Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Well there is a very old debate and many SEO will recommend you using sub directory instead of sub domain.

Reasons why you should use Sub directory instead of sub-domain:

• Search engine still counts sub domain as another website so if the blog is in sub directory it will be considered as the part of the website
• Your over all SEO efforts will impact on sub directory which is not the case in terms of sub domain.
• Its way easier to rank for long tail keywords with sub directory instead of sub domain.

If SEO is not a problem for you are you are more interested in branding then i think subdomain goes well as its easier to remember and write directly in the URL bar.

The shortest and the most honest answer to your questions that you are getting it all wrong. You are using blog comments to build links? Bad idea!

Blog Comments is a great way to build connections and relationships that later can convert in to quality links but building links using blog comments (dofollow or not) is a bad idea all together.

Hope this helps!

I personally don’t think there is such penalty on duplicate code as it is available on duplicate content...this is mainly because there are billions of people using Wordpress and as it is a CMS so the basic code will be same only JS and CSS is changed from website to website...

Infect, I have seen many people using the same JS and CSS on more than two websites just by changing the design of the website....I personally believe there is no problem from the SEO stand point.. But obviously ethically copying the code of the website is not good!

Eric, If I would be at the place of your consultant, I would have suggest you Wordpress (not drupel though). I don’t think there is a problem with blogger platform but things are really difficult in blogger platform whereas in Wordpress things are really easy.

Let’s say you need to set customer Meta description for a blog post in blogger (not saying it’s impossible) but as compare to this in WP all you need is a Yoast plugin and even a person without acode knowledge will do that.

Another reason I will suggest you is that I have seen very few blogger blogs ranking well in search engines as compare to WP. And another important reason why I will suggest that while back Matt Cutt recommends WP over blogger.

I am sure any SEO with a development background can give you indepth reasons for this.

Hope this helps.

I think this is one of the best ways to get your website kicked hard by penguin... To be really honest i can say NO to your idea!

I guess if a guy can work for you 4 hours a day and you want him to do quality link building for you then you should tell him to find link opportunities for you instead of blogs and forums that offer do follow link...

• Tell him to find the website that allow guest posting and are related to your niche.
• Tell him to find websites that are link to broken links of any of the website
• Tell him to email them and request links from them
• Tell him to search the image that you are using on your website to see who else are using it to ask link from them...

And this way you will be able to build a legitimate link profile instead of spammy link building that usually starts with do follow blog commenting...

I don’t see any big issue with the website that takes you from 1^st page to 100+ in rankings for most of your keywords until I looked n to your link profile. I looked at it and it took me less than 15 seconds or less to figure out where the problem is.

Here are few of the things that you are doing wrong:

-          Link with Brand name as an Anchor

Imagine a scenario where all the links you are getting to your website will be natural and think about the possible anchor texts you can receive. Why would someone link back to your website an exact match keyword instead of some general keyword or brand name?

You have very few links with the brand name as an anchor text in the link profile and general keywords are simply none. This is a clear indication that your link profile is not natural.

-          Quality of Links

I am not sure why you was ranking on the first page but keeping your links in mind I don’t see any quality in it and whatever you are going through completely make sense to me.

In order to get the rankings back my recommendation is to get good quality links (as many as you can) with natural anchor text and brand name so that Google can consider you as a ethical and legit business and give you your rankings back.

If you look in to the description, it says somewhere on the page he have used the brand name (if the description is coming from the page) which may be is one of the reason why he is appearing against the result.

If you really want to kick this result back to 2^nd or different pages, my idea is to create facebook, twitter, slideshare, about.me and different pages for your company (Active pages). As soon as Google will fine more relevant results the ranking for this result will go down and you first page atleast will be clean.

Just a thought!

You are in a danger Chris; my advice is to kill the contract immediately as they are selling the snake oil services and nothing else.

-          One article and submitting on different article submission websites, you soon will e the victim of Google penguin update. This is indeed a duplicate content plus Google don’t really like the links coming from article submission sites.

When buying link building services from any company always keep few things in mind.

-          If someone guarantee certain number of links in a certain time, you probably should question their quality as link building in most cases cannot be time specific.

-          Press Release links? Google don’t like it unless the links are no-follow.

-          Social Bookmarking links :O. I would not even consider them quality links.

-          Web Directories, unless they are highly relevant to your business and contain quality, its again will hurt you.

I would recommend reading this post as this will give you a quick idea of how to hire a digital marketing consultant for your business: http://www.setalks.com/how-to-find-quality-seo-consultant-for-my-business/

Hope this helps!

I have answered this kind of question before as well and I will stand on my point even today! Although they all are your website and may be linking them all on each other seems logical and user friendly to you but search engine will still find it questionable and might hit you by some penguin update.

In my opinion, try to remove links if it is possible for you (no-following is not an option in my opinion) and if not at least link to other website intelligently!

Let’s say you have 11 websites and each is targeting to different location so add a link where you are talking about some other location instead of adding them all in footer or sidebar!

Hope this helps!

If I got your question correct then

Members are the people who are in the list created by you and subscribers are the people who subscribe to your list so that they can get update about any activity in that list!

One of the basic things that you need to understand is that Google uses complex mathematics (Algorithms) to rank a website against a query and there are around 200 plus signals and not all of them are widely discussed.

There could be several reasons which includes quality of content, title tags, linking domains, website structure, internal linking and the list goes on.

Keeping the Devanur’s comment in mind I can safely advise you to do audit your website again and fix the problem to make it more SEO friendly plus get links from high quality places.

Hope this helps!

Link Building is a creativity game so ideas can be countless…

But here are few of the starting steps that I would recommend or may be if I would be at your place, I would have done that.

1. Extract the back link profile and start removing links from the places where possible.. Usually with article submission it’s possible if you have all the credentials of it.
2. Try to avoid article submission or at least don’t use it heavily. Instead of This try guest posting on different blogs, magazines and digital news papers… although making connections for guest blogging and other will be a difficult job in the beginning but fruitful at the end of the day!
3. Infographics that is liked by bloggers and audience as this can give you good links and brading at the same time.
4. Try manual outreach as this is difficult but must do job in link building that people use to avoid.
5. Try some contest in the niche and grab links from press and bloggers in your niche.
6. Think broad and connect different industries with you and get links from those blogs and forums…

This can go infinity… but I would recommend reading some link building post that comes from time to time and you can get some great ideas from there!

I believe this depends from case to case. On my own blog I have disabled tags but not categories and this is because I believe few category URL are very much user friendly.

Before you actually implement anything, ask yourself if this will hurt user experience or not and If the answer is no then just go ahead and do that!

Hope this helps!

Garrett trust me you are doing it right and especially for the client end I don’t really see any need of it. The most they can deliver you is some extra amount of traffic (with the bounce rate of 90% and plus) as far as the link equity from social bookmarking is concern, it’s more like directories.

The reason why they are shocked is because they have no idea how to ACTUALLY build quality links so they keep workin on shit that are not important at all in my opinion.

Ok I have worked on a coupon website so I have a clear idea of how to go with keywords and what kind of results you should expect for each keyword.

For the head keyword like ASOS, you might get lot of traffic but not every user will be finding discount codes so you might see a high bounce rate for this keyword. The better idea is to for keyword that does contain words like “discount” or “promo codes” then the conversion rate would be much better.

My advice would be to go for two words keywords and long tail keywords, they might contain a less traffic but the conversion rate would be much more powerful.

Hope this helps!

I don’t really think Guest Blogging is even dead but yes if you were using guest blogging as a sole reason to get links to your website, probably Guest Blogging was never an option for you!

Google is tightening areas for spammers and low quality thin content producers so I don’t think there is any other alternate available but to change the way you think and try natural ways to get links!

My advice to you is to research your niche and create the content that people are actually looking for! Promote the content and you will see links will eventually follow you!!

If you are still confused about if Guest Blogging is there or not, here is the post I wrote on my blog where I discussed in detail about who Matt is actually targeting in his blog post! http://www.setalks.com/guest-blogging-dont-panic

Hope this helps!

I am not a developer myself but I can say if you have purchased HTTPs for SEO purposes, adding a redirection will help but if you have actually added https because of the visitors and providing security to the website in that case this might not help.

The best is to contact your server and discuss an issue with that and I am sure they will be able to resolve this issue.

Hope this help!

Forget explainer videos, does having a video on the website directly increases the chances to get better visibility in search engines? And the straight answer to that question is, NO!

There are lots of BUT attach with it though!

For instance, that video goes viral and you get lots of link back to the website and that page and as a result you get better rankings. Yes it all happened because of that video but directly that video didn’t really help the page get better rankings.

Another idea could be, people (bloggers within your industry) uses that video and as a credit gives you a link back that as a results help you get better rankings.

What I mean to say is that video itself alone cannot help you get better rankings but its just a content of the website that when go viral can produces links back to the website that have a direct impact on rankings.

Hope this helps!

Allowing them to republish your content is fine! If you see Moz’s blogs gets republished on several different sites... and same is the case with Mashable!

I believe what you really should do is to request them to use cross domain canonical and this will be a clear hint to Google that which is the original version of content and Google will rank the original version instead of the duplication one!

Hope this helps!

I believe you are looking for this document: https://docs.shopify.com/manual/settings/general/google-analytics
as it covers almost everything you are looking for!

I am not sure but if you are asking how much DA and PA is required in an incoming link that will be considered as safe. If this is your question then there is no such restriction or recommendation in this area.

If the website from where you are getting a link have a clean link profile and no SPAM links pointing to that site then in that case no matter what the DA or PA of the website is the link from that website will be secure.

Similarly, If a website that is pointing back to your website have a decent DA and PA but link profile of that website is spammy, in that case the link will be considered as a risky link.

If the website is quality and link profile is clean then having a better DA and PA from where the link is coming will be considered as a lil more powerful as compare to a website that contain a lesser DA and PA.

Hope this helps!

If query string is the only choice you have in order to identify location then why not using canonical on the page. This will tell Google what the preferred version of the page is and so Google will only index the preferred version and avoid all other form of the URLs.

This way you will be able to use query string and avoid duplicate content at the same time.

Hope this helps!

This is not a dieting plan or a gym exercise that you have to do atleast this amount of work out on daily basis. Link building is more about quality then quantity so if you get 100 directory links every day… this might hurt instead you spend some time writing a good piece and get it published on a website like Moz (every industry have a Moz like websites).

Instead of spinning articles all day long better spend days and convince the journalist in your local area to cover your story and this will give you a better return on investment instead of 10 links a day kind of schedule.

Hope this helps!

Interesting idea indeed even from the reader’s point of view, if someone is looking for a tip, they know the place to go instead of finding posts from within the Youmoz section.

I might contribute to my story and problem solved as usually write these kind of stuff on my personal blog as well J

Thanks Ronell, I love the overall idea here!

Hello Chris,

Honestly speaking, I see this a little differently. In my opinion numbers and technical problems are less important than how your users are going to feel when you will have two websites or if you redirect other website to your domain name.

If the merger news is there in people, then it make a perfect sense to 301 redirect the bought company to yours and if not then you probably should spread this news through press release, social media and blog platforms and then make this 301 shift so that it make sense to the people within your industry.

Technically this 301 shift should increase your domain authority (if there is no panda or penguin attack on the website that you are trying to redirect).

Hope this helps!

Here are the following things I have noticed while being on your blog for 10 seconds.

-          Page Load time is high

-          Topics are mostly used keeping the keywords in life.

-          No promoting strategy implemented.

-          No option for me to connect to author on social media

-          Design is good but a little heavy in my opinion

We at our end when work on blog management this is something we always consider

-          Design should compliment brand’s online identity as well as appeal to user. User cannot wait much so the design should be light so that it can load fast as required by the reader.

-          Topics you are choosing are keyword friendly but when building a conversation on the blog you should play with mix of keyword friendly topics and the topics that have the ability to create buzz and conversation on your blog.

-          Lot of text, no infographics, you are missing mix media content on your blog.

-          There are multiple authors, which is great but there is no way I can communicate with them and engage with your brand. Remember, now people like to engage with faces instead of logos.

-          Writing a quality blog post is nothing unless you have a awesome marketing and promotion plan for it

These are the few ideas that you should consider and you will see a measureable difference in your traffic.

I am in Pakistan and that is why I do check websites in rankings from time to time and I have to say that there are many niches and areas where Google still allow spammy websites especially when it comes to Google.com.pk (maybe because Google give less important in our area).

The best idea is to report this URL to Google to bring this to their attention and may be in the next Google penguin update, this got hit.

In my opinion, there is not much you cannot do other than reporting it to Google.

Hope this helps!

It is important not to stuff the keywords in the content but from this I usually mean not to add keywords where it doesn’t make sense. If I would be at your place I would have thought from the user point of view.

Will the user be fine if they see the range with a brand name? If yes, I probably would go for it but if not I have to think about the alternate solution.

Whenever you are stuck with this kind of stuff, think about your customers more than SEO or Google as your customers at the end of the day are going to help you grow.

Just a thought!

Ok let me start with 1 basic thing... do not BUY guest posting placements or else you will get dramatically hurt.... not only from the branding point of view but from the rankings point of view as well....

As far as how guest blogging process works here is the short and quick version if it!

1. List down the blogs that are within your niche.
2. Check their DA, total subscribers and social value and separate the best accordingly!
3. Get their emails and outreach to them for the guest blogging opportunity!
4. Check the status of the emails and see who allow you to send them the guest post!
5. Send the guest post and ask them when they can make it live!

Wait for the guest posts to go live...

Once live... its always great to share it on social media channels and work accordingly!

I have worked for the health care hospital based in Florida while I was working for one agency and as far as my experience goes the basic game is pretty much the same. Get your business pages right, keep NAP consistent on all embassies and more.

The only advantage I took was by working with their PR agency. Their PR agency successfully established their brand name displayed on almost all local magazines. I just help the PR team to get the link from their magazines that looks natural (obviously for that I had to build a blog that contain the linkable content).

Links from quality places increase DA and overall authority of the website, right local SEO help me rank for most of the keywords with location pages.

Hope this helps!

Nakul, is right but also if you are using the wordpress then instead of going in to .htaccess use the redirection plugin!

Thanks Mark for the Google words and your insight about it but I am still not convinced with the ground realities...

Setting up a Geo target in Google webmaster cannot block you on other areas (this make no sense to me!). There is a strong possibility that US websites may not rank higher in UK search results but the website will be completely blocked (i don’t agree)

I have a website that has a preferred location as UAE and I can literally access that website from all regions... and on some general keywords it is ranking well in US although that is not my exact location...

I go with the simple rule here, whenever dealing with the on-page optimization, try to go with the options that go best for users and search engine will come along.

If you think having the same H1 as Title will serve users better then go for it and if you think you can craft a better H1 for users to engage with the website and continue their journey then try not to go with option one.

Hope this helps!

If I would be at your place and I would have given a choice to select one platform bwtween Wordpress and Joomal then my vote will be for Wordpress!

User and SEO Friendly:

WP is more user friendly not only for the user but SEO friendly URLs, SPAM filter for Comments, easy to create post and pages which is not that easy to use in Joomla and then they have so much issues with URLs that somehow contain duplicate URLs!

Plug-ins:

The plugin directory of WP is way bigger as compare to Joomla. With wordpress the admin have multiple choices on one thing which is rear in Joomla!

Fast and Quick Updates:

WP is up-to-date and takes you with the current environment! With Jommla this game is not that simple!

Customization:

With Joomla and WP the customization is possible but (thinking from a developer’s brain) Joomla is way more difficult as compare to WP as they contain clean and clear code!

These are just few out of many differences that you can come up with by simple Googling a bit about it!

I am not sure what video I was listening to but it was a SMX for sure and there was the same topic. As far as Google representative answer is concern, they try to get this information from the website, they think is more trusted.

I don’t think there is much you can do about it but if you can get more authority links to that page and your content is pretty much design in such a way that it’s a perfect fit for Google Answer Box, I am sure Google will pick you up instead of your competitors.

Personally, I think there is no defined process for it, I mean after all the work, Google might not change the result so all you can do is to try and see if it works or not for you!

Hope this helps!

You are right! The URLs are too long and unnecessary!

The shorten URL would make more sense to users as well as search engines. The current version seems like you are trying to stuffed the keywords within the URL where as shorting them will kill this factor and it will look more natural to SEs as well as end user.

My advice would be to go with shortening them and make it look real as stuffing is something Google don’t like so you might get hurt in the longer run!

Hope this helps!

There are always pros and cons for it!

Pros are that you will get a chance to target certain type of audience on one particular website. This means you will be able to create more targeted content around the specific type of audience instead of writing web copy keeping multiple audiences in mind.

You can easily target more powerful keywords that tar related to specific niche which is otherwise difficult on a website that convers multiple niches.

As the websites will be more targeted, it will be easier for you to complete within search engine from competitors and rank on the first page for targeted key phrases.

Cons have a list too! It’s not easy to come up with multiple sites as multiple sites means more and more content specific for every niche which can shoot your initial expense like anything.

Multiple websites means multiple SEO campaigns this can again put a huge dent on your initial marketing budget. If there will be one website, there will be one SEO campaign which can lead you towards the conversion in the longer run.

If it’s a local business, you cannot add multiple websites for one business page (I guess) and you cannot create multiple business pages as probably your physical location is the same.

I think the best idea is to see how your audience will react if you come up with multiple websites as compare for having one website for all services. Also what is more beneficial for your brand name. Once you have the answer you can take decisions accordingly.

Hope this helps!

If your Slide Share presentations are ranking well for your desired key phrases my idea is to create new content around the same topic for your website and include those slide shares in it. It is also a smart idea to look for websites that are already linking to that presentation and reach out to them to get a link on your website’s content.

This way you will have the chances to get ranked without losing the slideshare presentation’s rankings. Another reason why this idea is safe because extracting content from slide share and using it on the website is no guarantee that you will rank for those key phrases as quality of content is not the only factor that Google use to rank the document. There are several others like trust and DA which slide share must have higher than your website.

Hope this helps!

Obviously it really depends on what you really want from that forum... but in a normal state it is always good to go for sub directories instead of subdomain...

Matt Cutts of Google also did a post on his blog regarding this you can read it here http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/subdomains-and-subdirectories/ and i guess this will help you more...

Hope this helps!

Hello Nicola,

In my 4 years of experience as an agency SEO I only once accept this challenge and that is because my client was a reseller and he wants to come up on the 1^st page with the brand name of the manufacturer. I believe if this is the case at your end then I don’t think this make you wear a gray hat but in my experience this is extremely difficult in terms of competition and takes a long way to be on the first page.

If your case is not similar to the one mentioned above then I would want you to consider few important things before planning this:

• Trust of your own brand

Think from the angle of a visit that type in your competitor’s key phrases and find your website. After clicking it he/she might not find what he/she was expecting and this is where you will lose your own brand’s trust level.

If people are coming to your website and do not find what they are really looking for then eventually you will lose the trust of your own website/brand.

• Bounce Rate

If people coming to your website from your competitor’s brand name.. I believe they will only increase the bounce rate because of the fact that they didn’t find what exactly they were looking for.

• Killing User experience

This activity might kill the user experience to a higher extent due to the fact that you are taking them somewhere else when they are looking for something else.

Ann is smart indeed and I always mentioned that she is one of the few people who actually help me get better at SEO and blogging.

Getting free traffic idea is terrific and easy if the community is helpful but if the community is hijacked by spammers and there is no moderator that same good website becomes the real pain in the head...

As I said, Ann is smart so she must have some keep check on it but i would love to hear from her about the maintenance of the highest quality.

Hey Andrew,

Let’s start this way… you have the data of keywords that you have extracted from the Adwords campaign. This is great if you can extract all the keywords that are most convertible in terms of conversions.

Step 2 would be to list down the keywords and notice the traffic, difficulty level and competition each keyword contains and then on the basis of total traffic, difficulty level and conversion rate list down the keywords accordingly. Ideally it should be from highest returns to lowest returns…

Now you have the data so target the keywords that are most convertible… it depends on the resources of how many keywords you should target and what resources should do what!

Hope that helps!

I am actually happy that you are not one of those who believe that the importance of website is nothing but a company display! When you are redesigning your website this time you probably should consider the following things in-mind regardless of what CMS systems you use and what kind of design you have.

-          It should not take 3 to 5 seconds for your website to display its first page to your target audience.

-          Design and navigation should be easy enough for a visitor to continue their journey on the website instead of bouncing right after landing on the website.

-          Clear call to action so that he can easily convert in to lead and customer if he wants.

There are more ideas as well. Here is the checklist from hubspot that you should consider important when redesigning your website. http://cdn2.hubspot.net/hub/53/file-13220778-pdf/docs/ebooks/10-step-checklist-website-redesign.pdf

If you managed to create your website using this checklist not only your search engine visibility gets better but it will also help you increase your conversion rate as well as your website will be much more user friendly as it is at the moment.

Hope this help!

How about taking a look in to The Recommended Companies by Moz.com http://moz.com/community/recommended

Ok, the answer might bore you but this is what the truth is all about so here I go!

Search Engine use around 200+ different signals to rank a website and this links, DA, PA are just the indicators of few.

There are several other reasons why you are ranking above them like:

-          Your content is more relevant against that query

-          You might have got better quality content then your competitor

-          The links that are pointing to your website are less but quality always outranks quantity so maybe you have got better quality links then your competitor

-          My be the bounce rate of your competitors website was more than the bounce rate of your website

Long story short, there are tons of possibilities why your website is ranking above your competitors and one of them or may be all can be right or wrong!

Hope this helps!

First of all Congrats on the new website!

I am glad that you are serious about your marketing investment as most small businesses are more focused towards conversions no matter where they are getting from... off course PPC offer quick returns but investing heavily on PPC and ignoring organic is a worst business strategy I could ever imagine.

Anyways, in my personal opinion the budget is fair enough to start a comprehensive SEO campaign that offer REAL results and greater ROI. All you need to do is to invest it smartly!

1. Invest on Local 1^st

If you are a local business (even if you are not but have a physical location) try to heir someone for local SEO submissions only!

Submitting a website to local maps, yellow pages websites and business data aggregators is a onetime game so the charges won’t be too much! If you have time you can even do it yourself by reading a blogs about how to go with local SEO.

2. On-Page SEO Audit and Implementation

With Local SEO try and find a SEO consultant who is ready to audit your website from the on-page point of view and fix the problems within the website accordingly. This will be on technical as well as on the content and design side.

**Target to achieve Local and On-Page optimization for the 1^st month.

3. Social Media

This is a powerful ranking factor and can really help you lift your rankings in search engines but for a start I would advise you to start with using social media by your own and do not give it to the third party!

The major reason behind this is not only to save money but social Media is a platform where you can set your brand image in the online world so try to start by yourself as you know your business best! Later you can give your consultant to handle and manage your social media entities.

4. Link building

Now your Local and On-page is perfectly fit and you are done with your first month now hire a smart link builder to start with link building and management! I believe 2k a month for quality link building is a fine budget!

Over all your work to look in to different aspect will increase but as a result you will be able to get quality SEO services within your budget. Once you see some results started to appear in the SERPs and website started to give quality conversions... this is the time to increase your SEO budget and start with advance inbound tactics to grow audience around your brand and get 1^st page rankings from the desired key phrases.

Hope this helps!

Personally I think you have to give it some more time. If you have added news pages of unique content, just make sure that the quality of content is good.

Also see if the keywords are mapped correctly. It is also important to add some internal linking as this will help new pages get crawled in Google and internal link will give a link juice to new pages.

If I would be at your place I would have boost new pages on social media and add some links to the new pages as well.

I think you should be doing the above mentioned activities and give it some time to see how Google is reacting to that.

Hope this helps!

I don’t see much problem with PR Web other then the fact that you have to be careful about adding links in the Press Release. Actually you only should use PR Web when you want masses to update about your product or service but for SEO purposes it’s of ZERO value from now!

If you think adding a link in the PR is important for visitors then make it no follow otherwise just eliminate the link and let people know about the update you have!

Remember: Use it for users not for Search Engines!

PA and DA might indicate how many links are pointing back to your website but this is not the only thing that is important to consider when plan ranking better in SERPs from the targeted key phrases.

Again, DA increases when links pointing to your website increases but it does not measure quality of link and how relevant it is to your website. Other things you should consider including is quality of content on the website, internal linking, how powerful the link is and few more.

There are times when you actually deserve better ranking but some websites are outranking you using tactics that are prohibited by Google. In that case you can report them to Google or wait for the update as these things usually cutoff as soon as  the Google launches the algo update.

Hope this helps!