Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I wouldn't worry about it too much, as for some websites it's simply a necessity.  In some financial verticals, you need to display a (usually very long) risk warning/disclaimer on each page.  I've yet to see a site penalised for something like that.

My concern with footers would be exact-match anchor texts which are still dofollow, particulary for external links.  I've seen reconsideration requests finally be accepted after webmasters have changed those links to nofollow.

If you're concerned with the size of the footer versus the ratio of unique content, you could always consider putting any essential must-be-on-page information in the form of an image.  May increase load time on the page slightly, but could put your mind at ease over it.

To be honest, however, I wouldn't worry about it a great deal - I'd be more concerned with how the footer links around.

Yeah, that definitely looks manipulative.  Wouldn't be advocating that.

As for why they haven't been penalised - clearly the site hasn't been manually reviewed/penalised, so it's up to the algorithm to flag the page.  You look at the rest of the homepage and, while it looks a bit crude, it serves the user pretty well.  Nothing else on there looks manipulative, it's relatively clean etc - so you'd say 90/95% of the page, for a user, is helpful.  With that in mind, it's a bit easier to see why it may not have been flagged and penalised yet by the algo.

Rest assured though, it it was detected, it would be penalised for that stuffing.  It's not a massive offence, mind. The irony though is that the ramifications of any penalty would be much larger than any SEO benefit those keywords are having.

Hi Ben

Before developing the website itself, a good question to ask would be if the client is ever likely to run offline campaigns, such as print advertisements.

The reason being is that quite often it is hard to measure the impact and reach print advertisements have, along with calculating return of investment.

However, if you had a new domain, you could direct all your offline traffic (and only offline traffic) to this new domain. Therefore, whoever finds it you can be fairly certain that it is a result of your offline advertising.  I suppose the downside of this is that it can detract from building the 44-16 brand itself.

Another option would be to develop the new domain as a free, all-encompossing learning resource for film and production editors.  Develop a set of tutorials and best practice, but then invite other industry people to submit their own user generated content for use.  Maintain a level of impartiality, but by no means hide the 44-16 ownership.  You could even throw in a forum, should there be a demand for one.

To me, I think it would be quite valuable as a business to say that not only do we have a film and production company, but we're also the gatekeepers to one of the largest film and production communities in the UK, partnering professionals together around the country.

Those are just a couple ideas - the main SEO consideration needs to be that the additional website could function as a website in its own right.  It has its own content, its own approach, almost its own primary focus, with the secondary of course to help 44 16.  If it looks too much like a feeder site that's just linking in to the main domain for SEO benefit, it could be dangerous.

Hope this helps.

PS - Awesome cat.

Hi Sunita

That shouldn't be a problem, as authorship works on a page by page basis, rather than the whole domain.  That means any verified G+ profile can post on any page on the web.  Social signals are attributed to the domain and not the author, so again there's no problem there.

Remember, you can always add extra users to both a G+ business page and an analytics or webmasters account, so if you want to give other people access, you can.  You can also control how much access they have.

Hope this helps.

To be brief:

You get people and other brands paying and bidding on Adwords to appear next to a competitor when people search for that competitor.

I don't see why SEO should be any different (ethically).

Whether it's feasible and worth your time optimise, however, that's different.

Hi Jonny

If I were you, I would use a rel=canonical tag solution, so that every page (and new page) has a canonical tag on it.

Among other things, this will tell Google that your site is the originator of this content.  Any other  versions of it on your site or across the web is being used purely for user experience and therefore should not be ranked over the original.

As you will be publishing the content first, it should be crawled first by the search engines as well.  To ensure that it is, I would also share your pages on social media when they go live, as it helps to index the pages much quicker.

This way, the site scraping your content should (in theory) not be able to rank for the content - or at the very least will be seen by Google as the copier of the content, while you will be seen as the originator, due to being indexed first with the canonical tag.

You can read more on canonicals with this handy Moz guide.

Hope this helps.

The Google AdWords keyword tool only provides an estimation of monthly search.  The figures are rounded up/down, so it's very unlikely that both would have an identical number of searches.  In addition, the number is based on PPC data (although you would still suspect that the user behaviour would be the same for organic).  Incidentally, Bing's keyword research tool provides exact figures.

The general takeaway is that there are roughly the same number of people searching for both terms month on month.  That's all you can really take from the keyword tool, as competition relates to PPC as well and not for the domains currently ranking on page 1. There is usually correlation between an increase in monthly searches and the competitiveness of the term, but sometimes you might just unearth a diamond in the rough.

Hope this helps to clarify some issues.

Hi there

Actually yes, this is intentional.  It is a new ad extension that you can take advantage of.

You can find some more relevant info in this SEL article, as well as this one.

You won't be charged for a click if someone clicks a recommendation and you can find more examples in the wild by searching for "forex" among others.

Hope this helps!

Hi David

This is quite easy to set up, so let's run through it:

First, go to https://twitter.com/settings/widgets and create a new widget.

On the next screen, click on the "search" tab.  From there, you'll be able to see that you can enter a hashtag or any other search query, so pop in #commercialproperty there.

When done, press "create widget".

When the page refreshes, you should see some code appear below the preview box.  You'll end up with something like this:

Tweets about "#commercialproperty"

Add that code to your HTML and hey presto! You now have the feed showing.

And remember, the search field in twitter lets you use normal search parameters just like Google, such as AND or OR commands, or even -from:usernamehere if you want to remove a certain someone from the feed.

For instance, you may want to show tweets containing #commercialproperty or the words "commercial property" together.  In this case, you'd enter this search term:

(#commercialproperty) OR (Commercial AND Property)

Here's the code for that widget:

Tweets about "(#commercialproperty) OR (Commercial AND Property)"

Hope this helps!

Sounds like you and your team have just the right attitude towards this.  I'm sure it'll be a great success!

Have a good weekend!

Hey there

Something like SEMRush, KeywordSpy and KeywordEye should be able to do what you're looking for.  Can do it for your site and competitors too.

All three come with a free trial, so it's worth checking them out.

Hope this helps.

Hi Vince

You can certainly use OSE, but it will be more of a manual process on your end.  You'd need to go into the links in the OSE report for yourself, possibly starting with those with low PA/DA scores or exact match anchor text, and then making your own judgement on whether the link is bad or not.

With Link Detox, it runs through your backlink profile (it's a bit more thorough than OSE as well I've found) and then classifies the links for you, in terms of "health".  You should always check a few of the results yourself to see if you agree, but it's usually pretty accurate in its diagnosis.

With OSE, you don't get that automatic diagnosis, so Link Detox is pretty unique in that case.  If you haven't spotted it, you can pay a one off fee of €50 to run 2 audits - just follow this link.  There's no contract with this plan so you can test it and see if you like it.  Usually much more cost efficient for individual sites.

Hope this helps!

Hi Sara

The method I've used without fail on a whole host of sites is this:

Make sure you have the URL in the "links" section on the About tab in your Google+ business page.

Once it's there, simply add this bit of code anywhere in the code:

That's all you need to do.  Google will verify the code and the Google+ page fairly quickly after that.  The code only needs to be present on the homepage for the profile to verify, but you won't be harmed if it appears on all the pages on your site, if you have a bit of code that adds it automatically.

Ensure that the code is in the section of your homepage.  Hope this helps!

Hi Rich

You could try some search operator queries, try some of these out:

Keyword + intitle:“write for us”
Keyword + intitle:“contribute to”
Keyword + intitle:“submit” + inurl:blog
inpostauthor:guest + keyword
inpostauthor:”guest blog” + keyword
inpostauthor:”guest post” + keyword
inurl:- “write for us” OR “write for me” + keyword
“become a contributor” OR “contribute to this site” + keyword
“Guest Article” + keyword
“Become guest writer” keyword
“Become guest blogger” keyword
“submit a Blog Post” + keyword

Hey there

I'll run through what I do to get an idea of search volume.  Your mileage may vary, but all in all I've found this to be pretty accurate.

The first step I take is to use the Google Keyword Tool.  It does look at paid data which is a pain for sure, but it's a great starting point.  A feature that's been added to the new keyword planner is search volume for that keyword over the last 12 months.  This is particularly useful as you can see if the keyword is gaining or losing interest, which is a good way to look at whether it is worth targeting.

The second step is to use Bing’s organic search volume tool for the last month, which you can find here: http://www.bing.com/toolbox/keywords.  This appears to have many advantages over Google’s mechanism, as it is based on monthly data, it doesn’t provide rounded up results and is based on Bing’s organic search volume – all of which would make it more accurate than Google in theory.  However, the sample size of searchers in Bing is obviously significantly smaller and with anywhere between 85-95% of searchers still using Google, we cannot rely on Bing’s data too much.

I then aggregate the two scores to get an average search volume, then I look at relevancy once again.  I refer to Fresh Web Explorer (http://freshwebexplorer.seomoz.org/), which I use to measure the relevancy of the term in recent search activity.  The higher the score, the more that exact term was picked up by the tool over the last 30 days.  The tool does have some limitations, as it works on a limited base of RSS feeds that it has identified as following (there are notable exceptions), but it provides us with another indication of the keyword’s relevance over recent search.

Finally, I use another aggregator for the keyword’s recent mentions in the form of Topsy (http://topsy.com/).  This gives a more social media insight into the mentions of the keyword.  Again, the higher the number, the more mentions the keyword received.

Run these scores for about 20-30 of your prospective keywords and you should get an accurate idea of which ones will bring in traffic, plus an idea on which ones will bring in around the traffic number that Google and Bing advertise.

Hope this helps.

Can't see anything wrong with this at all.

It's a page designed with the user at heart.  The first view keeps this concise and lets the user select the style they want, after which they can click for more information if necessary, rather than having an information overload.

Just because text is being hidden to begin with doesn't make it a bad thing.  I find this very similar to the FAQ pages that you get with the sort of accordion style (click the + sign, expand for more information).  I think it works well for a product page and I'm surprised it hasn't been done more.

Completely "white-hat" in my view - the only grey area would be if those descriptions are being lifted from the original page, might be a weeny bit of duplicate content in that case.

Hi Kadel

The Moz report looks at the number of FB shares for that website, not the associated Facebook page.

If I were to choose which one to share, I'd definitely gow with the URL of the website.  It means shares and clicks go straight through to your website.  In addition, if there is any SEO benefit to having social signals, you'll want to share your website URL so that it can benefit from them.

This Moz post from Tuesday may be of interest to you: http://moz.com/blog/google-plus-correlations

Hope this helps.

Hey there

Your assumptions are correct - there is no benefit from doing this and you're actually running a significant risk with the duplicate content.

I'd highly recommend moving the blog permanently to your own website.  Think of it this way - would you rather have a link from a blog post that might have a few social shares and links - or would you rather have those social shares and links be pointing directly to your domain?

It has to be the second option for me. Having your blog posts sitting on your own domain will mean your root domain will directly benefit from any sharing or linking to the blog post - while potential clients are also landing directly to your site, shortening the conversion path.  There won't be any added benefit to have it done externally just because blogger is a Google property - even if there was it certainly wouldn't outweigh having those ranking signals directly pointing your site.

Hope this helps.

The only thing I would ask is: What do you aim to achieve by deleting them?

They may not be 'optimised' posts, but if they aren't doing any harm - and by that I mainly been duplicate or thin content - then I don't see any reason to delete them.  There is a school of thought as well is that a site with more indexed pages will, roughly speaking, be seen more as an authority site (and we all know Google loves authority).

So I'd not worry about them and focus on your fresh content and just optimise them.  I'll just say as well, you don't always want to write with keywords in mind - your audience should be the primary goal, but of course it pays to have keywords in things like title tags, h1s and metas etc.  Just don't stuff the thing with the keyword throughout (I'm sure you already knew this).

TL;DR - No worries mate, just write away!

Hi Laura

Both options are feasible really.  301ing the domain will pass the link equity to the shed finders site, which in turn may help it to rank for that keyword.  It may warrant a bespoke landing page for the keyword, in which case creating a URL for that keyword and then redirecting the root domain to that page would be a good solution.

However, you or your client may prefer to rank for the keyword for this microsite - if they feel that site better suits the purpose of the keyword.  In this case, carrying on your link building and inbound marketing efforts for that site should inevitably help it rank for that keyword.  You would want to make the site as informative as possible, while also making it as authoritative as possible - which may include guides, articles, videos and other rich media, social media integration and so on.  Creating this 'authoritative status' could help it rank quicker, as Google does give favour to those sites that can be recognised as a brand.

If you do all of that, you would feasibly be able to link the sites to each other - but do take care if you do so.  It could very easily look like a link network or scheme if it is overdone, while the reciprocal link itself could look suspicious to Google if it looks as though it is just there to pass PageRank and not direct the user to another authoritative website.  A recent Matt Cutts video on site interlinking may be of interest to you: http://youtu.be/x0-jw_PfwtY

Hope this helps Laura!

Hi Chris

Before I begin: this is undoubtedly a moral dilemma for me - whether or not to help someone who is intending to bring more One Direction into the world.

With that said (partly in jest!) one factor that I think is missing from your list is retention - how many downloads vs how many installs.  The better this ratio is, the better the play store algorithm will deem the app and thus it will promote it in the rankings.  There's not much you can do to control this, however, other than making a quality app of course.

Freshness is also a factor - newer apps will get some preference and I imagine in a 1D category, newer apps might pop up virtually every day.  So this could be impacting you.

Other than that, your standard SEO ranking factors I imagine would have some effect. On-page optimisation and inbound links passing PageRank will more than likely boost the ranking - but how much I'm afraid I can't say.

Everything else, ratings/downloads/reviews etc - you have covered.  All I would suggest is maybe to look at some analytics tools. App Annie comes with a number of tools that provide you with the metrics for the top ranking apps by category.  What I'd suggest is to look at the metrics, look for any patterns, and then throw in traditional SEO reports such as the on-page optimisation tool in Moz Pro/Analytics and any inbound links via OpenSiteExplorer.

Hope this helps. I hope you find that "One Thing" to help you rank higher.

Hi Jonathan

I like to get into the habit of having a self-referring canonical tag by default, but to answer your question you won't need to have one present if you're publishing in English and Danish.

From an SEO perspective, having the content in a separate language will essentially make it unique.  Might be the exact same article, but Google will see it as unique.  So you can publish without a canonical tag, should you wish to do so.

Hi Kevin

The Keyword Planner does a pretty good job of this now.  If you select any of the options and type in your keyword, you'll get the search volume.

Next to the "Avg. monthly search volume" there's a little graph icon.  Hover over that and you'll get the last 12 months and the average search data for that month.  There you should be able to see any peaks or troughs.

Hope this helps!

Hi Eduard

First of all, if your site was effected by the Penguin 2.0 update, then your duplicate page content wouldn't have been the trigger.  That has to do with the Panda algorithm (which is now part of the main algorithm), so if the drop came during the Penguin update, you could have a whole number of different problems with your site as well.

My advice would be to run your site through the Panguin tool: http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/

This will line up your organic traffic with announced Google updates - see if your drop matches up with the Penguin update.  If it does, then you have a whole number of things to check about the inbound links to your website.

To answer the questions you posted:

1. That should do the trick - the only problem is that by setting a canonical version you are instructing Google not to rank or consider any of the alternate versions. A more ideal solution in my opinion would be to rewrite the content for the other sites, ensuring no chance of a duplicate content penalty and giving the other sites a chance to rank.

2. I've seen this be a problem with Penguin before and every time I've seen it fixed the links have either been removed or have been made nofollow.  You may want to limit the amount of pages the footer links appear (just core landing pages) and also make them nofollow.

Hope this helps

Hi there

The question is two-fold, so let's look at it in bits.

First - Google+ may pass SEO value to your site, just as any other website would.  This is because Google+ pages can accrue PageRank and also pass it on - the links in the "about" section of a business page, for example, are dofollow, which passes PageRank or SEO equity.

Second of all, Google+ already has a big influence in organic search in a few other ways - and this is likely to get bigger over time.  We have seen people being able to link to their website with the rel=author tag - which links the website with a Google+ profile.  This creates a rich snippet in the organic search results, a small picture of the contributor's profile, which has been tested to show an increase in click-through rate in the SERPs.  So that's one way.

The second is personalised search.  People logged into their Google accounts will be served personalised search engine results.  This could be based on their previous browsing history, pages that they have "+1'", friends that have "+1"'d pages and probably more factors in the future.  This can have a massive shift in how organic search appears and therefore makes Google accounts and Google+ a significant influencer.

I would start engaging more and more with your Google+ account.  Get involved with Google+ community pages to start getting more followers to your own account and start being active and promoting your business pages too.  Engage with your audience, take part of the Hangouts feature and start adding +1s and followers to your page.  Link up your personal profile to your blog posts with the "rel=author" schema tag to improve click through rate on these posts.  The stronger your profile and business page are, then it's most likely the stronger the influence they will have in organic search.

Hope this answers your questions!

Well, quite simply, rewrite the content.

Make sure that it is not only unique, but it has unique value.

If there is a bit of content that is present across the site, such as a disclaimer, make sure you add additional content to that page, so that Google will see each page as having a unique value.

Now, if the copy cannot be changed but must be present on the site for user experience reasons, you have two options.  Either use the rel=canonical tag to point the page with the duplicate content to the original page, or use the "noindex" code in the header of the page:

You can read more on canonicalisation and noindexing in this helpful guide.

Hi Ben

First of all, that's a good solid approach.  I like SEMRush a lot.

Just to clarify for you - the "competition" metric in the Keyword Planner tool is strictly for paid search competition.  The search volume is for all search volume (searches that resulted in a paid or organic click, or no click at all).

Moz's tool gives you a competition score based on organic competition, so it is a good supplement.

You might also be interested in Term Explorer - as it gives a topline competition based on organic competition and is a bit more indepth.  I'm a big fan of it.

Hope this helps.

Hey

Let's approach this in two parts: SEO and Branding.

If you went for an en.microdesign.nl or microdesign.nl/en structure, would you be able to rank the site in Google US/UK and for English terms?  The answer is a definite yes.  You have a country TLD, but in the end a TLD is just a TLD and it won't prevent you from ranking outside of Google NL.

Two guides from Aleyda Solis on how to set up your international campaign, the international SEO checklist and establish your SEO strategy will help you get set up correctly, in order to rank.

The second consideration, and arguably the more important one, is the issue of branding and appearance.  Will English users want to visit your site or trust your site and services if you are on a .nl domain?  Now, if you had asked me this only a few years ago, I would have said probably not, and would have recommended you do all that you can to move to a global TLD, like .com.  Now, however, with all the different TLDs out there and people and agencies seemingly using any extension to rank (.me, .pro, .anything!), I really don't think it makes much of a difference.  Provided that the search result is fully optimised for the English user and when the person reaches the site, all of what they need (including the nitty gritty like contact details, terms, privacy etc) are presented in English, then I think you would be able to make your current website a success.  Plus, you get to preserve an SEO authority your root domain currently has.

I hope this helps.

To clarify a couple of those points for you:

If you have earned over 500 points on your account over any time period, you are eligible for full access to Q&A to respond and ask questions. Accounts are reviewed for this access on an account-by-account basis.

You keep your ID/username no matter what level of account you have (free, pro etc.)

As all accounts are subject to a review, if you have concerns or questions about this it is well worth getting in touch with someone at the Moz team, they're incredibly helpful and will be able to let you know what your options are.

From an SEO perspective, there's nothing fundamentally wrong with using any of the possible solutions.

Having every language in a sub-folder means that you'll get all of the countries links sitting on the same root domain.  That, in turn, could make the root domain very powerful - although any negative stuff could also be passed around, so you would need to be extremely on top of things.

A ccTLD might give a slight weighting to ranking in that country's search engine equivalent - although the .com TLD is widely accepted as global, so this is somewhat moot.

Taking SEO out of the equation, however...

I've seen a lot of case studies and market research that indicates most people will trust a localised URL and TLD if they're looking for a service.  So if you look at it from a user experience point of view, having a ccTLD makes your site at the very first glance look like you're in that country, you've invested in it and its people and you could be trusted.

There's no real right or wrong here and a .com/subfolder system may well provide the most SEO strength - but it could also lead to a penalisation if just one country is out of line.

Hope this helps.

Hi there

First of all, I'm really sorry to hear you've been affected by the update.

As Penguin was an algorithmic penalty, there will be no benefit in emailing Google directly or filing a reconsideration request, as the penalty was not manual.  However, filing a disavow file would be worthwhile if you believe that your site's link profile is littered with spam.

Now, I don't mean to alarm you but I can see some very worrying links in your profile.  You have a number of links from .edu.cn domains that look to be targeting pills and health items.  In all honesty, at first glance it looks as though the site has been hacked - are you aware of this?

Having checked the site in the safe browsing tool, it doesn't look as though Google has detected this as hacked.  Nevertheless, those links will be doing some pretty serious harm to your site and should be disavowed straight away.  In addition, there does look to be a number of links with the keyword "workwear" that look quite artificial - as in, they only look to pass SEO value rather than user value.  Those kind of links (which it looks like you've already identified) could be contributing to your penguin penalty.

It's worth noting that disavowing these links will likely have no effect until the algorithm refreshes, which may take a month or two.  In the mean time, you should focus on replacing those links with quality links and looking to drive traffic to your site by other means.  Also, in case you have been hacked, Google has released a great guide on what you should do next.

And I have to say, it looks as though you've got a great plan to do this.  Steps 2 through 7 all look like great inbound marketing tactics (I particularly like 4) which in turn should help you earn high authority links.

I'd have a deep look at your link profile and also check your site security, but your recovery plan looks really solid and I hope it's not long until you get back on your feet.

Hi Vince

What happened when you disavowed the links? Have you submitted a reconsideration request and has the penalty been revoked?

Until you get a message saying the manual penalty has been lifted, it won't matter what you do to your rankings or links - they'll keep on going down.

I'd definitely keep the disavow file in there (and add to it if needs be) and keep filing reconsideration requests until the penalty has been lifted.

It's worth noting as well that sometimes these bad links will be powering up your site.  I mean, one of the reasons people use bad links, for black-hat reasons, is because they can and do work.  However, they're not sustainable in my eyes.  If you've built a site with bad links, you're effectively a ticking time bomb and that's probably not the healthiest way to do business - at least in my opinion.

So disavowing those links could quite conceivably been the cause for the drop in rankings (even if you didn't have a penalty), but you're much healthier in the long run.  My recommendation - after getting that penalty removed first and foremost - would be to replace those links with high quality and authoritative ones, as you have mentioned.

Hope this helps.

I'm afraid your blog pages are in fact duplicate content, in Google's eyes anyway.

The /us/blog, /uk/blog and /ca/blog examples are all separate URLs that you are asking Google to index (separate canonical tags for each and no robots instructions that I can see).  Google is going to look at these and any blog posts within them as separate pages.  Once it realises they all have the same content, it will likely result in a Panda algorithmic penalty.

The risk here is that this penalty might affect your entire domain, rather than the offending pages.  I really don't see that as a risk worth taking.  Therefore, I strongly advise to remove the separate versions of the blogs and consolidate into one blog, with redirections of the local blogs to the new ones.  Failing that, choose one version and instruct Google not to index other versions of the page by using a meta robots tag in your header, or in the robots.txt file.

I also advise that you noindex the category page to be sure that its content isn't being seen as duplicate either.  More info on how to do that can be found in the Moz Robots Guide.

Hi Brian

If the domain has expired, it should only be a matter of time before Google recrawls the page/domain and sees that the link is no longer present, therefore discounting the link from your link profile.

You could have a look and see if this has happened by typing into your address bar (if using Chrome) either:

cache:example.com
site:example.com

The first one will check to see if the URL is cached and the second one if it is indexed.  If a cached version of the page no longer exists, the link has almost certainly been discounted, whereas if the domain is no longer indexed it would be safe to assume that the link will be discounted soon by Google as well.

I hope this helps - sorry to hear of your previous agency resorting to such backhanded tactics.

Very good question and becomes a discussion over time and resource management.

It should be said - you will usually see a marked increase in click-through rates even between #1 and #2.  So on that basis, always go for #1.

Whether or not to spend most of your focus improving this ranking to #1 or whether to improve some other keywords will depend on a few things - competition for those other keywords, what's their estimated search volume, can you attribute different levels of searcher 'intent' (eg 'red shoes' versus 'buy red shoes in london' - second one has much more intent to convert).

What I would do over the coming weeks is monitor your traffic and conversion rate in analytics.  Look out for any significant improvements that you can attribute to this higher ranking term - either through direct last-touch channels, or indirectly through increased brand search and/or conversions where organic search was a touch-point.  If you see a big increase, it may be worth pushing for the number one spot.  However, if you don't see a decent increase, even when ranking at 2, then it might be better to focus on your other keywords instead.

Hope this helps, would be good to get other feedback as well.

Howdy

You'll need to block the SEOMoz crawler in your robots.txt file.  Edit the file and insert this bit of code:

User-Agent: rogerbot Allow: /
Disallow: /forum/

If that doesn't work, you might want to add a Wildcard too, making it:

Disallow: *****/forum/

If you're not too sure about editing the robots.txt file, then it might be an idea to check the SEOMoz guide: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/robotstxt - if you're really unsure, it's best to get someone else to do it for you, as you don't want to block all of your site to all of the crawlers

Hope this helps

Hi Ruben

Before you begin, you want to be sure that you have the permission to use or re-use any photos.  Thought that was worth mentioning.

A .jpg is a good file extension to use, as you'll barely lose photo quality over a .png, which is much larger.  As for dimensions, try and pick the best dimensions for where the image will be.  I believe in focusing on the best user experience here, so go with what you thinks best.

A further step, which I think is vital, is to losslessly compress the images you want.  This process removes the unecessary bytes in images, reducing file size and subsequent page load speed, without compromising the quality of the image.  The online Yahoo Smush.it tool works great for this, or if you're running Wordpress the WP Smush.it plugin will compress all the images you upload for you.

As for where to host the image, you're fine to use your own server but if you want or need to externally host images, I don't think there's a quicker or easier service to use than Imgur.

Hope this helps.

You've effectively got 2 versions of your homepage live and ranking.

Using web-sniffer, you can see that both finalduties.co.uk and www.finalduties.co.uk are both giving 200 responses.  Google is effectively seeing both versions as two separate pages.

This can obviously be a problem because it might lead to duplicate content.  What you would want to do is 301 redirect one URL to the other.

Looking at your site architecture and linking, it looks as though you will want to 301 redirect http://finalduties.co.uk to http://www.finalduties.co.uk.  For more info on 301 redirecting, follow this guide.

Hi there Drew

You've made the right start by acquiring a Google+ page and some reviews.  Google considers these citations when deciding whether or not to rank a site in the local listings.

However, it also considers hundreds of other local citations for this local search.  Getting your listing on these sites can go a long way towards improving your local listing visibility.  Make sure that each listing uses a consistent address, phone number, company etc. and Google should start to take notice.

Here's a fantastic definitive list of local citations you can go out and acquire.  Getting the listing is only half of the job - using consistent information, getting reviews and of course earning high quality links will make your site appear higher and higher in local search as well.  Keep driving reviews to places like Google+ and Yelp, earn those links and claim your listings.

Hope this helps!

In a word: no.

There's a rough sort of hierarchy for where links come from.  Up near the top, you've got mainstream news websites, reputable blogs and so on.  Somewhere near the bottom, along with the likes of free, spammy directories, SEO press release sites and article directories are forum links.

They've been devalued substantially.  Even on pages that show a decent PA/DA (just the way the Moz algo works), forum links carry very little strength.  If you're using them to build an SEO benefit, then you're wasting your time.

Now, forums that are close to your market/niche and have an active community can be a great way to build potential leads - providing that you become part of the community yourself and are not there to just drop your link and go.  I'd certainly look at the possibility of that, should you have relevant forums in your industry.

I'd go with the first one as it is far more brandable and memorable.

With the second one you'd be giving that up, while attempting to gain some sort of benefit for SEO.  I can tell you now with some certainty that the SEO benefit of such a URL would be negligible and I'm pretty convinced that Google would not exactly be thrilled if they saw you trying to SEO optimise the URL (on their own social network, no less!), which may come back to haunt you.

Go with a branded and memorable URL.

Hey Petros

From the SEOMoz guide to domain authority:

"We calculate this metric by combining all of our other link metrics (linking root domains, number of total links, mozRank, mozTrust, etc.) into a one single score."

What you should also consider is that each Mozscape update varies in size.  If we look at the last update, 70 billion URLs were crawled. The previous crawl looked at 68 billion and the one before that looked at 78 billion (that's a lotta links!)

With each different crawl being slightly different in size, there may be little fluctuations to your page authority and domain authority, even if your website and link profile hadn't changed a single bit between crawls.  Of course, if you have earned a number of high authority links to your domain, you can expect to see your domain authority go up.

Hope this helps, have a great weekend!

Hi Tim

Just to quickly throw my opinion in: I think you're of the right frame of mind to recommend a consultant.  Finding an agency that would build safe and valuable links on a small budget can be a very frought process, with several rip-off merchants out there.  Not to say all of them are of course, but equally if the clients' budget is not sustainable, the path of self-education could be a better one.

With that in mind, you may be able to find a number of quality consultants on SEOMoz's own recommended companies list: http://www.seomoz.org/article/recommended

Furthermore, I'd point your clients in the direction of some great educational resources. The beginner's guide to SEO from Moz remains a great document for all, while Jon Cooper's Link Building Course and DistilledU can also be a great investment.

Hope this helps you and your clients out.

Hi Ruud

As you've said, I'd go ahead and add a robots.txt file.  One thing to remember is that each subdomain requires its own robots.txt file.

In addition, I would add "noindex, follow" to the header of the pages you don't want crawl.

You can find out the best way to implement these changes with the Moz Robotstxt guide.

It's always hard to gauge as consultants will always price themselves differently and on different grounds.

I can recommend a ton of others not on that list, such as Chris Dyson http://tripleseo.com/ Steve Morgan http://seono.co.uk/ and Ross Hudgens http://www.rosshudgens.com/ - it's always worth dropping them a line, get an idea of budgets/quotes and whether or not they have expertise, or even specialise, in small business SEO.

But like everything, you get what you pay for and what you get out of SEO is more or less proportionate to what you put in.

I'd buy both. I'd use the long one as the main domain and then use L21F.com as a 301 redirect to the main domain.

Reason being, I can see the shorter domain being useful if you're ever running any advertising, including print.

I think the biggest influencer in this decision would be what the client is advertising.

If they're advertising mainly B2B, exclude VAT. If it's B2C, include it.

There are exceptions to the rule - for example, websites like Scan.co.uk and eBuyer.com will typically show ex VAT prices more prominently, but that's because, while being a retail website, most of their bigger orders come other businesses.

So I would ask who is it that your client typically serves - businesses or individuals?

If it is individuals you are obliged to show the VAT price before the purchasing decision (add to basket) has been placed, pretty sure that's a legal requirement.  You can display both, as Scan and Ebuyer too, and that will suffice.  And if you're paying for Google Shopping inclusion, Google is sophisticated enough to know which price is your VAT and non-VAT price and will show the VAT prices in its results (if applicable).

Nothing wrong with showing both - but if you plan on showing one, it all comes down to who the website is intending to serve.

It wouldn't make that much of a difference, similarly being hosted in somewhere like the US wouldn't be the end of the world.

If the TLD is .ie, I feel that would have a bigger influence on Google.  Similarly, you can tell Google where your Geographic target is in webmaster tools.  In the configuration drop-down menu, click settings and ensure that your Geographic target is set up for Ireland.

I mean, the absolute best practice would be to have a .ie domain, targeted in WMT for Ireland with Irish hosting - but I just don't know how feasible or cost effective this would be for you.  In this case, 2 out of 3 certainly is not bad.  If I was asked whether the hosting, in this case, is likely to have any visible difference, then I'd say no.

The OSE crawler is a lot smaller than GWT, so some discrepancy is to be expected, I'm afraid.

Have you seen any other rankings of yours fall for different keywords and, primarily, different landing pages? If not, that would pretty much rule out any penalty.

Having said all that, I think your first paragraph provides the reason why your rankings have fallen.

My guess would be (provided that the links haven't been dropped) is that Google has devalued your links from the infographic directories.  Like normal directories, I can't see much of a user benefit at all on a site like this, which makes it a stand-out target for Google to devalue the link.  We've seen recently that Google looks to be heading towards continuous devaluation of links over a number of weeks/months, as reported in this article. I'd go along with this school of thought - for instance, on one site I've seen homepage keywords dropped while the rest of the site was fine - the homepage had a number of directory links which I now believe to be devalued.

Be sure to double check that the links have not simply fallen off and that other pages on your site have not been penalised.  Should you draw a blank there, this is what my semi-educated guess would be - a devaluation of directory style links, resulting in a fall in rankings.