions on the Beginners guide to SEO http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo

The main factors you should focus on, for on-site optimisation are;

• title tags
• h1 tags
• keyword usage on site
• keyword match in url
• image alt text
• internal linking keywords

In terms of off site optimisation, there should be a small budget set aside. This should not necessarily be spent on paid links, as these will over time be picked up by Google, and your websites performance will drop. However, focusing on generating good, interactive and/or graphical content (for example, see ours: http://www.evoenergy.co.uk/uk-energy-guide/) is the way forward, as it attracts a lot of links from design-related blogs and galleries.

Perhaps you could let us know what niche you are in, and we could all suggest a few ideas for you?

This is a bad idea, the practice has been around for a while and Google is wise to it. OSE and Google don't use the same indexes, and OSE can be up to 1 month out of date at any time.

The links or 301's will not count in Google's eyes, so I wouldn't recommend it at all.

Perfect, that's exactly what I was after!

Does anyone know how often OSE index is updated?

We've relaunched our website recently, and I'd really like to see how our redirects, PR efforts and new internal linking structure is working out for us.

I think I have previously seen a schedule somewhere, but I can't find it at the moment.

Any help is appreciated!

I'd be wary of that community page, however it's extremely unlikely that one page will have a negative impact across the whole website, so it's not a high priority

As mentioned below, reducing the footer on internal pages might be an option?

36 hours isn't enough time to know really.

Because Google realized the site was down, it will probably wait a little while longer than usual until it crawls it fully again, however you should expect to see some real progress by the end of the weekend/beginning of next week.

Internally linking to the homepage is best practice, if anything.

Penguin related problems arise where there are keyword stuffing issues, or anything else that could be seen as webspam.

As well as looking at your internal link profile, it might also be a good idea to check out your use of keywords on the /main money' keyword!