Hey there!

There's no benefit or negative effect of this either way - so there's really nothing to worry about here.

Furthermore, if you type in http://www.consumerbase.com/ you get redirected to the .html version and it's the same for internal pages.  This means you've not got any problems with duplicate URLs or content.

In short, everything is in order and from an SEO point of view there's no reason to make the change - all is well!  The only reason why you may want to make the change is from a user experience point of view - but I don't think visitors to your site will be concerned with .html extensions at all.

Hope this helps to put your mind at rest!

Hi John

If you aim to make the alt tags descriptive and not just contain the keyword, I think it would be fine.

So, let's say your shop sells shoes, the five image alt tags could look like this

Brand Trainers Front View
Brand Trainers Side View
Brand Trainers Rear View
Brand Trainers Size Guide
Brand Trainers Packaging

The whole idea of the alt tag is to provide an accurate description of the picture.  Using a method similar to this would do exactly that, while having the product or keyword in the alt tag would be perfectly natural, as it's using the alt tag for its primary function of describing the image.

This is only based on my opinion and experience, but having used similar methods in the past, I've never had a problem with over-optimisation, as it were, so you should be grand!

Hope this helps.

Hi Matthew

You'll probably be interested to see what Matt Cutts has to say about the issue: http://youtu.be/x0-jw_PfwtY

In short, a small number of sites that are related are fine to link to each other and won't flag quality guidelines.  It sounds like your websites fall under this, so you should be fine.

A problem may occur if there is a gratuitous amount of links or websites all passing PageRank.

If you want to be ultra-safe, you can make the links between the sites nofollow - which will you'll out any chance of a penalty due to interlinking.  But I think you'll be fine without this if done sparingly.

Hope this helps.

Hi Rob

The JS script will increase the load time of the page, but it might not be too bad.

What I'd suggest you do is input the URL into this tool.

This will measure the speed of your site and the individual elements, including that bit of JS script.  From there you can measure whether it is effecting your site speed too much.

If it is, there are a couple of things you could try to do.  You could try loading the script from the footer, so that the rest of the page load isn't delayed while waiting for the script.  You can also minify some of the JS code, reducing its size and therefore time to load.  JSMin is a good free tool that helps you do this.

Hope this helps.

Hey there

I've seen this before and in almost all cases the rankings were returned to their previous state, give or take maybe 1 or 2 places (which would be normal SERP flux).

Unfortunately, I've found that this can often take weeks and there's no real sure-fire way of getting Google to update it quicker.  Theoretically, to speed things up you want to get the crawler revisiting the URLs more and more often.  Fresh backlinks would do this, but obviously you can't game that sort of thing for web spam reasons.  You could also try pinging devices, such as GooglePing, but I'm not convinced by their effectiveness.

The most frequently crawled domain on the web is Twitter.  If you could legitimately get your key URLs tweeted, either by yourselves or others, this may encourage the Google crawler to revisit the URLs, and consequently reindex them.  There won't be any harm SEO wise in sending tweets with your URLs, it's a quick and free method and so may be worth giving it a shot.

Hope this helps you - I've often found you can't control these things but hopefully some of these theories might work.  In the long-run, however, the rankings will return and so for normal SEO purposes, create content and links as per usual.

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

I'm fairly sure that the Googlebot ignores those

title elements, so I can't imagine this having any positive SEO effect.

The worse case scenario would be that if its got a lot of keywords in the title tag, it could be seen as keyword stuffing and we know that Google can penalise sites for over-optimisation on its content.

However, like I said, I believe the bot ignores these elements.  To be safe, just make sure that each tag is relevant and not overdone or stuffed.  Keep it natural to the reader and there will be no problem.