This one:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-seomoz-office-gets-a-new-do
I know it's not strictly SEO related, but it came at a really cool time in my freelance career and was awesome motivation.
Latest posts made by JGar-28032
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RE: What is your favorite SEOmoz blog post of all time? And why?posted in Content Development
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RE: Move the content from mycompany.es to mycompany.com is worth it?posted in Technical SEO
Nope. I would buy the .com, and if/when you're ready explore international SEO with it; but for now I would just 301 it to the domain you've had this whole time. It's the one with links to it, the original content, and the right top-level country code for your target audience.
I say this generally because the TLD isn't going to have the impact. But, I don't know anything about either domains. Was it used for a very similar business model/is it getting traffic, all that other stuff?
Simply age and domain extension aren't enough reasons, but if you're buying a running and successful site, consider how you want to use that content.
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RE: Yahoo! Directory Category Questionposted in Link Building
Hey Brandon,
I think it depends on how much more relevant that desired category would be. If it truly is a better fit, and the one the put you in isn't, then yeah, see if they will update it.
If it's good enough though, I would say leave it. The Yahoo! directory can be a decent link, and I wouldn't want to delay getting a solid listing if it isn't too terribly important.
Rather, I would take my link, and move on. Depending on the business I have some clients that actually get business because of that listing. But a lot don't, they sometimes barely get traffic. I still think it's a good listing, but don't waste too much time on it if it isn't going to actually convert.
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RE: Domain that ranked 4 has now disappeared from search resultsposted in Technical SEO
Hey Warren,
Man, I'm really sorry to hear about the drop. I took a quick look but I'm gonna answer given what you said first.
If the content really is duplicated, that's going to be the first and loudest bell for me. The other domains that ranked are of higher authority (they have an established history, more quality links, etc.). Given the opportunity to rank a site of such high authority (which in turn offers several listing to clients, thus enhancing their browsing experience) vs. yours it's going to be tough to change their mind.
Food for thought:
The fact that the domain is so closely matched to the address could potentially look spammy. Pair that up with the duplicate content and it could appear rather nefarious to the Goog. I don't think it's that bad, but keep that in your noggin for future reference.
A long time ago the real estate industry felt a slap by Google for shotty link practices. I got a ton of real estate work back then (cleaning stuff up mostly). We often played with the idea to create mini sites for each property but simply didn't think it was the best way or working their online marketing. Large risks were among the hurdles.
Fast forward a few years and there's so much one can do to gain local exposure. That arena is really built for sites like those that are out-ranking yours (sites that have many listings, sort features, etc.). There are so many things you can do to promote individual properties on a single site that it's generally your best route.
Not knowing your business model, that's my first suggestion. Have a single site and promote the listings that way.
But if this is where you're at, then it may be as simple as getting some unique content on the site. You might read some advice to "make sure it is XX% different" but I would say scrap and write something truly unique. If it's in your budget, you can find freelance writers all over the place on the web that will get some decent content on there for you.
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RE: How important is meta content="" name="title"?posted in Technical SEO
I'm totally with Nicholas on that one. Generally the <title>is the more appropriate method.</p> <p>A bunches of years ago I worked for a company that provided a closed CMS to their clients. They didn't have access to the <head> section, so this was the only way to actually get a title; but that was many years ago, at a company that had no idea. </p> <p>Just to clarify, they totally don't do that anymore. This was a really long time ago. </p></title>
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RE: Can penalties be passed via 301 redirect?posted in Intermediate & Advanced SEO
Man, please don't sue me if this doesn't work, but I say go for it.
Think about it like this. What's to stop a competitor from getting a bunch of those links, wait til a site is penalized and then redirecting it to you? Nothing. It's unlikely I think, and quite the investment but it could happen, right?
Plus, if you're getting hit because your links look shotty to Google, then wouldn't a redirect to a well-established site help to curb that perception.
I vote do it. But seriously, let me know how it goes.
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RE: Proportion of traffic from adwords vs organic searchposted in Paid Search Marketing
Right off the bat I point you here:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/mission-imposserpble-establishing-clickthrough-rates
These numbers are actually pretty close to what I usually see. There are exceptions and it can be wildly different depending on the results, type of business, etc.
1% might seem low for 4th position, but I've actually seen that quite a bit. The traffic estimates by Google are usually BS. Are you looking at broad match or exact match?
Also, I know "icebreaker" is your brand, but it is a pretty vague search term. As you said, you're the first retailer. I see other results; something about a ship, etc.
I also see Amazon up there, which is a well-known brand. Sometimes it's not the fact that you're being out-ranked, but by whom you are being out-ranked. What I mean is, if you were being out-ranked by lesser-known brands, then you would probably see better CTR. But Amazon is super well-known.
All those things combined, not bad I would think.
To answer your question though, it really all depends on the brand. I work with a group that is very well-known right now. And their brand terms bring more traffic than any other type of terms.
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RE: Can penalties be passed via 301 redirect?posted in Intermediate & Advanced SEO
It's always so hard to get a straight answer on this. There isn't much in the way of an official one from Google (of course), and I've experienced what I think to be both results (penalty passed, and penalty not passed).
Personally, I think it has a lot to do with the penalty, etc.
More importantly though, why do you think it has been penalized. You mention that it hasn't completely lost visibility, but you've lost rankings. There are many things that can cause that.
First, I would check this vid to get a grasp on your situation:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-oh-i-got-a-penalty
If you still think you have a penalty it can be a bit tricky. Like I said, I constantly hear debates on this, and have anecdotedly seen both results. It's tough to test really.
I would take a step back and put the SEO goggles down. Ask yourself "How do I genuinely fix this situation?" Not the penalty itself, but the cause of the penalty. If you think a 301 is your best hope, then go for it.
As for actually redirecting the penalty, I don't think that's going to happen...unless you did something really naughty. Rather I think people 301 without fixing the underlying issues, and when they get penalized they assume that it was transferred via the redirect.
I'm pretty interested though. Let us know what happens/what you decide to do.
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RE: Google Places - Shared Office Spaceposted in Image & Video Optimization
OK cool. So we know that the address isn't specifically the problem.
When I say over-accommodate, I mean that sometimes I get clients who aren't even close to the city center. In those cases, we have to build substantially more citations, etc. to compete.
So let's look at those aspects. I can't believe I didn't ask you about reviews. Those are pretty important. Does your client have more, fewer, on-par reviews? Tab up the negative reviews vs. positive. Do you respond to any negatives?
I did a lawyer not long ago and I remember Google pulling judysbook reviews. And sometimes from NOLO. But I think Google doesn't pull from other sources like they used to (sorry Yelp). See if you have any links to more reviews. You might not actually see the reviews, but there will be a link for "reviews from around the web" or similar. If you see that there are listings to third-party reviews that your client doesn't have, get those. Hell, even if your competition doesn't have them, I would still head to Judy's Book and nolo and get listed, and try to solicit reviews as much as you can.
The reviews on the Google Places page are going to be more prominent/important, but those still have an impact.
I would keep the address as you have it. At this point it's more important to keep it as consistent as possible than to try and change it now.
While you're at it, where are you on the GPlace Page itself? Have videos and images? All that stuff? Don't stop when it says "100% complete" fill up the image and videos spots the best you can.
Alright, let me know about the reviews and completeness. I would try to get the "basics" as out of the way as possible.
I wrote (however ugly it may be) an eBook on this exact thing. Get all the foundation stuff under control first then poke at the detailed issues. I may be sending you on a goose chase for a second though as it sounds like you have this part under wraps. Just in case: http://seo-factor.com/ranking-in-google-places/
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RE: Traffic dropping after blog was added...posted in Algorithm Updates
It's a little tough without looking at all the details, but here are my thoughts/suggestions.
Missing Old Pages - This may be happening because of a new design/CMS. I see this a lot when clients go for a new, WordPress site. It's a great idea, but they neglect to implement 301 redirects for all those old pages that had rankings, etc.
Check your 404 errors/Google Webmaster Crawl errors. You might find a bunch of pages that are being linked to, were updated with a new URL structure and now result in an error. You might find that setting up the 301s does the trick (give it a couple weeks once you're done).
Check for keyword cannibalization - See if the keywords you were targeting on those "main" pages are also being targeted on those blog posts. Might need to clean that up a little; ensure that each page has unique info/focus/titles, etc.
It is possible that the links to those posts is spreading your link juice a little too thinly, but I wouldn't jump to that conclusion just yet. I only say it because a year is a long time, and you could have tons of posts that are drawing from that link juice.
Best posts made by JGar-28032
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RE: Can penalties be passed via 301 redirect?posted in Intermediate & Advanced SEO
Man, please don't sue me if this doesn't work, but I say go for it.
Think about it like this. What's to stop a competitor from getting a bunch of those links, wait til a site is penalized and then redirecting it to you? Nothing. It's unlikely I think, and quite the investment but it could happen, right?
Plus, if you're getting hit because your links look shotty to Google, then wouldn't a redirect to a well-established site help to curb that perception.
I vote do it. But seriously, let me know how it goes.
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RE: Traffic dropping after blog was added...posted in Algorithm Updates
It's a little tough without looking at all the details, but here are my thoughts/suggestions.
Missing Old Pages - This may be happening because of a new design/CMS. I see this a lot when clients go for a new, WordPress site. It's a great idea, but they neglect to implement 301 redirects for all those old pages that had rankings, etc.
Check your 404 errors/Google Webmaster Crawl errors. You might find a bunch of pages that are being linked to, were updated with a new URL structure and now result in an error. You might find that setting up the 301s does the trick (give it a couple weeks once you're done).
Check for keyword cannibalization - See if the keywords you were targeting on those "main" pages are also being targeted on those blog posts. Might need to clean that up a little; ensure that each page has unique info/focus/titles, etc.
It is possible that the links to those posts is spreading your link juice a little too thinly, but I wouldn't jump to that conclusion just yet. I only say it because a year is a long time, and you could have tons of posts that are drawing from that link juice.
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RE: Does anyone think the <figcaption>attribute from HTML5 will have any influence for image search?</figcaption>posted in Web Design
It's a little difficult to tell right now (and even if they do, to what extent).
They are also pushing schema.org a bit themselves along with the other SE's, so I think (and am currently betting) that they would use this info instead, or with more priority.
The Schema.org tags allow you to get specific with not only the item (an image) but with it's context as well (an image of the author, or an image of a specific product, broken down by type, and so on).
It's all still in dev and about the only thing I've read from Google regarding its impact is along the lines of:
"We aren't saying it will increase your rankings. But this stuff will help us better catalog the Interwebs, which will help us better serve the users who search in our SE."
One could infer that Google ranks sites that are better for users higher, and so this would impact it. But you know how they are their official responses.
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RE: Tags in wordpress -Important?posted in On-Page Optimization
Hey Pedro,
This really depends on what you want to do with your site, and how you want to deliver the content to your readers.
The tags are generally used to help people find articles that interest them (by searching or clicking the tags, etc.) so they are an important usability feature for a lot of blogs. But they can create a bit of duplicate content if they are allowed to run rampant.
Because you can place tags with more/less specificity, you can give a much better description to each post. So if your site is about "SEO" you may have a post that goes into the "beginning SEO" category. But the post is about title tags. So you would give that post the tags of "title tags, meta tags, on-page seo" etc. depending on how your site is organized.
So you see how they allow you to place just a bit more info so you can tell your visitors what the post is all about.
The reason you hear about them so much in the SEO arena is due to their ability to grossly inflate the number of your pages on your site with content that is duplicated elsewhere.
If you have that same post and tagged the way I described, you now have the same/very similar content on the archive pages for each of the tags you assigned to it. This is usually handled by either blocking the search engines from indexing those pages, or creating canonical pages appropriately.
There's a really good plugin to make this a non-issue by Joost de Valk, but before you download and start setting it up, you might want to also read his WP SEO article.
The Article:
http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/
The Plugin:
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RE: Does having a file type on the end of a url affect rankings (example www.fourcolormagnets.com/business-cards.php VS www.fourcolormagnets.com/business-cards)????posted in Intermediate & Advanced SEO
I can tell you from experience that it doesn't matter. In fact, Matt Cutts suggested (quite some time ago, mind you) to keep the extensions. I almost never keep the extensions myself, and have not been given a reason to think it matters.
Here's the vid from Matt Cutts:
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RE: Proportion of traffic from adwords vs organic searchposted in Paid Search Marketing
Right off the bat I point you here:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/mission-imposserpble-establishing-clickthrough-rates
These numbers are actually pretty close to what I usually see. There are exceptions and it can be wildly different depending on the results, type of business, etc.
1% might seem low for 4th position, but I've actually seen that quite a bit. The traffic estimates by Google are usually BS. Are you looking at broad match or exact match?
Also, I know "icebreaker" is your brand, but it is a pretty vague search term. As you said, you're the first retailer. I see other results; something about a ship, etc.
I also see Amazon up there, which is a well-known brand. Sometimes it's not the fact that you're being out-ranked, but by whom you are being out-ranked. What I mean is, if you were being out-ranked by lesser-known brands, then you would probably see better CTR. But Amazon is super well-known.
All those things combined, not bad I would think.
To answer your question though, it really all depends on the brand. I work with a group that is very well-known right now. And their brand terms bring more traffic than any other type of terms.
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RE: Internal linksposted in On-Page Optimization
Hey Sebastian,
Right off the bat I would say go over this article real quick:
http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/internal-link
More to your question though, you'll want to talk this over with someone looking into your site specifically (your SEO). This really depends on the type of site you have, the competitive nature of those deeper pages, what you consider a "conversion" and how one would actually convert.
If your homepage plays a major role in your funnel, then you may not want to put too many links on it. If you want those deeper pages to rank, and they need a little extra juice then it may constitute placing a link on the homepage.
If you have some historical information (traffic, conversion rates, etc.) then you may also want to keep an eye on that. If you gain rankings and lose conversions, why? Is is because the added links took away from the desired flow?
In regard to implementation, it again depends on your site. I wouldn't jump on any changes just for SEO if it's going to have an undesired effect on your overall performance. I hate giving vague answers like that, but it's important to make the right changes depending on your goals.
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RE: Multiple sites in the same nicheposted in Intermediate & Advanced SEO
This is a bit of a tricky one. If you're really able to keep them separated then you should be fine. After all, many people download the same WP themes from not only their repository, but from third-party places like themeforest.
Just to be safe though, I would really make sure they are different; regarding sidebar content, etc. I would also make some changes to the heads and footers. Not just the meta, but placement of code, inclusion/exclusion of pieces, etc. Really get in there and make sure.
Honestly though, I don't know what your niche/strategy is; but you're going to have your hands full promoting 10 sites of the same type. If this is an attempt to get them all to rank for the same searches, I would re-consider your strategy. Google is pretty good at figuring that stuff out, especially if a competitor points them in your direction. It can be difficult enough to promote just one site sometimes, let alone having to also worry about what flags you may be throwing up with each of 10 sites.
If you're still going to do it, I would be super paranoid about it. Log into Google Analytics from different computers, never speak about them to people, and each time you meet someone, give them a fake name. I'm certain Google's street view cameras are equipped with microphones to catch spammers on ground-level. But maybe I only think that because the aliens told me....and what do they know about SEO?
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RE: Move the content from mycompany.es to mycompany.com is worth it?posted in Technical SEO
Nope. I would buy the .com, and if/when you're ready explore international SEO with it; but for now I would just 301 it to the domain you've had this whole time. It's the one with links to it, the original content, and the right top-level country code for your target audience.
I say this generally because the TLD isn't going to have the impact. But, I don't know anything about either domains. Was it used for a very similar business model/is it getting traffic, all that other stuff?
Simply age and domain extension aren't enough reasons, but if you're buying a running and successful site, consider how you want to use that content.
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RE: Duplicate titles but redirecting anyway (without redirects set up!!!)posted in Intermediate & Advanced SEO
It can depend on your server, but usually this is normal (at least by design). When you make URL/structure changes in WP, it automatically creates 301 redirects. So if you change the permalink, or category info for a page, it should update all "old" links to redirect to the new way.
Keep in mind that this is by design, and not always the most accurate. I've had a few clients with weird permissions and it didn't work. Keep watch over your GWT for 404s.
GWT can take some time to update. When you're looking at the errors, check the date of the last time Google noticed the problem. Check them manually. If everything appear to be fine then you're likely good to go.
Check in a week or so, and if things are still amiss, then something went wrong.