Hi Edmond

You'd be able to use the copy without any problems, but you won't be able to rank for it specifically.  If that's not an issue, then read on.

What I would do is add a canonical tag on your page back to the original press release.  You can read up on canonical tags here in this Moz guide.

So say the press release is at this URL: http://www.pressreleasecompany.com/yourpressrelease

You can take the press release and publish it on your own page, such as: http://www.yourdomain.com/yourpressrelease

On your webpage, you would need to have the following code in the section of your HTML:

rel="canonical" href="http://www.pressreleasecompany.com/yourpressrelease" />

With that bit of code, you are letting Google know that you have taken the press release from elsewhere and that the original copy can be found there.  You are using the copy just to feature and add user experience to your website, and not to try and rank for any terms.

Google will acknowledge the tag and will not penalise you (or reward you) for using the duplicate copy.  I think it's also a good idea to include a brief introduction to where the press release came from and what it is about before using the copy, just to show that you are citing your source.

With those steps, you will be fine in mentioning external press releases about your company on your own site without risking being penalised.  Always a good idea not to overdo it, but with the canonical tag you won't be seen as duplicating content for nefarious or ranking means.

Hope this helps.

I don't see any reason why this would be seen as black hat.  On the contrary, I see it as an unintuitive UX idea and you should definitely do it.

The only information your withholding (and you're not even cloaking it) is a price that is dependent on a lot of factors.  You're not hiding any content or links, so there's no worry there.  Even if you were hiding content it wouldn't be a problem, unless it was completely irrelevant and there just to rank the page.

Any affect this could have is that if you're deferring elements to load on the page to improve Time To First Byte, then Google may not read them as they crawl and therefore the content it sees on the page may be depleted, affecting your ability to rank the page.  But for something like deferring a price tag, this isn't relevant at all.

I'd say go for it - think it would be a great idea for user experience.

Hi David

The principle of the algorithm is the same, but some updates or tweaks may be further behind, as you mention.  I highly recommend talking to Daniel Ezquerro about this - this is his twitter link and this is his blog.

He'll definitely be able to guide you in the right direction.

Hey there

Dan Shure wrote this fantastic Wordpress optimisation guide here on the Moz blog a year or so ago and it is still very relevant for today.  In that post, he goes into depth about the problems with tags and what your best practice should be.  Usually, you want to noindex the tags on your WP site - keep them for navigation purposes if you want, but letting them be indexed can lead to duplicate content issues.

In theory, this shouldn't be a problem.

When you use an image on a page, you are embedding that image from somewhere else - it's own URL.

Therefore, if the page itself is "noindex,follow" - that does not apply to the images (or anything else like a video, pdf etc) that is embedded into the page.  Provided that the URL holding the image is allowed to be indexed on your root domain, which it will by default, you can index the image.

You can test this out by uploading images to your root domain and then, in the next few days, performing this site search:

site:yoursite.com filetype:jpg (or png/gif/whatever you used)

That will show any of the images that you have on the site that are in the Google index.  If that does not work, try this search:

site:yoursite.com inurl:imagefilename

Replace those details with your real site and what you named the image when uploading and it should show you whether or not it's indexed or not.  If not, you could try sharing the image on Google+. G+ is ridiculously effective at getting web pages and content indexed.

But just because the page where the image is present on is instructed to be noindexed does not mean that the image itself will inherit that quality.  By default, it should be indexed properly.  You can also create image sitemaps to help with indexing (I believe you're running Wordpress, Yoast's SEO wordpress plugin can help with this).

Hope this helps.

I've tested this a couple of times and each result has been: no.

If you 410 a page, Google does a bloody good job at never bringing that URL back.  I've changed the response code back from a number of 410s, socially shared the page, built natural links to it, even blasted links to it (for testing's sake of course!) and Google has never reindexed it.

It's both good and bad - good in the sense that it really uses the 410 response code properly, but bad in the sense that, if you make a mistake and want to reuse the URL, you're pretty screwed.

If you're going to use it, be absolutely 100% you wouldn't see any use in using that URL again (such as offering the product again in the future etc.).  If there is any doubt, leave it as a 404 or redirect it.

Elementary, my dear Mosley.

Hi Robert

According to Algaroo, a tool that tracks the level of volatility in Google AU, there doesn't look to be anything out of the ordinary in the last few days.

I jumped into MajesticSEO to have a look at their backlinks, and what struck me was that out of their top 50 links (according to Majestic), around 20 of them have been deleted on the 21st and 22nd of September.

I'm also looking at their links on a whole - there are a lot of blogroll links, which looks quite unnatural, plus a number of directory links (which aren't necessarily bad but may have been devalued).  A number of these blogrolls were site wide, so the deleted ones will have resulted in a very sharp fall in the number of links.

I can only speculate as to why those links were removed - whether prompted by Google or not - but it's clear that either removing them has caused the drop, or they have been prompted to remove them by Google after finding out about their link scheme (if it was one). Similarly the massive amount of directory links could be the cause - not because they're penalised, but because they have been devalued.

Hope that helps.

Hi there Ricky

I think you're bang on the right track with this.

Like you say, if a search term like that has 20,000 searches, some of them will be local searches.  In addition, in the UK at least I've seen SERPs change from region to region, even if the search query itself has no local term attached to it.  Think of a term like "junk removal" and how the results seem to be dominated by your local area, but not so from someone searching elsewhere.

So with the issue of title tags, I'd take SEO out of the equation for now. I'd rather look at whether the company explicitly wants local business only, or wouldn't mind national business.  This can be quite important depending on how the company is set up.

If a company would welcome businesses nationally, or even by state, having "West Palm Beach" in the title tag might put off some prospective customers if they think it is too small, or focused too locally.  In that case, it would be best to leave it out of the title, more from a conversion perspective than SEO.  Converesely, if the company is just looking for that local business, which for something like a sign company or a junk removal service like I mentioned before might only be interested in, then including "West Palm Beach" not only filters out unnecessary traffic, but it would also likely boost the SEO efforts for that term - albeit very slightly.  I don't think it's a huge influence, but every little helps!

And as you'll no doubt be aware, there are loads of other stuff that can help you rank locally besides the title tag.  So if you choose to omit a local term in your title tag but still want to optimise for local, there's a lot you can do.  Earning your local citations is very high up on my list - Both GetListed and Local Visibility provide fantastic lists of the most important citations for your country and, where applicable, your area.

Hope this helps!

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.

Short answer is definitely yes.

If you want to pass on the link equity/juice/strength, you'll want to implement a 301 redirect ASAP.

However, some studies have shown that over time a 302 may pass equity.  So it's not a completely lost cause, but we're looking at months (possibly years) for that to pass with a 302, so where you can just use a 301.

Hi Chris

First and foremost, in my mind you don't need to change a thing.  It's working well - and here's why:

Think of a canonical tag as an instruction to Google to treat that URL is the top dog, the be all and end all - the one that you want Google to index and rank.

Any other page or URL that has the same canonical tag on it is basically your way of saying - "see this page? Don't worry about that page, it's a variant of this page that might look the same. Ignore it and rank that other page!"

Now, why would you want to do this?  Well, if Google thinks that your website has duplicated content and it believes it is being done to manipulate or game the algorithm, it might hit you with a penalty (often a Panda penalty).

Ecommerce sites often have this problem with their product pages and, while not usually intentional, Google has been known to put penalties on these sites.

Your site, in my mind, counters all of these problems very well.

Google can and will index URLs with query strings on them (anything with a "?" after it) and treat them as separate pages.  That means, theoretically, Google would have tried to index all of these URLs of yours:

http://www.bronterose.co.uk/range.html_?p=2_
http://www.bronterose.co.uk/range.html_?p=3_
http://www.bronterose.co.uk/range.html_?dir=asc&order=price_
http://www.bronterose.co.uk/range.html_?dir=asc&limit=all&order=price_

Now this would be a problem, as you'd quite likely have similar looking pages being indexed where products appear in multiple URLs.  This duplicate content could lead to a penalty.

But that's where the canonical tag comes in and does a great job.  Your tag is telling Google "ignore all versions of the http://www.bronterose.co.uk/range.html URL with a ? on the end of it - that's just to help the user and I'm not trying to duplicate content to try and rank higher. Ignore them and treat http://www.bronterose.co.uk/range.html as the main page"

So you're avoiding the problem of duplicate content and your canonicalisation is working well.  Very well, in fact.  If you do a site search (check it out here) you will see that only one version of the URL has been indexed and noted by Google - and that's the canonical version.

So keep it just as it is in my eyes - it's set up very well indeed!

Hope this helps.