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Thanks for the response. This is a definitely work around, but for Products / Offers only.
This doesn't help when applying Microdata / Schema to "global" site specific parameters, such as Author or Organization.(http://schema.org/Organization)Any one have any ideas of how this should be handled on a global level that doesn't involve turning the Microdata On / Off?
I have a quick question regarding Microdata / Schema.org files that are not hosted on secure connections.
I receive a receive a security error from my e-commerce site because the code references the schema over HTTP instead of HTTPS.<div< span="">itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Product"></div<>This is not the first time I have run into this issue. We also use MRSS schema for an RSS feed from yahoo and the same thing happens.<div< span="">xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss"></div<>The problem mainly lies in the fact that these schemas are not hosted over HTTPS. If you add HTTPS to the beginning of both you will get a security error.Just wondering if anyone else has dealt with this or similar issue and what the "best practices" are around this?Is it ok to obtain the schema directly and then host it on our server, over our secure connection?Thanks!
The white hat in me knows that the answer to this question is most likely that the company bloggers should write under their own names, else the very concept of AuthorRank is undermined. Yet, I've had these questions for a while now and I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts on the issue. Hoping this sparks some good discussion.
On a recent post in /r/SEO I mentioned that I used SEOHosting.com in the past, and it was met with several warnings that this could result in deindexation or penalization. I just wanted to know if there is anything to back this up.
I did some digging on my own and it looks like some of the private blog networks that got shut down recently were using SEOHosting.com, and they were speculating (screenshot of pertinent parts included below) that this is how Google was able to track down their network and shut 'em down. But I've also heard a lot of speculation that the smartest way for Google to map out these networks would be to create tons of content, submit it all, and look for patterns - which has me wondering what role, if any, SEOHosting.com played in taking down the private blog networks earlier this month.
Is using SEOHosting.com a legitimate concern? Is it a threat even to websites that meet Google's quality guidelines? Is it especially a threat to those that don't?
Any thoughts you guys have would be greatly appreciated.
The SEOmoz Web App is showing me that every single URL on one of my clients' domains has a duplicate in the form of the URL + :80.
For instance, the app is showing me that www.example.com/default.aspx is duplicated in the form of www.example.com:80/default.aspx
Any idea if this is an actual problem or just some kind of reporting error? Any help would be appreciated.
Quite simply, you can't access someone else's analytics data. Well, not without their username and password, or an extremely talented hacker, at least.
There are a few ways (think Alexa) you can estimate traffic - some of them are better than the rest, but all of them are imperfect. When you compare a website to another and use these metrics in a relative sense, however, they can be useful. Try looking up the estimated search volume of a competitors' brand names compared to your brand name using the Google Keyword Tool. This won't give you an accurate traffic estimate, but it might just help you figure out who's getting the most traffic and where your website falls in the market.
This is exactly the kind of situation that rel="canonical" exists for. Product color is one of those classic examples SEOs bring up when explaining canonicalization. Don't trust Google to figure things out on their own - make it clear to them that these pages are related and should be treated as such.
Most strategies that work well for dominating your brand name SERP usually rely on piggybacking off another website's massive domain authority, optimizing the on-page factors as much as possible for your brand, and running a small linkbuilding campaign towards these webpages to give them a page authority bump and a backlink profile with targeted anchor text.
Sources that work well for this type of campaign are :
Additionally, make sure you have Sitelinks properly set up, as this can sometimes make your website the only search result above the fold.
Another amazingggg strategy that I read somewhere last year is to always keep a generic, can-be-released-whenever press release written and ready to go. Get a negative blog writeup or some bad press that's appearing in your search results because it's at the top of Google News? Release your PR and push it out of the way. So. Effing. Smart.
Will it cause harm? Not likely. If Google suspects the links aren't kosher, it will probably just ignore (or "devalue") the links.
As to whether it is a shady or manipulative practice - debatable. From my perspective, I don't quite see how it is all that different from a company linking to its partners, suppliers, or customers. The link represents a business relationship, and that relationship has value. If I have a client in the position to get these kinds of links, for me it's a no brainer - get 'em. At the very worst, they have no impact SEO-wise, but help with branding and referral traffic. Google's perspective may differ.
As to why the practice might not be working out so well for you - do you run linkbuilding campaigns for the websites you develop? Does anybody? Do many of the websites share a C class address?
A bunch of links from websites with weak backlink profiles or the same C class addresses won't take you very far.
BONUS - a few linkbuilding tactics guaranteed to work:
No doubt - you're not the only one who hasn't had a ton of success thus far with the social network. Google Search Plus Your World is an attempt to integrate the social network into their search engine, using their biggest asset to promote Google+. With this move, Google hopes to increase the Google+ user base and make their social network relevant.
If Google gets its way and Google Search Plus Your World does its part in promoting Google+, you might find those +1 buttons being used more frequently. That's the idea, anyways.
You may have heard that Google Search Plus Your World has been included in the FTC's anti-trust probe. This is presumably because Google is favoring its own social network in search results over Facebook and Twitter. Google has said this is only because Facebook and Twitter's terms of service prevent this from happening, and that they are open to the idea of integrating these social networks. If this happens, Search Plus Your World will have implications not just for your Google+ page, but for the rest of your social media presences as well.
A spammy link blast might just do the trick, but your SEO results won't have anywhere near the type of longevity that it would have had you used high quality link building tactics like guest blogging. A few great links will solidify your client's position in the results and make the lives of competing SEOs that much more difficult in the future.
Moreover, while low quality exact-match anchor text links might help out one page for one keyword, building strong, high quality links to individual landing pages will have a cumulative effect on your ENTIRE domain's authority, and with increased domain authority comes increased long-tail traffic across the board. Plus, once your domain is viewed as authoritative, you'll be able to rank for mildly competitive terms just by publishing content.
Add the +1 button to every page on your website. When people +1 a page on your website, it will be more likely to come up in their personalized search results, as well as their friends personalized search results. The user activity will also typically be published to the user's Google+ profile for their friends to see.
Build a Google+ page for your business and regularly update it as you would Facebook or Twitter. Invite your users to connect with your brand on Google+ via a badge on your profile, an e-mail blast, and cross-posts to other social media accounts you actively maintain.
Open Site Explorer is the tool you are looking for. Generally, you want to seek out links from websites/pages that are relevant to your niche and have a strong Domain/Page Authority, which is a reflection of the strength and diversity of their inbound link profile. The more authoritative the page or domain, the stronger the link.
As for determining if a website is low quality (beyond SEOmoz authority metrics), you can use Open Site Explorer dive into the target website's backlinks. You should also obviously view the website and see if it passes a quick human review - is the website well organized, filled with high quality content, and well designed? If a website's strongest links appear spammy or their on-site tactics appear to be anything less than clean, you might want to consider moving on to the next opportunity.
In general, though, don't fret too much about making sure that each and every link opportunity presented to you is 100% clean. It is highly, highly unlikely that your website will ever be negatively impacted by an external link; even the most manipulative link tactics are usually just ignored by Google. Focus on keeping your on-site tactics clean and making sure that any external links ON your website are to good neighborhoods. Moreover, focus on building links with websites that have strong followings or large communities around them - don't forget, referral traffic can be every bit as powerful as organic search traffic.
The Official Google Webmaster Blog published a great post last year about getting quality links to your site. It may be worth the read.
Although it isn't inconceivable to create a landing page specifically for one linkbuilding campaign, and I'm sure I could figure out a time and a place for that, linkbuilding is generally an activity that is done to an entire website. Starting out from the very top...
First, figure out who your target visitor is. Then, thoroughly research exactly what keywords you wish to rank for organically (based on relevance to these target visitors, estimated traffic from these keywords, available conversion rate information, and level of competition). Once you know what keywords you need to go after, figure out how these keywords work with your current content. Sometimes you can simply assign your target keywords to relevant existing content, or repurpose current content to fit in with your target keywords. Usually you have to create new content, at least to some extent, to target keywords on your wishlist. In many ways, that's the same thing as building a landing page specifically for a linkbuilding campaign.
Once you've got your content and keywords all squared away, linkbuilding generally does not focus on one specific page, but on a wide variety of important pages. Part of Google's algorithm is not just the authority and trust of a given page, but the authority and trust of the entire domain, so it is beneficial to build links to each important page on your website. Because of a variety of factors, most websites have a majority of their links pointed at their homepage, however other pages containing important information, great content, or any other type of linkbait typically have large amounts of links pointed at them as well - hence the reason why most people around SEOmoz will recommend content-based linkbuilding strategies.
Try poking around SEOmoz's Open Site Explorer and checking out a few different websites. Analyze the nature of their link profile, where the links are headed, what their top content is, the anchor text they've been using, and how different webpages and websites compare in terms of link metrics like domain authority and trust. See if you can deconstruct how these websites built or earned their most valuable links.
Finding blogs can certainly be difficult when you've guest posted on 300+ blogs in your niche. I wrote a YouMoz post last year about ways to find guest post opportunities - perhaps that could be of some inspiration?
I also created a free tool to help generate queries to find guest post opportunities based on a variety of keywords - it sounds similar to the method you've used to find current guest post opportunities, but perhaps there are a couple query variations that you haven't tried yet - check it out here: Guest Post Opportunity Finder.
Aside from that, what comes to mind is figuring out ways to post on blogs that may not be directly related to your niche - in other words, horizontal guest blogging. For example, if you are doing SEO for a construction company, don't solely focus on construction blogs, but figure out ways to create content that can be shopped to real estate, home improvement, and green or sustainable building blogs. Sugarrae wrote an awesome post that talks about horizontal guest blogging.
Open up a picture of yourself on Facebook and turn your attention to the URL. It should look something like this:
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10150447363550460&set=t.8844147&type=3&theater
The bolded number is your user ID.
I know that they're saying this will only affect a single-digit percentage of organic searches, but isn't it plausible that in certain niches or communities it could take away a much larger portion of keyword data. Any SEO blog might be a good example. I would hypothesize that the average SEOmoz visitor is more likely to have a Google account (and be signed in) than a visitor to, say, MarthaStewart.com. Could this be a bigger blow to some websites' analytics data than Google is letting on?
Thanks, Ryan. I appreciate the answers, especially for the second question. Link exchanges aren't really my style as far as link building is concerned, but it kind of popped into my head as a result of the first question, so I figured I'd throw it out there. Thanks for the responses!
Hypothetical Situations:
My intuition here, and the answer that I expect, is that if it's good for users, the link belongs there, and as such there is no trouble with linking to the post. Is this the right way to think about it? Would grey hats agree?
My intuition here, and the answer that I expect, is that this would be a sneaky practice, and could lead to bad blood with the people you're exchanging links with. Would these tactics even be effective in turning a reciprocal link into a one-way link if you could overlook the potential immorality of the practice? Would grey hats agree?
Pretty cool tip, actually. Somehow I've never seen this before.
What about Yahoo Site Explorer? I'm not sure how it matches up next to Open Site Explorer, but it's worth a shot. Also, you could potentially use Google to find it, with a query like "site:www.domain.com your website name" or even using the link operator if your website name isn't necessarily on the page or in the anchor text.
In short, yes.
Don't get me wrong. It is perfectly fine to publish press releases on your website. Google isn't going to lose trust in your website from selected content that might be syndicated elsewhere. Give them a little credit. Google certainly recognizes that press releases, however boring and uninspired, make up a necessary part of how companies communicate, and thus a necessary segment of content on the web. Their algorithm, for all of its faults, is not completely without common sense. Moreover, having selected content on your website that is duplicated elsewhere isn't necessarily a dealbreaker. Google, particularly with Panda, seems to evaluate the trust of your website as a sitewide sort of factor, and a couple pieces of duplicate content aren't necessarily going to mess up your day.
But if press releases do make up a significant portion of the content on your website, I would say you're definitely at risk. Google will learn that your website isn't dishing out unique content, and they'll trust your website less because of it. Moreover, press releases aren't exactly the world's best type content, even if they are completely original and don't exist elsewhere on the internet. The fact is that there are much better opportunities to create original, engaging, and shareable content, and taking advantage of those opportunities will help your SEO efforts much more than any amount of press releases you could possibly publish.
Much respect to Steve Jobs, but I definitely salivated when I saw it too, for a moment. Quite possibly the most powerful link in the entire world - although it's presence will be short-lived, undoubtedly.
Well, it's going to make registrars a ton of money, that's for sure. So the financial incentive is there, for them. Big corporations will eat it up too - and why shouldn't they? It offers a great branding perspective, and because of the somewhat selective nature of who will be allowed to actually register for these TLDs, adds a definite legitimacy factor to any company fortunate enough to get one.
I agree with Gianluca. I think having a keyword-rich Twitter handle has extremely limited value, whereas conversely, a Twitter handle with your brand can have a ton of upside.
Considering that it will cost $185,000 USD just to apply for a .brand TLD, you may want to first make sure that this will be an issue that you or your clients are realistically likely to encounter before you lose any sleep over it.
That aside, nobody's quite sure how these TLDs will affect search rankings. Given Google's growing (and increasingly worrying, for some) trend of trusting established brands in search rankings, it is certainly possible that having a .brand domain name could help your search rankings. Moreover, some aggressive applicants are likely to try to snag keyword-rich .brand domains, although it is anyone's guess as to how Google will weigh the importance of keywords in the TLD algorithmically.
Distilled had a pretty good article on their blog a while back. It's not an authoritative source for how this will play out (that doesn't exist, because we simply don't know enough yet), but it is an interesting analysis. Definitely worth a read if you're interested in these new TLDs.
Yes, this will be seen as duplicate content. There's no "easy" way to create unique content for each locale. The best you can do is have a general outline and outsource the content creation to a high quality writer (or sit down and start writing yourself). Article spinning or cheap writers will lead to low quality articles that will be difficult to get to rank well.
I don't think there is any "good" rule of thumb out there, as it really depends on your website and the amount of authority you have, but I would say that your SEO guy is certainly right in that you should try to cut back on the amount of links you have. I don't know what your website is, but I would generally say that anywhere close to 1000 is probably too much. Mathematically speaking, the more links you have on any given page, the more the "link juice" is going to be divided up. For this reason, it makes sense to focus internal links on your most important pages, particularly if they are coming from one of your strongest pages, like your home page.
SEOmoz's Pro tool uses 100 links as their standard. Any pages with more than 100 links get flagged. In Danny Dover's book, Search Engine Optimization Secrets, I believe he cites his number as 150.
Dr. Pete wrote a tremendous post on this topic earlier this year which is certainly worth a read.
The rule of thumb I would use: Are these links good for the user? Is this the optimal way to offer easy navigation to my visitors? Can this be done easier, cleaner, or more efficiently?
At the end of the day, if your page is authoritative enough, something like too many links isn't going to pose a problem. But if they're affecting user experience, or if they're weakening your SEO efforts, than they can certainly hold you back.
SEOmoz knows and has acknowledged that this resource requires a good bit of TLC. That being said, there are still a couple of good directories in that list - it's not a terrible starting point.
In general, I would try to minimize the importance of directory submissions in your link building process. For my clients and my personal projects, I target perhaps 10-20 high value general directories (some paid, like Yahoo and JoeAnt), as many high quality niche directories as I can find, and then I move on. It's not a huge part of my process, and I don't think it should be a huge part of yours. The fact is that these websites have thousands upon thousands of outbound links that dilute the power of the link to your website, which is already buried deep on some sub-topic page below hundreds of other links. There are directories that are the exception to the rule and do indeed provide great links and good click-through traffic, but in my experience, those are usually industry-specific.
Now, I'm sure a lot of other SEOs on this forum do way more directory submissions than I do (I'm definitely on the low side), but I think most people here will agree that you don't want to make them a big part of your link building strategy. Pour your time and energy into creating great content, networking with bloggers and auhority figures on Twitter, writing guest posts, etc. I'll take one GREAT link from one of the above methods over 1,000 directory links in a heartbeat - and I think that you should too.
I think you should check this article out by Rand Fishkin. He goes into detail about some companies in very BORING industries that have managed to develop incredibly successful link bait.
Probably not. I've tried it all, from paying for social bookmarks to just submitting content and hoping for clicks. What I've found is that if your content is truly quality, it's not going to need links to pick up steam and get shared. A little nudge to your Twitter followers should be sufficient. If an article sucks, buying 100 thumbs ups or diggs isn't going to really get it any exposure. These things tend to balance themselves out - high quality content always rises to the top.
Here is a good list of them from Parallels.com. The Page strength is only a 17, but the domain strength is 100 and the links are not nofollowed.
Ah, gotcha. In my experiences dealing with SMB clients, some great links for local businesses are from:
I don't mean to steer you away from link exchange requests as a tactic. It can certainly be useful, and you're right, it can be an easy method for small businesses to obtain links from other local companies or websites. I just get frustrated by the low response rate and oftentimes relatively weak link opportunities that I see with this tactic. Usually local competitors' websites are just like your own before you start working on SEO - weak, unoptimized, and with few backlinks.
I'd rather spend my time to get a guest post published on an authoritative website in my industry. It might not be as relevant of a link as one of my competitors in the area, but I can guarantee that it is going to have a ton of authority and link juice behind it.
I'm glad you posted this, because I noticed the same thing with one of my competitors as well. It was a file from Parallels.org, and I couldn't for the life of me figure out what it was. Anybody got an answer?
I don't really do any formal reciprocal link exchanges via e-mail, but I do have a ton of success with the following method:
1.) Write a great blog post or piece of content for your own website. Include in it links to other great blogs or resources about the topic you're writing about.
When the post is published, Tweet at the people whose websites you linked to and let them know that you mentioned their amazing, helpful resource in your latest post.
This generates a TON of retweets, and once in a while a great link back to my website from the blog/website that I mentioned. It also helps me establish a line of communication with authoritative figures in my industry. In short order, it puts me on their map, making future link requests much easier.
I know this isn't exactly what you're looking for, but I thought you might find it interesting. Just my $0.02!
My short answer, which is also included in my YOUmoz post that got published today, 15 Smart Ways to Find Guest Posting Opportunities, is to do both.
Posting on a number of blogs helps build a large quantity of relevant, high quality back links. Some part of SEO, however big, is indeed a numbers game. You want to get as many external root domains linking to you as possible.
Posting on one blog, however, can help you build a following within their community. Particularly for A-list blogs in your niche, you will find that if you write multiple guest posts, stay active on the comments section of your guest posts, and interact with their community via social media, you will get (at least) as much benefit out of the branding and traffic implications of your guest posting strategy as you will out of the link you built. The SEOmoz knowledge base has a great thread on this exact topic.
If I had to pick just one, I would go deeper into just a few blogs, assuming that these blogs truly are authority websites in your industry. I understand that it can be difficult to have the time to create all of this high quality content, so you will need to prioritize, and so you may opt to focus on a few authoritative blogs at first, and then expand outwards.
Shamless Self-Promotion: If you're looking for ways to scale the development of high quality content, check out one of my recent blog posts, 3 Ways to Outsource High Quality Content Creation. Having the time to consistently write great content can be tricky, and these are the methods I use to help me out.
I'm sure by now a lot of you have had a chance to read the Let's Kill the "Bad Inbound Links Can Get Your Site Penalized" Myth over at SearchEngineJournal.
When I initially read this article, I was happy. It was confirming something that I believed, and supporting a stance that SEOmoz has taken time and time again. The idea that bad links can only hurt via loss of link juice when they get devalued, but not from any sort of penalization, is indeed located in many articles across SEOmoz.
Then I perused the comments section, and I was shocked and unsettled to see some industry names that I recognized were taking the opposite side of the issue. There seems to be a few different opinions:
Now, I know that SEOmoz preaches a link building strategy that targets high quality back links, and so if you completely prescribe to the Moz method, you've got nothing to worry about. I don't want to hear those answers here - they're right, but they're missing the point. It would still be prudent to have a correct stance on this issue, and I'm wondering if we have that.
What do you guys think? Does anybody have an opinion one way or the other? Does anyone have evidence of it being one way or another? Can we setup some kind of test, rank a keyword for an arbitrary term, and go to town blasting low quality links at it as a proof of concept? I'm curious to hear your responses.
I don't know about all that...
A quick site: search turned up this Game of Thrones paper.li which is indexed by Google. The links look pretty good to me on the text-only version of their cached page.
The links are not nofollowed, so one could reason that there is some link juice being paseed. How much link juice? Hard question to answer. Paper.li is pretty much just a really polished content scraper, so I can't imagine these links would be super valuable in Google's eyes, but they definitely won't hurt you.
Yessir. SEOmoz is just trying to have your back - there's no need for concern whatsoever.
Items under the "Notices" section are just that - notices. If a canonical tag points to a URL other than the page it is on, the notice comes up. This is because engines will not count this page as the reference resource, meaning it won't have the opportunity to rank - which could be a terrible situation if you're using the tag incorrectly. SEOmoz includes the notice just to make sure you're targeting the right page.
You can learn more about canonicalization and the rel="canonical" tag at the below resources:
Additionally, you can find information about other crawl diagnostics in the SEOmoz Help Forums.
Cool! I'm primarily concerned with for-profit uses, so that's great to know. I'll definitely check it out. Thanks for sharing your experience.
Ah, good to know. I found this because my old fraternity (yeah, yeah, shutup) at Rutgers has all of their pledges using it, which I thought was super creative and a great idea to brand themselves on campus. These kids are getting smart!
Exactly. And don't forget to check your analytics to see how those keywords are converting, too! These are the little details that separate good keyword research from great keyword research.
Nope, and you won't find that kind of tool anywhere, the reason being that each page on your website probably ranks for hundreds of extremely long-tail keywords and keyphrases.
The best way to see the information you're looking for is to take all keywords that sent you an organic search visit for a given time period in your analytics and run them through a rank checker. You can then cross-check this data with the Google Keyword Tool to figure out which keywords are getting significant traffic.
This can be a great way to spot "low-hanging fruit" - keywords that you are ranking for naturally and are sending some traffic, but might just need a little push to get your page to the #1 spot.
I stumbled across Twibbon today - it's a service that basically creates an easy way for you to brand your Twitter/Facebook pictures, and to allow others to promote your cause as well.
I'm not sure if I'm late to get on board here or if this is a relatively new thing, but it seems pretty cool. I can definitely see this really working out for promoting philanthropic causes. It would also work really well for events - imagine if every speaker at an SEO conference used Twibbon to brand their Twitter/Facebook? I think it would really help with branding, for both individuals and businesses.
301 redirects are indeed the proper way to restructure URLs, and adding these shouldn't hurt you. This is confirmed by a post by Barry Schwartz on Search Engine Roundtable a few years back. The one thing you do want to make sure to avoid is "chaining" 301 redirects, as noted by Matt Cutts.
Right that's what threw me off as well, and that's why I ruled out the possibility that it was pulling the site titles from the ODP. Here is Google's explanation of how they choose Title/Description snippets. I suppose they could just be pulling it from the content of the website and writing their own, but I've never really encountered that happening without it being related to an external link source. Strange. Hopefully another SEOmozzer can provide better insight.
I can't be sure without digging into your site a bit, but Google has been known to use the anchor text of strong links to your website in place of your title tag, on some occasions. This is discussed in this YOUmoz post, Distilled Stole My Page Title.
Could this be the cause?
