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I just had a smack upside the head moment. I had all of the links in the main nav as absolute but my links in the footer were all relative. That was giving me my 404 errors.

Hopefully this will get me back on Google's good side. We dropped in the ranks a little for some of our main keywords.

I recently implemented a blog using WordPress on our website. I didn't use WordPress as the CMS for the rest of our site just the blog portion. So as an example I installed Wordpress in http://www.mysite/blog/" not in the root.

My error report in SEOMoz went from 0 to 22e. The Moz bot  or crawler that SEOMoz uses is reporting a ton of 4xx errors to strang links that shouldn't exist anywhere on the site.

Example:

Good link - http://www.mysite/products.html

Bad link reported by SEOMoz - http://www.mysite/blog/my-first-post/products.html

I've also noticed that my page speed as become much slower as reported by Google.

Does anybody know what could be happening here? I know that typically it's better to install WordPress in the root and use it to control the entire site but I was under the gun to get a blog out.

Thanks

Thanks for the reply Matt!

I think I may have identified another page on our site that could be optimized for the same keyword phrase, so I made changes to the title and h1 tags along with a review of the content.

I also discovered that on the home page both my h1 and h2 tags were the same. Not sure how much that may of contributed to our recent drop but I'm going to test that out to see if it was an issue.

I've been reading a lot about keyword cannibalization and I'm worried that some of my sub pages may be pulling rank from my home page.

If I'm trying to rank my home page for the keyword phrase "blue widget manufacturing" and I have sub pages with the titles "blue manufacturing services", "blue widget enginnering", "medical widget manufacturing" is it possible that those pages could be causing me to commit keyword cannibalization?

I'm looking at a lot of the results for my keyword phrase and they don't seem to have additional pages with similar keyword phrases.

Wondering if I should change my titles so they don't look as optimized.

I'm wondering how Google calculates local search volume in the keywords tool without specifying a city or a region.

Is it just an average of the different regions or states?

I'm using the "All in One SEO" plugin and checked  the option to no follow tags and archives.

I just launched a WordPress blog on our website and SEOMoz is reporting duplicate content on all of our tags. We only have one post so far, so of course each tag is going to be duplicate. Should I no-follow those tags for the time being?

Hey Josh,

Wasting more time on it is what I was going back and forth on this morning when I saw where they placed our site. I'm kind of scratching me head as to why they would completely ignore the category that I had requested. Our company offers both products and services but our core business is our services, so says our home page and supporting content. Not sure why they placed us in a category for our products.

It's a little disappointing but the pages PR is the same.

The listing for my company was buried in a bad category in the Yahoo! Directory that had no Page Authority. I was able to get them to remove the old listing because I couldn't find the account info for the individual that originally created it. I resubmitted and they didn't put my site  in the category that I requested but the Page Authority of the category that I was placed in is 50. Is this OK? Or should I repeal and ask them to move it to the category that I had originally requested which I feel would be more relevant for my company and listing which also has a 50 PA?

Great!

Thanks, I may take you up on that!

-Brandon

Hi Bojan,

One thought I had was to create new php pages, keeping the same page name but using Apache to Rewrite the php to htm.

Any thoughts on this as an option?

-Brandon

If I use Apache Rewrite to remove my file extensions from my pages will Google view those pages as new? Do I have to also 301 redirect from the "page-name.htm" to "page-name"?

I'd like to change my pages from html to php to make my life a little easier but I'm worried about losing link juice if I were to 301 on every page.

Thanks

-Brandon

Thanks Marek,

I didn't realize that Bing was also now in control of the Directory.

-Brandon

Would using rel=author be a good idea in this situation?

I'm getting ready to distribute a press release on PRWeb and had a question regarding the proper way to optimize the headline. Should I use our targeted keywords or our brand in the headline? We don't have a really strong brand, we are not a very well know company throughout the business world.

The choices would read like this:

"Maker of Blue Widgets Receives Pretigous [big company name] Award"

or

"[Brand Name] Receives Prestigious [big company name] Award"

Any thoughts?

Thanks

-Brandon

Does anybody have any contacts over at the Yahoo! Directory? I'm trying to edit information on a very old listing and they username and password info that I was given does not exist.

I've tried filling out the online contact form but I have not received a response back.

Thanks!

Thanks for the suggestions! Recently I was trying to convince a friend of mine that he was charging too much to list in his directory. I explained to him that if I stumbled across his directory, looking at his domain rank which was 23, I would pass on his $40 submission cost.

Thanks Keri, that article is exactly what I needed!

What do you look for when submitting to directories? I'm going through the Web Directories list that SEOMoz has put out and trying to decide which are the best. I'm just wondering if anybody has any suggestions as far as what to look for before submitting.

I know PageRank is kind of an old metric but I do seem to see a correlation between PageRank and directory cost. If I submit to a directory category with a PR of 4 or 5 it seems like it will cost me anywhere between $50-$300.

I don't think a better link will be possible from this site. It's very strange, all of the content describes bluewidgets.org as if it's a company offering services. But there is not company name anywhere, not even on the about us page.

I just filled out their contact form to try to obtain more company information.

I recently found a very interesting link to two of my competitors sites. The companies are number 2 and 3 in Google for my targeted keywords (for some reason Wikipedia is number 1) and are both linked from the home page of this site.

I don't want to leave a link for linkers site because I don't want them to be able to see that I'm snooping on them but, here is the scenerio:

The site that they are linked from is a .org site. It is basically our targeted keywords in a .org. Something like bluewidgets.org. At the very bottom of the home page are some tabs, you click the first tab and it opens about 20 new tabs, when you click any of those 20 tabs it displays some text at the bottom of the page. This text is of no value to visitors, it  is obvious to me what is happening here. Both companies are linked with targeted keywords in the anchor and title text.

I'm wondering if I should also pursue a link from this page. I know there is value in a .org link but this site seems to be built to link to those two sites.

Anybody else ever run into anything like I'm describing. Should I post a link to this site?

I have a navigation menu at the top of my page with drop down menus that lead to different pages of my web site. Very typical navigation.

If I have a page that is optimized for a particular keyword, lets say "Awesome Blue Widgets", do I want to remove that link from the navigation menu on the page awesome-blue-widgets.htm since the link uses the keyword phrase "Awesome Blue Widgets'?

Yes, I did misinterpret when to properly use rel canonical. Google seemed to respond the way I was expecting though. All of my new pages went into the index while the old pages were ignored.

Once a 301 is in place, is it safe to remove the old page from the server?

Thanks for your response. I've been reading a lot about the rel=canonical for duplicate content so I figured that I had a situation in which I should utilize it. I also found this Matt Cuts video where he describes when to use rel=canonical and when to 301.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=zW5UL3lzBOA

watch?feature=player_embedded&v=zW5UL3lzBOA

I've had to rename some of the pages on my site and also move them to different locations. I placed a rel="canonical" on the old page pointing to the new one. The reports on my PRO Dashboard are telling me that I have Duplicate Content and Page Title errors.

Do the SEOMoz automated reports take the rel="canonical" link into consideration or do I need to remove these pages and do a 301 redirect from the old to the new page?

Thank you for the responses!

The reason why I thought it may be effective is because I had seen it done on a few sites. Specifically when a CMS is used to manage the sites content. If you place a h1 tag into your header file it's going to care through every page of the site.

I will definitly be changing that strategy ASAP!

Thanks for the help.

Should I have the same H1 tag in my header through out my entire site? Or is this considered to be  self canalization for my main keywords.

For example right now I have an H1 tag with my main targeted keywords on every page on my site, even if the pages content doesn't necessarily match the keywords in the H1 tag.

Thanks for the help!

Ugh, that's what I thought.

So basically I need to make a major decision regarding which pages I want to rank and for and for what keyword. I could focus our home page just on the company brand and try to get the sub page ranked for the targeted keyword. Of course it's always easier to build links to the home page rather than to the sub pages.

So I think I might have identified an issue with a site that I'm trying to get ranked for a specific keyword but, wanted to get some opinions before I started making some big changes on the site.

On my homepage I have the keyword that I would like to be ranked for in the title lets say "Blue Widgets - Company Name', also on the home page I have some descriptions of our services including the keywords. I also have a couple of the keyword based links within in the content, navigation and footer. But these keyword based links all point to another page on the site: blue-widgets.htm. If I really want my home page to rank for the keyword "Blue Widgets' should all of these links point to the home page instead of the sub page?

I know there are a great number of other factors that contribute to rankings but looking at my competition, this is something that they seem to be doing. The keyword based links within the content, navigation or footer all point to the homepage.  I also have a higher Domain Authority than some of the sites that rank higher than me so I'm not sure if building more links is the answer. Of course I always want to build natural links but these sites don't seem to be doing that either.

Any comments, suggestions or input would be greatly appreciated.

Is it important to "cover your tracks" when searching for links? For example, would be it be a better idea to search for valuable links off of my companies network?

If so, what are your strategies for stealth searching?

Thank you for the advice everyone!

Is there any value in creating a Wikipedia page for a company then placing a link from a Wikipedia article that is focused on a service or type of product that the company offers?

I was recently searching for topics related to a companies services on Wikipedia and found some of our competitors had links within the article to their very own Wikipedia pages. Companies Wikipedia page contained a link to the companies website.

Gyi Tsakalakis

I actually went to management with three sites that ranked on page one of Google for our most important keyword and asked them to verify that the companies were our competition. Management countered me by printing out some pages from a competitor that they knew of but ranked no where near the top of Google. So I think they kind of missed the point of what I was trying to prove. So I've had some difficulty even getting off the ground.

Thanks for your response.  I have been spending some of my own time gathering some data on our current rankings for some our most important keywords. I'm happy to say that some time that I've spent recently on some on page optimization have increased our rankings for some keyterms. But now it's time to push the site to page one of Google instead of page 2-3-4 or 5.

You hit the nail on the head regarding my current situation. A very small amount of my time is spent managing the website but I feel as if it should be a full time position. Instead of letting it sit and HOPE that people will visit and contact us, we need to spend more time climbing the ranking and then experimenting with landing pages to get visitors to convert.

Perhaps a power point presentation with graphs, historical rankings and suggestions and what to do moving forward is in order?

I currently work for a contract manufacturing company so when I think about building links it seems as if it's going to be a daunting task. Mainly because any kind of content that you can come up with is rather dry. When I go about searching for links I usually run into a lot of directories that charge anywhere between $25-$50 for a listing.

I've had a hard time convincing marketing that we should start a blog which may be a good way to build some links if we come up with quality posts but those posts may be few and far inbetween.

Does anybody have any recommendations for building links for this type of company or subject matter?

Also, and I'm sure we have all heard this. When I mentioned the fact that we should be building some quality links to the site marketing first asked why and then commented "Well that shouldn't take you too long". Why is it so difficult to get management to accept the fact that managing a website is an ongoing and constantly changing process that involves research and experimentation?

When changing the title meta tag to: KW | Company Name

I have a little extra room, should I add the City and State to the end of the meta tag?

Ok, I could see doing that if the url was a keyword term. That makes a lot of sense now. Our url is the brand of the company so putting the main keyword term first may be a better strategy.

I could also seeing doing that if my business was based on the internet.

EGOL,

Do you have sub pages for all of those keywords? With the page named according to the keywords?

That is the first time I've ever seen a recommendation to put the url in the title tag. I don't think I've seen that anywhere. What advantage does that have over placing a keyword first.

Question about a sites most important keyword term.

So lets say you have a website and your most important keyword term is "Blue Widgets", you also have a page named "blue-widgets.htm". What do we do with our index page in this instance? Especially for the title  tag? Should I put "Blue Widgets" in the title tags of both pages? I'm guessing this would be a duplicate meta tag error?

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks
-Brandon