I would consider them important. Most of my clients are e-commerce sites and I put them on every site that I do. A lot of platforms are supporting them out of the box now, if that speaks to importance to you.
Posts made by LesleyPaone
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RE: We're currently not using schemas on our website. How important is it? And are websites across the globe using it?
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RE: Why do these links violate Google's Quality Guideline?
For those links I would say that #1 and #3 are link exchanges, which are a no-no now. #2 is a paid advertisement, but it is not a no follow, which makes it a paid link. I think all of them can really be considered paid links, so I would either contact the people and have them removed or disavow them all.
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RE: Do deep pages issues affect homepage chances of ranking?
In my opinion, no they do not. The only thing that I am aware of that works site wide is domain age and domain penalties.
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RE: Blog comments - backlinks - question
I am going against the grain here and say they work in moderation. If you happen to comment a lot, just because you like to comment, 5%-10% of them being keyword is not going to hurt you. It will more than likely help you a bit too, but not too much.
Comments are a very weird / grey area. I know most people think they provide no SEO benefits, but there are some people that think they do. I ran into the guy that runs Raven Tools at a local SEO meeting and he mentioned that he was doing some experiments on comments. Basically, if you have someone that has a high authority in authorship commenting on a post, it raises the post. That is something interesting to think about.
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RE: Duplicate content from pagination and categories found in multiple locations
Actually the rel=canonical would solve both issues. I am guessing that because of the way the site is made, 80% of the content from page to page in a category is the same. I am guessing it might be using the same title tag, maybe appending a "page title page 2" on it, maybe not. Also the meta description is more than likely the same as well. It is a given that all of the code is the same, so I am thinking unless you are using long descriptions on the category pages that is the issue.
I would also implement the rel=next and rel=prev as well. You might have someone code in a way to change the title tag based on the page as well, and if you are feeling spendy have someone code in a meta description based on the category page as well.
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RE: Could posting on YouMoz get you penalized for "Guest Blogging?"
From my understanding and how I do things as well, guest blogging is not dead. Low to no value guest blogging is dead. The issue with guest blogging is people were over using it just to get a link, so sites would have hundreds of guest bloggers and really offer no value. They were basically like a link scheme. I still think high value guest blogging is still alive and well. I write blog posts for high value sites sporadically and the exposure and links help.
In your situation, I would advise the lawyers not to turn down high value sites. For example if the state bar association wanted a guest post about a case, I would do it. If some other local law blogger wanted a guest post, I more than likely would advise not to do it. One thing to keep in mind is that the high value sites rarely have guest bloggers, that is one thing that makes them valuable.
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RE: What should I do with a large number of 'pages not found'?
I always take notes from giants on how to handle things like this. Amazon is the giant in this arena, what do they do? They do not disable the product, they leave it on the site as unavailable. I would do the same thing personally. What platform are you using, does it have a suggested products module / plugin? If so, it can be modified to be more promient on pages that are disabled from selling. But I would keep the page and keep the authority of the page.
If you 301 it to another product, the search satisfaction level goes down and your bounce rate will rise. I would be careful with this, because Google wants to serve results that are relevant and what people are looking for.
The other option I would give is to return a 410 status code to get them de-indexed.
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RE: Domain Authority Drop
This is to be expected as MOZ tweaks their index and algorithm, I would not worry about it. The main thing you want to see in this is that your competitors fall at the same rate as you do. Here is an image of a historical view over about a year of some of the domains that I track, http://screencast.com/t/P8SjVyKiR
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RE: Do citations count as backlinks?
I am pretty much thirding what everyone else says, but with a little grey hat twist.
They help on both a local and a (not to the same extent) national level. One thing that helps them even more is having reviews attached to them. I owned a small business, it was a cabinet company. We went from doing about 80k a year to several million a year flatly because of SEO. The strategy I used in the beginning still works for small businesses. I created accounts at all of the local places, yp, yelp, angieslist, google, and so on. Then I sent the links around to friends, family, customers, ect, and asked them to post a review. Soon after doing that (because no one hardly reviews cabinet companies) we had the most reviews, so we were at the top of the lists. As far as I know this still works today and I would nail it if I was in your position. Because this is a grey area, I would also like to mention not to work with people that will "get" you reviews. They are buying them, if you get caught it might undo everything that you have worked for.
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RE: Does building multiple websites hurt you seo wise? Good or bad strategy?
I agree with Keri. This in my opinion is a horrible strategy. There are only a few times I would recommend something like this and your case is not one of them.
The times I would recommend this is if your products are broad enough to support a whole site. For example I have a client that sells medical needs such as scooters, lift chairs, bathroom accessories, wheelchairs, and things like that. We did make him another site to focus specifically on scooters, just because it is a hot market. But at the same time going into this I advised him of how much work it would take. Rewriting all of the content for the descriptions, and everything else on the site.
I mentioned before that I have read a couple of your posts. One of the biggest things that I would advise for you is to work on marketing along with SEO. If I were you, I would post to craigslist every day, when you have dogs available. This does absolutely nothing for your SEO, but lets be honest, you want to move dogs, you don't want people to just come and read your site. I am sure this is no secret, but the time that I have found to post to craigslist is about 8:50 in the morning. It takes about 10-15 minutes for your post to become live on CL, so your post will show up shortly after 9. This means it will be one of the first posts that people will see. See the theory that I use, and it works with most businesses is that workers come in and screw around in the morning. I would hit all of the local sites like backpage, kijiji, and craigslist if I were you.
A lot of people treat Google and other search engines like they are the end all know all of everything. But honestly, in some situations they are not. Recently we had a new concrete patio poured. Craigslist was the first place I looked, then I researched the people individually on Google. I think a lot of people do that for local services still.
One last thing I would like to mention, if you do make posts on craigslist, create an image for the post. Upload the image to your website and embed the image in the post with html. The reason being is if you just upload images in their viewer, you cannot track them. Doing it this way, you can track them and find the best time to post your ads.
I hope this helps a bit.
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RE: Just found a wordpress blog duplicating main website blog - what to do?
When you say you found it, do you mean on a clients server or a server that you have no control of?
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RE: Duplicate content on user queries
Is it possible to leave the products and just disable the buying function for them? That is the best bet SEO wise. Then your pages keep their authority.
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RE: Robots.txt help
Can you not just add a htaccess password to the directory to keep the dev site up, but keep bots out?
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RE: Sitemap & noindex inconstancy?
It will get crawled, but it will not be indexed. Basically the crawler will get the page, see that and not index it. It could follow if you put noindex, follow. Or it cannot follow if you put noindex, nofollow.
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RE: Rotating Content Concern on Deep Pages
In my opinion the safest way to do it would be to have a discrete iframe that loaded the contents. The reason being is that google would ignore it. It would make it on par with twitter widgets and facebook like boxes.
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RE: Fixing temporary redirects
This is an issue with how Magento handles the canonical urls. Your best bet would be to use the Yoast canonical url module for Magento, it specifically fixes this issue. http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/Yoast/extension/906/canonical-url-s-for-magento
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RE: Does the follow link from the moz Profile really count after first with nofollow?
Interesting point. I get traffic from my site link in my Moz profile, but at the same time a link to my root domain does not show up in GWT.
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RE: I'm Getting Attacked, What Can I Do?
To expound on what Jane said, I would actually rewrite the headers of these pages to a 410 status code. That way they will drop out of the ranking quicker. http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2340728/Matt-Cutts-on-How-Google-Handles-404-410-Status-Codes
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RE: SEOmoz not showing latest backlinks
Like Chris said about Moz's index not being as large as Google's. If you want Moz to notice the links, tweet them and they should be listed under your just found links in less than an hr.
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RE: My site's articles seem to never show up in Google.
Can you post a link to your site so we can see some articles? It is hard to deduce the issue without seeing part of the problem.
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RE: Page Title & Meta Description Getting Cut Off In The SERPs
I read a couple articles about the issue a while back. Search engines do not actually use a hard number of characters in both the title and the descriptions. They actually use a pixel width. You can read more about it here http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/page-title-meta-description-lengths-by-pixel-width/ and here http://moz.com/blog/new-title-tag-guidelines-preview-tool
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RE: Can we mix up Wordpress and Html?
I cannot see the different style mattering either. The only thing I would advise is to use good page speed practice. Also I would advise against making too many pages like that, you could risk getting a penalty.
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RE: Can we mix up Wordpress and Html?
If you are using the same theme and page layout, honestly I don't think google will ever know. The only give away will be that the page loads slightly faster since it does not need any server side processing.
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RE: Re Posting Reviews
I honestly don't put as much stock in duplicate content penalties as a lot of people do. I would weigh the content that you are wanting to add against how much content is on the page to begin with. If you are sitting around 5-10% I would not worry about it at all. If you have no text on the page where you want to put the reviews, I would consider doing them in an image.
Also you might editorialize the content as well. Like say the original site lists the reviewer as "Janet Johnson" You might list the review as "Janet J." Also you might cut it down as well using periods. Like "Janet J. says, Great service.... I would recommend them to all of my friends". You can do that as a legitimate way of beating duplicate content without changing the point or message.
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RE: How to make a .dwt in html 5
I am going to tell you what you don't want to hear. Drop Frontpage, drop Dreamweaver and go with a platform such as Wordpress, Joomla, or whatever. The reason being is that they will most likely never go out of date. Front page was discontinued around 10 years ago and websites have changed so much since then.
Also a point I would like to make is to use your assets to fullest. I am just off the hip shooting here, but your website could possibly be redone for the 3-5k range, if it is just a standard service website. Your wanting to do it yourself has cost you 150k. I would hire someone that can knock it out in a week or two and focus my time on my company. I know when you own a small business you wear a lot of hats, but you have to pick and choose which hats fit.
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RE: Is it possible we are being penalized for doorway pages?
I would not think so. If you are using a logical division of products using categories and sub categories, I cannot see that holding you back. It is really the defacto standard on how e-commerce sites work. As long as your site is not doing something weird with the re-writes on the the products I think you would be fine. A weird rewrite would be like this, say you are selling a baseball pin. If your rewrites do this site.com/baseball-things/pin.html and the page is also at site.com/baseball-things/pins/pin.html then I would highly suggest using canonical urls. Because one of the pages is going to get a duplicate content penalty.
Another thing I would suggest is if you are not already, use category descriptions for the category pages and also mix the products. You don't want your main category to have 75% of the products that a sub category has. Like in the example above, if 3/4 of the products in the baseball root category are pins, I would change that to be a more even number between the categories.
Also one other suggestion, I wouldn't use empty categories either. Like for basketball, if all you offer is trophies, I would not have a basketball category then a basketball trophies category. That would be seen as duplicate content.
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RE: Shopify vs BigCommerce vs Lemonstand vs Yahoo
No problem, I am one of their community moderators for their forum, so if you have any questions like if something can be done with it; you can send me at http://dh42.com/contact/ ( I hope this is ok, I don't want to put my main email address out to get scraped). I can let you know if something is a stock feature or not. Because with the hosted platforms like Shopify, Lemonstand, and BigCommerce the features are limited because you do not have access to the core application. With something like Prestashop or Magento for that matter since you have access, you can really do anything your budget allows.
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RE: Shopify vs BigCommerce vs Lemonstand vs Yahoo
This falls out of the bound of which platforms you mentioned, but you should give Prestashop a shake. It is on the level with the other platforms you mentioned and more than likely ahead of them. It is OSS so it is free, all you have to pay for is your hosting.
I have a couple of jewelry store clients running Prestashop and it does very well with them. One of them has features such as 3d product rotation and where you can design pieces with what ever stone you choose and metal.
As far as SEO most all newer platforms are on the same level, which means the SEO of the platform means little to nothing. You have to do the SEO yourself with every platform.
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RE: Had SEO Firm tell me to Start Over - pros and cons help please
The prices are in line with industry standards, but I think the way of handling it is not. The only time I ever recommend someone changing their domain name is if the company went through a period where they have a bad reputation and cannot recover from that. Like there are bad reviews and things that you cannot control around the internet with links back to the site.
If I were doing SEO on the site I would look for a penalty and then disavow any bad links. Then I would start drilling local citations for the site. I have seen your posts a couple of times on here lately, it seems that local citations would help your site out a lot. I am assuming that you do not ship dogs across the country, or it is very rare for you to do. So you will want to focus on local sites that can get your local ranking factors higher.
At the same time I would do the blog posting and I would also do forum posting too.
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RE: New un-natural links to my website that i didnt create.. and lots of them!
My first course of action would be to start using the Google link disavow tool, then I would try to make contact with the website(s) and ask them to stop.
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RE: PDF or HTML Page?
This is what I came say. Have the html document, then the link to the pdf download. That way the html document can rank and also the PDF can too. I think some people over look the fact that the page a pdf is downloaded from can rank AS WELL as the pdf itself.
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RE: To Worry or Not? Duplicate Content Created from Redirect After Login
I think something missed about duplicate content is what Google actually does with it.
Say you have those two urls, Google is not going to penalize your whole site for the duplicate content. What they do is try to figure out which one should be shown, and sandbag the other one. More than likely the login one would be sandbagged, because it is not linked.
You could always add a canonical url to really solve the issue.
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RE: Product Landing page- Key Words used too often.
How many products are you showing in a category page? You might should consider reducing the amount of products show to around 10 -20. That would give you about 20-40 instances of the word if you have one instance in the name and one in the description.
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RE: I'm Getting Attacked, What Can I Do?
My first step would be to start disavowing all of the links in Google before you get a penalty. It is a pain, but it is worth it compared to getting dropped out of the SERP's.
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RE: Infinite Pagerank Dilemma
I would say a loop doesn't work, or just about every site would be a pr 10 site.
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RE: Same titles in Webmasters' tools
To me it sounds like the root of the issue is a canonical url problem. It is hard to tell exactly without knowing more though.
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RE: Pinterest links have been growing in Webmaster Tools
I actually think this is part of a deeper strategy. I have google alerts on several client keywords and I just got an alert a few minutes ago. It was for a twitter post. I can't think of a time when I have ever gotten one for a social network post, even though my clients are very active on social media. I am going out on a limb and saying that google is starting to give more rank and actually indexing in a sense social media posts that are not behind a wall.
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RE: Change in Google local ranking
I did read an article today about a different Panda algorithm coming out this month that has skewed some search results. It could be related... http://www.hmtweb.com/marketing-blog/google-algorithm-updates-february-2014/
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RE: Twitter T&Cs
I would think no, because you are not actually giving money to them. These kind of promotions are quite popular, I think if they were against Twitter TOS they would have been mentioned by now. (In reality isn't it basically the same as advertising on Twitter?) But also apps like rafflecopter are allowed which is in a sense buying follwers as well.
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RE: Lost all comments on our blog...will it hurt rankings?
A few weeks ago I heard some interesting talk about this. I go to a local SEO meetup and Jon Henshaw from Raven Tools attends sometimes. He actually had an interesting thought on comments. Apparently from his own personal tracking having a comment by a top influential commenter can drive a post up in the SERP's. I think he mentioned a post he had that was kind of lackluster, but a notable person commented on it, and it drove it up pretty high.
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RE: What are the advantages and disadvantages of having a dynamic website in terms of SEO? and a static website?
As far as in SEO or in general? SEO I cannot think of any really other than the ease of changing things. But then again that is the major benefit of having a dynamic site, you can change things easily. As far as static websites the major plus on them is speed if done correctly.
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RE: Does an subdomain hosted offsite provide SEO value
From my own experience blog.site.com and site.com are treated as two different sites. So you might be getting some link juice from your job section pointing to your site, but you are not getting as much equity as you would if the site was in a sub directory and not a sub domain.
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RE: Document download sites linking to my site. Should I disavow?
The very broad rule that I follow is that if you did not create the link, disavow it. That does not work in all situations though, especially if someone notable is quoting an article or your site. The next rule I look at is if it seems useful, or it seems like it is just scraped content for SEO. If it is actually a useful site and a useful link, I would not disavow it. One metric that you can use is if there is actually traffic from the link. On scrape sites there is never any usually link traffic, but with useful links you will get some traffic.
Also on a side note I would consider DMCA'ing them on taking down the PDF's.
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RE: How you can manipulate your MOZ DA
These are my main points.
If my links are taking me tweeting them to get added (some are over a year old with good PA) then my competitors need to tweet their backlinks as well. But if they do not know to do that, then the Mozscape that I am looking at for my competitors is seriously out of date as well. If I start noticing positive changes in their sites, I cannot do any kind of research with Mozscape, since the index is outdated.
About your first crawl statement. What you are saying is there are two indexes, correct? One index that has pages with PA and DA assigned. Then another index of pages that have actually been crawled. Then you merge those indexes to make the Mozscape index and pages with PS and DA that have not been crawled are just orphaned and used for the toolbar.
What factors decide whether a page is crawled or just assigned a rank?
And how can Mozscape be deemed accurate without actually using referral url information?
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RE: How you can manipulate your MOZ DA
I do have a couple of questions then, since you seem to be the person in charge of the area we are talking about.
How does a page get PA and the links not get indexed or added to the index? It would make since if a crawler is used, the links on the page would be crawled and added.
Also, I think it can be demonstrated that Moz is either inherently flawed and cannot be fixed to a usable level without violating people's privacy.
I am going to make a supposition here, that I think a few in the SEO industry might know. Say I make two forum posts, with basically the same content to two pages that have the same PA and DA. One of those links gets 1000 unique clicks, the other one gets no clicks. Also, imagine that both sites run GA. I firmly believe that Google ranks the links differently, and can pretty much back the idea up with my own research.
Back to the privacy. I have my GA account connected to Moz. So do the three sites that I have in my competitive analysis. But Moz won't extract the referral urls from the accounts. That would be considered a huge breach in privacy if I could see which links were actually driving traffic to my competitors sites. At the same time though, a lot of value is lost because this metric is not present. By a lot, I mean most. Basically PA and DA have to be figured using a completely different system than Google uses. Not different because of different developers doing things differently, but different in the sense that if it used the same method, it would be considered a privacy breach.
Where do things go from here, if I can in the end adjust a sites DA and PA at my leisure?
What about my research since, the main links that drive traffic are not included?
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RE: How you can manipulate your MOZ DA
Is this a decent summation of what you are saying? "Our links are not up to date in Mozscape. It should not be used as a tool to determine the ranking factor or backlink weight of your competitors sites." Also in regards to DA authority, "The way we figure it, it is not acceptable for any use".
Correct me when I am wrong about something in my general assumptions.
Every page that Google sees a link on that links to your site either passes page rank, or does not pass page rank.
Factors depend on the follow status, how many other links are on the page, and the domains rank in relation to the domain it is linking to (eg a PR of 3 linking to a PR of 8 does little, but a PR of 8 linking to a PR of 3 does a lot.)
All links that are followed pass some amount of link juice.
If I am right about this, how can Moz be useful other than for detecting onsite issues? I am not looking at an accurate backlink profile on my competitors, there is no metric on why a link is included in the linkscape and not included.
Looking at my links on Mozscape, my referrals in my GA account, and the linking sites in GWMT I see two different sets of links. My GWMT and GA match up pretty well for sites that I have backlinks on that are active backlinks (active meaning someone actually comes to my site from it). In my Mozscape though, none of those links are shown. So I am going out on a limb and guessing that my competitors are not shown either.
So what is the use of Mozscape if highly active links are not shown for any domain?
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RE: Open Site Explorer not detecting linking domain on my site
You can manually add your backlinks to the OSE and can manipulate your domain authority, read this http://moz.com/community/q/how-you-can-manipulate-your-moz-da
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How you can manipulate your MOZ DA
I have become frustrated at MOZ in the last few months, none of my backlinks have made it into the index. Old back links. Long story short, I figured out the issue and I figured out how anyone can manipulate their DA. I wrote a blog post about it here, http://blog.dh42.com/manipulate-moz/
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RE: Footer link back to developers domain
I just wrote an answer to the post above, but the jist is not that it is an attribution link like so and so developed this site. It is more a default theme for a major software package. It might get 100k natural links in a month from having it in the footer. I would venture to guess it gets around 10k a month now from it.