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Option A seems to be the best option as it can pass linkjuice you could get on a deep page (training-course/date/time) to the main course page.

In SEO we have a saying "If it ain't broken, don't fix it!"

As long as everything is fine with your ranking and trafic, you should not worry too much about those long URLs

I think it is not worth the effort

However, you should probably make sure new content is given shorter urls

Best of luck!

Normally, Search Engines cannot use such data directly because they don't have access to it! How would google know what bounce rate your have on your website?

Many marketers say that usage data like bounce rates, number of visists... will influence rankings in some way, but there is still no evidence for that.

Plus, an 80% bounce rate cannot always be a bad thing, imagine a user looking for an info, he finds your website, reads the page that answers his or her question, you have a 100% bounce rate but the user is satisfied, what's wrong with that?

A good way to reduce bounce rates on a website is to:

• link to related content

• have an easy to navigate website

• engage the user by letting him comment

...

Hope that helps!

What you should keep in mind is that your website does not have one unique position, it is always changing depending on the IP that made the search, the google domain used, the time of the search...

I know that sometimes SEOMoz Pro needs more than a week to start seeing your ranking, but a best practice would be to have other tools (some of them being you checking manually) to confirm your position

Also, you should always say my website is AROUND xxth position, that way you won't be too wrong

Hope that helps!

I second Keri, you need to provide more details and background about your site and promotion strategies for us to be able to help you.

If the redirection is made at the server level via a .htaccess file, then the server will never serve the original (old) copy of the page.

This means you can do whatever you want with it, as it will never be shown!

You are most welcome!

Happy new year to you too!

I have taken a quick look at your website.

In terms of SEO, I would say that your vendor didn't do a bad job.

In fact, it would be hard to ask for more than a well structured website, clean URLs, good titles... if you didn't specifically request a Search Engine Optimized website.

Of course, there are many major improvements that could be made like adding a sitemap, a robots.txt file, description to pages...

Here is a tool that will give you a nice broad picture of your website's SEO:

http://www.woorank.com/

Hope that helps!

In AdWords, you get a sens of the competition between advertisers willing to pay for clics on ads for this keywords whereas in SEOMoz, you get an evaluation of how competitive it would be to try and rank organically (without paying) for that keyword.

Hope that helps

When google is recalculating/reassessing your credentials (trust, popularity...) typically after a major update/change to your website/page, it is not uncommon that a page drops heavily before recovering to a much better position.

Best thing you can do is wait a few days and see what happens.

When you are doing "well" or "not so bad", you should always keep a backup before making any changes, this way you can go back to the older version much more quickly.

As long as you are doing well in the serps and you really don't have other options, I don't see why you would change anything just to please others in an upcoming, uncertain... outreach campaign

You could change the titre temporarily (for a few days) just long enough to do your outreach, but I am not fond of changes when it comes to Google...

Normally, a good practice is to have no more than 100 links per page, otherwise it might be seen by some search engines (Google) as an overly agressive internal linking strategy.

SEOMoz initial crawl is just "initial", this means a deeper crawl will be performed next week end every week you will get a deeper understanding of the issues on the website.

Hope I am being clear enough

You are most welcome!

Good luck to you

If you can get the buyer to put redirects in place, here are your three options:

1. Redirect ANYTHING to the new domain's homepage: olddom.com/* => newdom.com

This is very easy to do technically, can even be done in the domain registrar's control panel. However, that's a bad option from an SEO point of view as you would be redirection anything (pages, contact info, product...) to your a single page, your homepage.

Should be used as a last option.

2. Redirect pages individually. You would end up with an .htaccess like that (I am assuming you didn't change anything to the site's structure):

redirect 301 /dir1/page32.php http://www.newdom.com/dir1/page32.php

redirect 301 /dir1/page33.php http://www.newdom.com/dir1/page33.php

redirect 301 /dir1/page34.php http://www.newdom.com/dir1/page34.php

...

This option is obviously time consuming but will give you the most control and the best SEO results as you will direct every single page (old one) to the new one (updated URL) passing its link juice and everything.

3. A generic redirect that will automatically redirect each and every page to its corresponding one on the new domain:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^oldsite.com

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://newsite.com/$1 [R=301,L]

This is very similar to option 2 but it is not as time consuming.

Hope that helps.

Unless you really need the space to type in a long tweet, it is obviously better to include a direct link to your website for at least two reasons:

• help build your brand (people see your domain, not a shortner)

• help get social signals to improve your SEO efforts indirectly

Hope that helps.

Your assumptions are globally right. However, I have never seen Google react that quickly to a 301 redirect or even a crash, I always tell my customers "if you have a temporary issue with 404 and 500 erros, don't worry about it too much, Google won't react unless it is a permanent issue that lasts over three or four crawls".

This is why I would also investigate a penalty that just happened to take effect shortly after the crash. To rule that out, could you please tell us if some of your major keywords are still ranking well?

I don't think you sould worry too much about that, just wait a few days and see if some pages recover.

I think you know the answer, you just need someone else to confirm that there is little you can do!

Obviously, you should start by updating the links you control and build some new ones.

You must alos make certain the content is unique and that the buyer doens't use the original content.

If you had implemented authorship, you could still benefit from it by updating the links.

That's all I can think of.

Of course, the best thing you could get is a nice 301 Redirection for the buyer.

Google luck!

Google's algo tends sometimes to adapt the snippet shown on the serps to the user query.

In other words, if a user is seraching for "new orleans" and it occurs in your content but not in your description, Google will automatically show the sentence(s) where it apears so the user can decide to clic or not

Hope that's clear enough

The easy answer is: try removing the links and see what happens, if nothing changes, put them back up!

The more pro approach would be to try and understand what makes a spammy link in google's algo eyes. Take a look at this very nice article:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/17-types-of-link-spam-to-avoid

Hope that helps

In GWT you are only allowed to associate your website with one country.

The first question is: should you associate your website with one country if you want to target two countries?

If you have a primary traget and a secondary one, that may be a good idea, otherwise, I would let the .co.nz do the job for NZ and try to get links from an Australian neighborhood, which means associating your website with other web properties clearly linked to Australia (content, domain, links they have...).

Hope that helps

You seem to be doing it just right.

I would also use some kewyords in the title to deversify and sometimes a link inside the comment itself (when possible/allowed)

No-follow links are backlinks, they just pass very little if any linkjuice.

To have a natural looking link profile, you need to have a decent proportion of nofollow links, so they are usefull for this reason at the very least.

This is a decision you only face at blog creation time, once you have strated your blog and it is established, I don't see anything that should push you to change unless it is a "business reason"

A subdomain is arguably not the best practice, but it is not a bad one either

YES, we have a methodology that yields results both on the short and long terms.

Nothing has really changed for us since those updates as we already had very cautious linkbuilding strategies done 100% manually, the hard way!

That's a very common pattern in the SEO area

Just keep building quality links knowing that a portion of them will probably never be of any use, but you cannot guess proactively which ones!

You never really know when a link's effect has been applied, you don't even know if it has been applied.

In fact, a link's effect can be "your rankings were maintened (no change) thanks to that link that helped keep up with your competitors' linkbuilding strategies"

The website giving you the link could also evolve prositively (or negatively) and you won't see an effect until many months later.

The simple answer is NO

However, keep in mind that the IP has a very very small impact on your rankings.

If you target the French market, you have a very slight advantage in getting an IP from France

Also, try to get a good host so your website's loading speed doesn't get affected.

Other than that, I really don't see anything.

Oh, don't forget "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"

We have helped many customers achieve TOP 5 rankings without ever using content marketing!

In fact, there are many other powerful linkbuilding strategies like :

• blog commenting on quality blogs with dofollow comments
• forum posting on area specific forums with incontent links
• social bookmarking
• directories preferably good quality one and done manually of course

Of course, you might say, this is so old style SEO! And I would have to agree with you, but guess what? they still work quite well even on highly competitive keywords when done properly.

Anyway, good luck to you.

http://p3consulting.com/ already exists, so #3 is not an option (you would be working for them)

#2 has a USP in it, what would you do when you want to change it? However, you might want to register it and use it as a "brand" or secondary/specific website.

#1 and #4 are not bad, but they are a bit long.

As you will probably need the word "consulting" in your future SEO actions, I guess #4 is the best.

Good luck!

You should always try and track the density of your target phrase, not individual words.

That being said, I second Cody in that you shouldn't worry to much about the density itself. Try to apply those rules :

• use exact phrase at least twice in the content (more if you have a lot of content)

• use a variation (plural, adverbial form...) of the phrase

• put it in bold once or twice

For more details about on page optimisation, this old post is still a very good one :

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/perfecting-keyword-targeting-on-page-optimization

In addition to what has been said, I think you also need to understand how it all works for you to make the best decision.

It is all about DNS propogation, it is the time taken to update all the servers around the web with the new IP to point to when one looks for your domain name. Now yourdomain.com points to 195.81.76.22 and you want to move it to 156.22.101.85 (examples only)

While the update is propagating, some visitors will get the old IP (website on yahoo) and others will get the updated one (on the other host) so there is no downtime.

The issue is with dynamic sites (forums, blogs...) you might get data (comments, posts...) that will be made to the version on Yahoo and will be lost once everyone goes to the new host.

I your website is static, just go ahead and move your files and update your DNS records and don't worry about anything else.

If your website is dynamic, then you should copy the data at a given time and either :

• block the old website from getting comments/posts/entries...
• copy the data manually from the database once all DNS have been updated (hard to do)
• accept to lose some infos

Hope that helps