Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Olga,

The first step would be adjusting your image names and ALT tags. I grabbed a random image from your home page.

Name = 1335830967585-632321001.jpeg

ALT = green paisley print black bandana the pattern of this bandana is made by girls gone biker - bandanas

From a SEO perspective, the name and alt tag are horrible. Your images are ranking just fine for the terms you offered. For example, try a google search for "1335830967585" which is the first part of the name of your image. Google image search shows the image, and regular search shows one result, your website. You are ranking perfectly fine for the image name you chose. A suggested change:

Name = bandana-black-green.jpeg

ALT = "black bandana with green print"

These changes will at least get you into the ball park of where you want to be.

There are other steps you can take such as adding quality content around the images. Danny Dover shared a nice WBF on this topic.

Hi Steve,

Generally speaking the practice of using keyword based domains in this manner is not helpful. There are better ways to spend your time to earn traffic.

This tactic is called creating a Doorway Page. It is a violation of Google's Guidelines and subject to a site penalty.

Google Adwords shows 210 hits per month for the exact match keyword. It is unlikely the site holds any ranking for other terms. The domain name and site title are optimized for a single keyword.

A legitimate SEO should definitely be able to help any quality Denver IT consulting websites outrank the example site you shared. Even the top ranked site is not very well optimized.

Bill, I'll divide a response into two sections. First, allow me to respond to your direct SEO inquiries.

Regarding the redirects, when a page loads it provides header information to the browser. The header information includes codes such as 200 (all ok), 301 (page is permanently redirected), 404 (cannot find page) and numerous other codes. There are many methods to view this information. Since you are here at SEOmoz I would recommend installing the MOZbar on your Firefox browser. Analyze Page > Page Attributes then scroll to the bottom and you will see this information.

Regarding the content, you are absolutely correct. It is a common problem when a manufacturer provides a data feed then many vendors copy and paste the information from that feed. It is all duplicate content. In order to rank well you need to provide quality, unique content. Ideally you will spend some time with each product and share the details, some positives and negatives about the products. Any extra videos, images or other content you generate is great too as long as it is sincerely helpful to users.

Regarding cannibalization, that refers to when you have multiple pages on your website which are relevant to the same keyword. You have numerous pages which present "Nitro Monster Trucks" and even multiple pages with that exact same page title. Every page title on your site should be unique. It is perfectly fine to have one page titled "Nitro Monster Truck" and another page titled "Nitro Moster Truck Volcano S30". It is not ok to have two pages titled "Nitro Monster Truck" This subject gets complicated when you have similar content such as your products. You need to be careful with page titles, headers, ALT tags, etc. Internal linking should also be used to support the correct keywords on each page.

Regarding performing SEO in general, it is wonderful you wish to learn. The best place to start is the Beginner's Guide to SEO. The Google Guide is also recommended reading.

SEO, Web Development and being a car mechanic have one thing in common. You can learn pieces of it in less then a day and see the positive results of your work. The challenge is it takes years to really learn and understand these fields. There is formal training, informal training, experience and tools involved.

Using web development as an example, there are shopping carts and CMS software such as WordPress which allow a user to install site software, replace logos, add images and content then have their site up and running in under a day. The challenge is a professionally developed site which utilizes all HTML and SEO best practices would likely take a solid month to develop and customize for you. The month timeline assumes an experienced programmer who has the training, knowledge, experience and tools to do the job. If you are earning 80k/year on ebay, your site has a chance to do serious business. I would definitely employ a professional developer. Each month your site is not up you are losing sales.

As a final note, there are many developers who claim to be professionals but do not build quality websites. There is a long list of items to look for in a quality website. Be careful in how you select a developer. Treat it like selecting any other professional. Don't simply go for a flashy ad or the best price.

Hi Bill, I took a look at your site and there are a few things I can share:

• the label of "Low Competition" from Google AdWords applies to PPC advertising, not organic ranking

• presently your site does redirect the non-www version of URLs to their www equal, but it takes an extra hop. Check your redirects to make sure they can happen in one hop

• a major concern is cannibalization and duplicate content within your own site.

A primary function of search engines is to index unique content. Can you point out the content on the URL you shared that is unique? The header, footer and sidebars are likely consistent throughout the website. Your page offers 7 sections: main, price, options, description, video, accessories, related items.

The "related items" and "accessories" content is available on many pages throughout the site.

The "video" section has no content at all other then presenting a YouTube video.

The main section is images of the item with no text. Images do count as content but Google cannot read images. I checked only one image but the name is "Diplay11.jpg" and there is no ALT text. One shortcoming of most onpage optimization tools is they cannot properly check images although it should have flagged the image for not offering ALT text.

The "price" and "options" sections each have extremely little text and what is there can be found on other pages throughout the site.

What's left is the Description section. This area is your best opportunity to show something unique, but that does not happen here. I took your first sentence and performed a Google search including quotes: "The Nitro Monster Truck RTR Volcano S30 replaces the Volcano SV. "

<cite>www.rcnitroshop.com/Nitro-Monster-Truck-RTR-Volcano-S30</cite>

http://www.rcnitroshop.com/Volcano-S30-110-Scale-Nitro-Monster-Truck_p_8.html

The last URL above also has a page title of "Nitro Monster Truck". A page title usually gives a pretty good idea of the keyword for which you are attempting to rank.

In summary, if you wish to start ranking your website pages it will require a much more serious effort. From a SEO perspective, the site needs a tremendous amount of work, or to be redesigned. From a content perspective, you need to be willing to take the time and write unique, compelling content for each product in order to rank well. I define "ranking well" as landing on page 1 of Google results. If you are satisfied with ranking in the top 50, you can simply put effort into the existing site and it can happen.

404 errors are a natural part of the internet. Pages are added and removed from sites on a regular basis. With that said, when a page is removed from your site, you should take one of two actions:

• redirect the URL to another very similar page on your site. If you have a page on a Nile 2-day cruise and that page is removed, you may wish to redirect visitors to your Nile 3-day cruise page. This redirection is helpful for users as they find content similar to what they were seeking.

• allow the page to 404. If you no longer have a similar page, then go ahead and allow the URL to provide a 404 error. This tells search engines the page no longer exists and they will, over time, remove the page from the index.

If you choose the latter approach, be sure you offer a helpful 404 page on your site. Provide your site's normal navigation, a link to a HTML site map, a search box and a most popular articles widget can all be helpful.

The worst thing you can do is allow your server to return an error message not designed for users. Presently, your 404 error page is provided by your server. The error message is unfriendly and not helpful for users.

As an fyi, the URL you shared does not show up in Google.co.uk search results so you have no concerns from that perspective. The link will likely be removed from OSE in 1 or 2 updates.

Daniel,

I highly advise against any such method of link building. The proper link building technique is to earn links. If the links are given away free to anyone, you did not earn them. Google often views free directory links as manipulative and "inorganic".

You need to closely examine each directory. Is it a quality directory? Can anyone get in or are there authentic standards which cause a percentage of websites to be rejected? Does the directory comply with Google's Guidelines?

I have worked with multiple clients who have been penalized as a direct result of similar links to what you are describing. The result is the clients had to contact each linking site and request the links be removed. This process is very time consuming and expensive. It costs many times more to remove the links then to get them in the first place. Once again, I strongly advise against ever using any directory submission site. Even if you do not earn a penalty, the links simply offer no value.

Can you offer clarification as to what you view as a "dead link"?

If you mean a link to a page on your site which no longer exists, then your options are as follows:

• take John's advice and 301 the link to the most relevant page on your site

• allow the link to 404. 404 errors are a natural part of the internet. You should be sure to have the most helpful 404 page possible. Include your site's normal navigation, a search box, most popular articles, etc.

Blocking pages in robots.txt is usually a bad idea and is more likely to add to the problem rather then fix it. If you do not block the page in robots.txt, Google would then crawl the page, see the error and remove it from their index. Because you block the page they can no longer view the page so they will likely leave it in for longer.

Google normally promptly removes web pages submitted with the URL Removal Tool. The tool is designed to remove pages which can damage your site or others. For example, if confidential information was accidentally published. It is not designed to be used to remove 74k pages because you decided to remove them from your website.

If these dead links are simply pages you removed from your site, I advise you to remove the robots.txt block and then decide to 301 them or allow them to 404. Google should then clean up the links within 30-60 days.

If you want to speed up the process as much as possible, there is one other step you can take. Set a 410 (Gone) code for the pages. When Google receives a 404 response, they are unsure if the page is simply temporarily unavailable so they keep it in the index. If they receive a 410 response, you are telling Google the page is GONE and they can update their index faster.

Hello Mike,

Are you familiar with the MozRank and MozTrust metrics? If not, I recommend checking out the following pages:

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/mozrank

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/moztrust

In brief, they are link metrics. If your site has not earned links during the past 6 months, those metrics should not change.

MozRank, MozTrust, PA and DA are all based on the SEOmoz web crawler. It takes 30-60 days to capture data and process it. If you have waited 6 months and still do not see data there are one of several issues:

• your site has not earned any links

• your site has earned links but not from any quality websites

• your sites has earned links but the pages which contain the links are buried deeply, or the linking site has code which is difficult to crawl

• any sites which link to you are blocked via robots.txt or the pages have the noindex tag applied

If your site has earned authentic links and you are willing to share your site address then we can take a further look. Please include the URL of some pages which link to your website and an approximate date of when the link was earned.

If you feel confident you have earned authentic links over 60 days ago, then you can take Host1's advice and contact the SEOmoz help team ([email protected]).

Regarding a bridge page, Google's policies are quite clear and can be located here: http://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=190435

In brief, the defining factor is whether or not your web page offers a true value to users. Are your reviews authentic, unique and sincerely helpful? Are they well presented? If so, then it would not be considered a bridge page.

How many affiliate links is considered too many?

Too many for what exactly? Are you trying to rank your website in organic search? If so you need to understand each link you add detracts from the overall link value of your page.

Too many for users? Begin by using your best judgement and perform A/B testing.

In short, if you configure your site to provide the most authentic value for users and you succeed, Google will not have any problem with your site. If you attempt to manipulate your users or Google, then you are risking a penalty.

There are two ways to initial a crawl:

1. There is a weekly crawl associated with any sites for which you have set up a campaign. Each weekly crawl is fresh data.

2. You can manually initiate a crawl by going into your SEOmoz tools and using the Web Crawl tool. Each time you manually start the Web Crawl tool it should be a unique crawl.

If you feel you have made the proper changes and the crawl tool is still showing errors the most likely cause is either the changes were not saved on your web server, or the changes were not performed correctly. If you are confident the changes were made correctly, you can also contact the SEOmoz help desk ([email protected]) to report a bug in the web crawl tool.

Does anyone have feedback regarding Inbound Writer? http://www.inboundwriter.com/wordpress

I normally do not use such tools but a new client is presently using the tool so I would like to hear from the community if they have any experiences to share.

Thanks!

It can't be done with respect to Google's visibility. Anyone can link to you at any time and there is nothing you can do about it.

The main positive action you can take is to earn as many good links as possible so if you get some bad links pointed to your site they will only represent a small percentage of your total links.

I know people hate this answer but we have to trust Google has systems in place to deal with black hat SEO tactics of link spamming a competitor's site.

If you wanted to go to extreme measures, you can block a link from reaching your site in your web server settings. On Apache servers (the most common servers) you can do it in the htaccess file. Once again, this is not recommended but those who are extremely determined to block the links from working can do it this way.

When you look in OSE, it shows 35 LRD but right above the large metrics is the small print "Link metrics for the page http://thisisouryear.com/".

The key word is "page". If you look at the SEOmoz tool bar it offers three sets of link metrics: the page, the sub-domain and the root domain. If you look at the page metrics for the URL you will see it shows as 35 LRD. If you look at the root domain metrics, it shows 1015 LRD.

As an additional note, this particular directory does not warrant any analysis. It is a pay-for-link directory which charges $25 for links and then you choose if you want a follow or nofollow link. If you choose nofollow, then the link is not worth paying money. If you choose follow, then you are violating Google's policies as this site is not compliant with them. You would therefore subject yourself or your client to penalties. Google is coming down hard on manipulative links and their removal is the most painful penalty to deal with in SEO.

The overwhelming majority of directories are manipulative links. If you obtain a link from a directory, please be sure they comply with Google's guidelines.

Hello Kate,

In my opinion, yes you should stop the redirects from Domain A to Domain B. Google has been cracking down on manipulative links recently and many sites have been penalized as a direct result of manipulative links.

My recommendation would be to disable the redirect then try to determine if your site has been manually penalized. If the site has not received a manual penalty, your rankings should be restored in a month.

Those links should have the "nofollow" tag applied to them as they are sponsored or paid links. If they do not have the tag applied, it is highly likely Google devalues those links anyway.

I enjoy the sentiment very much Alan.

Most of us white hat SEOs have experienced challenges working with clients who ask why everyone else can get away with "stuff" (i.e. spammy links, bad code, nearly duplicate sites, etc) while we are asking them to avoid those tactics. Many clients are confused why their process worked for years but suddenly there is a problem.

Both Google and Bing have improved their processes. We are now seeing the benefits. For years the focus was simply building out the search engines. The focus then shifted to obtaining fresher data. Next, they had to focus on very serious issues such as malware, spam, pop-ups, porn, etc. Now the major search engines have gained control over all those issues they can focus on quality.

I expect and hope search engines continue on this path and improve the search world for the benefit of all. I also expect high quality content and website design to become more important then random links.

Thanks for sharing.

Yes.

Google and Bing are two independent companies which offer search results. If you wish to optimize your performance in Bing (Bing + Yahoo) then you should register with Bing WMT.

By actively sharing your knowledge and responding to user questions you can quickly earn MozPoints. If you check-in frequently, you can earn bonus points which are available for responses offered within 4 hours. There are other methods to earn points such as responding to blog articles. The link Brent shared is quite helpful.

Diane, Keri's response is very accurate. The only way you can know about every link to your site is to access a web crawler which has visibility to every page of every site in the world. There is no such crawler.

A few challenges:

• a website may link to your site but have the page noindex'd so the link is not captured by crawlers

• a website may link to your site but have the page blocked by robots.txt

• a website may link to your site but the page requires users to log in which a crawler is unable to do

• a web page may link to your site but the page is buried deep within a site, or an island page, or very low value (i.e. few or no links) so they page is not found

The results you seek are simply not possible in today's world. The best you can do is to use multiple tool sets so you can have the maximum level of visibility to links. I would recommend the following 5 tools: Google WMT, OSE, Majestic, Raven and Ahrefs.

For the most part, if a link exists to your site and you cannot find it in either OSE nor Google then the link likely has little to no value. An exception would be new links, especially if they are not on popular pages.

Oops. Sorry for looking at the wrong site Alex. Some quick opportunities I noticed for your site:

• improve your HTML and CSS validation

• add some unique content to the page. As far as I can tell, there is not any unique content on the entire page.

• add more social engagement

• provide more engaging content. What content would visitors find helpful? Your page is about The Shins. Perhaps their next tour dates where people can meet up? Band News? etc.

• I would recommend examining every Shins fan page you can find. Take a look at what is being offered on those pages. Incorporate any additional cool ideas into your page. Perhaps a poll or asking users to share their favorite songs or band stories.

• replace the "+" in the URL with a hyphen. http://tastebuds.fm/artists/the+shins

• the ALT text is mainly numbers. Replace the text with helpful descriptions. Also provide more helpful image file names.

Those are just a few initial ideas I noticed.

Any idea what is the time commonly needed for small and new websites (no trafic at the moment) to see domain authority growing ?

Domain Authority is purely a SEOmoz term. It is based upon Linkscape's crawl of the web which is completed approximately once per month. Depending on when the links were built it may take 2 months before they are discovered.

Keep in mind Linkscape only crawls the top 25% of web pages. For the most part, if Linkscape does not see your link it likely does not have much value.

Linkscape was last updated Feb 28th so if you built a link a full 3 weeks ago, it should be visible after the next update on April 10th. If you started after 3 weeks ago, it may not be visible until May. Please take a look at the update calendar: https://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/345964-linkscape-update-schedule

Google will find your links much quicker. It depends on the value of the page. If you gain a link from the New York Times front page, Google will likely find the link a few minutes later. If you gain a link from a random page of a low value free directory, it may take a month.

Also keep in mind just because a link is found does not mean it has any value.

Hi Alex,

A few tips:

• your web page has over 140 html errors. Try fixing most of the HTML and CSS errors. They may cause various issues ranging from search engines not being able to crawl your site properly to errors being displayed on various browsers and devices. http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fanpop.com%2Fspots%2Fthe-shins&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0

• Change your title a bit. Your desired keyword focus is "the shins fans". Your present title is "The Shins Fan Club | Fansite with photos, videos, and more". Try a title of "The Shins Fans" or at least replace "The Shins Fan Club" with "The Shins Fans".

• Try using the keyword target in the page's content. You have shared your focus is "the shins fans". The only place that phrase is used is in the very bottom block of the page. If that is your keyword focus it should be used prominently at the top of the page where it is visible when the page first loads.

• Use ALT tags to identify images. Search engines cannot "see" images so they rely on your help to identify them.

• Use image file names which represent the image. One of the main images on the page is named "520_800_100.jpg". Perhaps name it "Shins Group photo.jpg" or something more helpful.

There are tons of opportunities to improve your SEO. I don't place a lot of value in the "A grade" for your page. If you desire to be on the first page, especially if you wish to be at the top, there is a lot of work to do. A great place to start: http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo

Good Luck

The 301 cancellation itself is immediate. It may take time for search engines to crawl your site and notice the change on any given page.

Hi Marisa,

If the issue is limited to the seomoz crawler I recommend contacting the help desk: [email protected]. They can help you troubleshoot the issue.

I have not encountered this issue before. I checked your header codes and the redirect seems to be working well.

The first item we need to know: is this human translated content? Or is Google Translate or another similar tool being used?

If you are using auto-translated content, it wont rank. It is a violation of search engine guidelines. If you are using human translated content, ensure the translations are high quality. A few items to check:

• the translation should target a specific country rather then a specific language. Search engines results are provided by country such as Google France, Google UK, etc. Dialects of the same language also vary greatly by country such as Spanish from Mexico and Spain are quite different.

• the translation should account for the targeted countries monetary units and systems of measurement

• the translation should account for local customs, traditions, politics, etc.

• the page should use the proper language meta tags

• you will need to make a decision regarding content presentation. Will you use a unique subdomain? Or present the translated content in a folder?

There are numerous articles related to providing duplicate content in translated form. I suggest a quick site search will yield lots of results.

Truth be told, you do not want to trust anyone with anything. Movies, television and stories are filled with tales of trust and betrayal.

With that said, if you are going to trust a company, then SEOmoz has all the right indicators.

1. It is the largest SEO-focused site in the world in terms of traffic.

2. The CEO, Rand, has been trusted to represent the US in international matters related to SEO

3. SEOmoz began in 2004. 8 years is a long time in today's internet world. SEOs from around the world have entrusted SEOmoz since that time.

You can always go with the TRUST NO ONE approach. If you own or perform work for any small business type of site, your are trusting a lot more people then you realize.

• Do you own your own server? If not, you are paying for hosting with a provider. My hosting provider has 200 employees, many of whom are network engineers or various level techs. A large number of these people have full access to your server and logs.

• Do you have employees? You are trusting them with your data.

• How secure is your site really? Numerous of the world's largest companies have had serious security breaches. What type of security testing have you performed on your site? I am not speaking of running some sort of free or inexpensive testing, but rather have a security expert examine your site's code line by line looking for vulnerabilities.

• How secure is your office network? Your laptop or pc's? Your internet network? Your internet browser?

I take security very seriously, moreso then most of my colleagues. I have custom built Dell laptops with Intel vPro chips for encrypted hard drives and CompuTrace Complete for the ability to disable and recover lost or stolen laptops. I have a paper shredder in the office, and I use it. I maintain my own dedicated server with custom scripts for added protection. These are just a few examples of basic security practices.

I choose to trust SEOmoz with my data. I would suggest if you perform a full security audit on your business practices, SEOmoz data sharing is not likely to be even a blip on the radar compared to the numerous gaping holes many businesses share. With that said, this would be a great time for a SEO staff member to share the practices used to secure our data.

**How big a factor is no follow in ranking?**No follow links do not impact rankings. The links are treated by Google as if they don't exist for ranking purposes. With that understood, Google can still follow the nofollow links so they can help with having your site's pages crawled more frequently. Additionally Google may use nofollow links in certain computations to detect spam. **What is the major factor in the seomoz "trust rating"?**Links from "trusted" sites. When you earn a (follow) link from Harvard.edu, WhiteHouse.org, Time.com or other "trusted" sites, your mT rating will improve. The closer a site is to a "trusted" source, the higher the amount of trust which will be passed. MozTrust is helpful to consider in combination with a site's other metrics. To learn more about moztrust visit this link: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/moztrust**Does high no follow rate impact trust factor?**My best guess is nofollow links are ignored, but I would love to hear an official answer on this question.

Two things to understand:

1. PR is a page-level metric. Most tools which share PR have no idea what the true PR is for a given page except for your site's home page. If your site's home page is PR 5 then they will often use a formula to guess the PR of other pages within your site. Pages 1 click away from your home page would be calculated as PR 4, 2 clicks away would be PR 3, etc. These are pure guesses and may not have any relation with the page's true PR.

2. The only way to improve your PR is by earning links. Period. How many pages your site has is irrelevant. The quality of your content is irrelevant. You can debate these points. For example, quality content is important to help earn quality links so in that sense it is important, but PR is purely a measure of incoming links. Some SEOs could get technical and share how the number of pages in your site can impact PR based on your internal links, but that really takes the conversation into a deeper mathematical discussion which is not going to help you.

If you provide the best website in the world but have no links to it, your PR will be 1. If another webmaster owns a crappy website but has somehow managed to earn quality links pointing to their home page, they can relatively easily show a PR of 4.

With the above understood, you should forget about PR. You have likely read this advice numerous times and have chosen to ignore it. PR is one of over 200 metrics involved in determining your rankings. What you really care about is your profit. Beyond that, you care about sales. Stepping further back, you care about traffic and conversion rates. These metrics should be your focus, not PR.

I thoroughly enjoyed your response Harald. I never would have considered switching from Amazon S3 to Amazon Cloud Space. The improved performance you experienced is amazing.

**We have over 950,000 pages linking to us from 829 unique root domains. **

When we talk about PR, the first thing to understand is you only have visibility to "toolbar PR". Google internally updates PR on a very regularly (likely daily) basis. Externally there is an update to "toolbar PR" 3 or 4 times each year. No matter what changes are made, you will only see the results once every few months.

How can we improve our PR and how important is PR today?

You improve PR by earning quality links. PR is calculated on an algorithmic scale which means the higher you go, the harder it is to move higher.

I would suggest focusing on the number of unique root domains and not the number of links. You can obtain a single footer link from a forum site with a million pages and then show a million linking pages. Despite having a million linking pages, the PR value would likely be less then a single link in content from a quality web page.

PR is very important, but keep in mind it is a piece of the puzzle. My recommendation is to first improve your site itself to ensure it incorporates both SEO and HTML best practices. Next, take steps to improve your conversion rate and instill trust in your site. Then focus on providing top quality content. Once those steps are complete, then focus on earning links and promoting your site via social networks.

**What should i be looking for to decide if these directories are worth paying for a link? **

Be very careful to ensure the directory does not violate Google's Guidelines. In my experience, most paid directory listings have no value whatsoever, and may actually harm your site. A few examples of requirements for a paid directory link:

• the link fee must be for an evaluation of the site, not for the link itself. In other words, any site which offers any form of guarantee to be included in the directory is violating search engine guidelines. It is highly likely Bing and Google have devalued all links from the site. This can be confusing because the site may retain its own PR, but the outgoing links are devalued.

• the link fee must be non-refundable. If the fee is "guaranteed inclusion or your money back" then the directory violates guidelines.

• the site must offer solid selection criteria. The idea is the directory separates "good" sites from "bad" sites. One example would be the Better Business Bureau directory which sets standards for membership.

There are numerous articles which cover this topic in detail. A helpful link from Matt Cutts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=rKUlVquEImc

what about page rank of the page that it's on?  Does that matter?

Sure it matters. Understand when you refer to PR you can only see "toolbar PR" which is often months old. There are directories which manipulate a page's PR, then as soon as Google updates the toolbar PR the directory makes changes and the PR is then worthless, but they will earn revenue for months based on the falsely assigned PR value.

For this questions and your others questions, there is an excellent detailed discussion you may find helpful: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-link-based-spam-analysis-techniques

** i've heard that one page rank 5 link carries the weight of hundreds of page rank zero links. Is this true?**

PR is assigned on an algorithmic scale. Yes, higher PR is worth significantly more then a similar page with lower PR value. There are many factors which affect a links value including the position on a page (header vs footer vs content), whether the link is "above the fold", uses anchor text, etc.

What does it mean if the page rank is unranked? Is it worth paying for a link if the page is old and is unranked?

The term "unranked" may have various meanings depending on the tool you are using. It could be a new page which has never earned a rank, or it could be a penalized page. If you earn a link on a quality new page, then it may already have earned a decent PR ranking but it is only visible to Google.

I read in an SEO forum that there are many other things i should look at in a directory besides page rank. Obviously traffic is one but what about other not so obvious things?

The most important consideration is whether the directory is useful. Will anyone actually go to this directory, perform a search and then find your site as a result. The second most important consideration is whether the directory is 100% legitimate. In other words, do the links offered pass value. You may disagree with the order of these two criteria, but either way they should be your focus.

How many directory links at one time is too many? how many is too many over a long period of time?

This is a judgement call and opinions will vary. I find there are very few directories of a general nature which offer any value. My preference is to add one general directory link per month until the quality directories are used. The total directory links to your site should be a very small (less then 10%) of links to your site in my opinion. Many SEOs use a higher percentage, a practice with which I disagree.

Kane's answer is solid and gets a thumbs up from me. I would add a bit more detail to directly respond to your inquiry.

I've heard that when a site is new, the sources from which it gets its first back links are very important -- that the early links are more important for ranking than later links.

The primary concern is the first links are authentic, quality links. If your site has 100 quality links and then gathers 50 junk links, your link ratio of quality links vs spam show 66% quality links. If the first links to your sites were free directories, spam blog articles and other inorganic links then you can quickly show a link profile with 100% spam links which can cause ranking issues.

Your profile is not complete so I cannot tell what industry your site focuses. Let's say you sell watches. Some suggested first links you could acquire:

BBB (Better Business Bureau)

DMOZ / Yahoo / Business.com - other high quality directories

MasterCard SecureCode, Verified by Visa - programs offering secure shopping sites

Authorized retailer links from Seiko, Rolex, Casio, etc.

Share a couple "best on the web" quality articles on other sites discussing topics of interest such as "Watches - Does the Brand Matter?", "Watches of James Bond", etc.

Write top-quality reviews of specific watches and share them

Create short videos showing watches in detail and people using them

Distribute high quality images of the watches

Offer discounts to certain groups. For examples, 20% off all watches to graduates of (insert local university name) for 90 days after graduation. The university may provide a link to your site.

The list goes on. This is the point where I would suggest reaching out to the links Kane shared.

Serge,

It sounds like the certificate is not properly installed on the server. The steps to install a Verisign SSL certificate are (from memory):

• generate a CSR from your server. The method to do such varies based on your hosting setup. If you use WHM, there is an option within the panel. If none of this makes sense, contact your web host for guidance.

• Verisign will provide you with the key. This key then needs to be installed on your server. You can do this via WHM or contact your web host provider.

• Verisign has a tool which verifies the certificate has been properly installed. If the certificate is installed correctly, users will not see the warning you mentioned in IE nor any other browser.

• htaccess is not related to the above process. What the change in htaccess allows you to do is ensure visitors can only view your site in https://

• once the above is complete, you will want to review your code to ensure all images and other objects are presented only in https on secure pages. If you skip this step, users will receive a "not all items on this page are secure. Do you wish to view the unsecure objects" error.

• now you can add your Verisign trust badge to your page(s)

Good Luck.

%20 represents a space character.

The proper URL to your "print quotas" tag page is: http://www.altman.co.uk/category/blog-tags/print-quotas

Notice the above link works. You need to examine your site's crawl report, locate the "referrer" field for the 404 error and examine the referring page for the broken link.

If your blog tags are bringing up 404 errors, your CMS is not configured correctly. Can you share an example URL of a tag page?

Hi Peter,

I sympathize with your situation. Since the home page is blank with just a login feature you have no information about the site or its purpose. A Google search for the site shows nothing but the home page. A WHOIS search shows the site owner is private.

There is no way to know the reason behind the traffic. Someone could have shared a "free stuff" post and for whatever reason provided a link to your site. When users arrive at your site they are of course disappointed then leave.

Some options:

• contact the site owner via the WHOIS e-mail. Ask the site owner to remove the link.

• block all traffic from Bangladesh. This option will work if all or most of the traffic is from that site.

• block all traffic which shows that site as a referrer. I have never implemented such a solution but your web host can likely offer options in this regard. You may have to implement a firewall.

Best wishes

Marcin's answer is correct. A couple items to add-on:

• you can indicate the location of your sitemaps in your robots.txt file

• if you do update your sitemaps in Google, I suggest taking the same action for Bing. While Google does control about 70% of the search market, keep in mind Bing + Yahoo is the other 30% and the traffic is significant.

• there are ways to provide a single sitemap but your choice would either be having an external tool crawl your site (not recommended) or having a coder either merge the sitemaps or provide an internal solution.

Hi Peter,

There are many questions which need to be addressed regarding this issue.

• What search engine are you using exactly? Google.com? Google.co.uk? Google.es? Bing? etc

• Have you made any geographical settings in Webmaster Tools?

• Is your site language specific? Do you offer a single language site? Or is it divided by country /uk, /us, /es?

• If you only offer one language, which country is it focused towards?

Your hosting country is an indicator of your site's target audience. All things being equal, I would consider a site hosted in Spain to be less relevant to a US searcher then a comparable site hosted in the US. This factor can be offset by ensuring all other country-specific indicators are set properly.

Without examining your site and the pages involved it is not possible for me to share feedback.

Is it possible you made any recent site wide changes? Changes to your header, navigation, footer or sidebar could have pushed you passed a certain threshhold of duplicate content which triggered a flag.

For the YellowPages links specifically, I would expect them to show in OSE. The challenge is how buried is the page with your link?

From the home page I tried to navigate to your page using a mouse. I clicked "More cities" then selected "Saint Paul Minnesota". The resulting page is "Currently trending in St Paul" where you business is NOT listed on the page. I tried a couple other links such as "See more trends" and "Recently Added Businesses" but was unable to locate a link to your page on their site. A crawler needs a way to locate the page through links. Clearly Google found the page but to answer why it does not appear in OSE we need to answer the question...how can a user access the page without using the site search box?

If you could research the site and learn the answer, we can offer a better analysis.

I took a look at a couple links.

The scsuhockey.com site is a very low value site. It has a DA of 4. The home page has a PA of 17. This basically means OSE wont crawl more then 1 link past the home page. Content from this site may be crawled by Google, but not OSE. The link is on the 4th page of a forum post with 10 pages. This type of link has almost no value. You should expect to see the link in WMT but not in OSE. This result is the normal behavior for both tools.

The findhealthpros.com site is in a similar situation. It shows a DA of 22, but the page your link is on seems buried within the site. From the home page I clicked the "Chiropractic" link but did not see any link to your page.

In order for your link to be seen by OSE it needs to have a measurable amount of SEO value. As a rough rule, expect OSE to go one level deep (i.e. 1 click) from the home page for every 10 DA points. If you receive a link from a site with DA 40, the link needs to be within a maximum of 4 clicks from the home page. Alternatively, the page with your link could have direct links to it which OSE might find.

I am just confused to why OSE only shows 7 vs. the 80 in Google Webmaster Tools.

Have you built a lot of links recently? It will often take 60 days for a link to be visible in OSE.

Another consideration is OSE does not capture every link. It examines approximately the top 25% of websites. Generally speaking, if a link is not visible in OSE and is not new, the link does not offer much value.

If you would like further analysis, feel free to share a couple links which you see in WMT but not in OSE.

I agree with Robert. I will add it would be a nice suggestion for SEOmoz to offer the ability for agencies to add employees to the "master" account. It would need to be thought out. For example, what is an employee leaves the agency and goes to another one? The employees SEOmoz profile of posts and such should remain in tact.

You have identified your competitor as having "artificial" links. It is likely many of those links have been devalued by Google and do not offer any benefit to the site. If that is the case, the site may even earn a penalty at some point due to inorganic links. It would be foolish for you to copy the bad links from your competitor.

I understand you are viewing your competitor's site and have determined the reason for the site's performance is these links. There are over 200 factors in determining a web page's ranking. It's entirely possible there are other factors causing the site to rank well and links are not the primary cause of the site's success.

Either way, you seem to clearly understand the process. You want to EARN links. You will never beat your competitor by copying their links. Examine your competitors profile so you can find opportunities and gather ideas. Work to capture some of the strong links from your competitor but leave the rest. You want to earn organic links in content.

What do you think would be the best way to tackle this?

You could choose to report your competitor to Google's spam team. They may take action based on your report. If action is taken, it will likely be months later.

Is the DoFollow vs NoFollow ratio important?

The primary importance is earning organic (natural) links to your site. Both follow and nofollow links are a natural part of the web. If you focus on earning legitimate links to your site, you have nothing to worry about. Whatever the ratio works out as, so be it.

If you engage in manipulative link building practices, then you have to constantly worry about being discovered and penalized. The ratio of follow vs nofollow link is one of many metrics a search engine can examine as a possible flag for guideline violations.

Should I worry about writing too much viral content without building traditional links first?

Absolutely not. This type of problem is one most webmasters dream of having.

Somehow, this link does not show up on OSE, and it seems to get no credit.

There are two readily apparent issues with the webpage presented at: http://www.happydogwebproductions.com/item/spine-and-sports.html

Issue #1 - no visible linking. If I was located on the home page of the HappyDogWebProductions.com site, how can I get to this page? Apparently I need to click from the Home page > What We Do > Portfolio > Design/Development > HTML/CSS > Spine and Sports.

There is simply not enough authority to cause crawlers to go that deep. The page should either be moved to a URL closer to the home page or earn it's own direct links.

Issue #2 - the page lacks content.  "Spine and Sports Chiropractic needed a website to separate themselves from the competition. They ended up with just that."

The page is 90%+ duplicate content. The header, footer, comment box, etc. comprises the majority of the page's text. There is nothing worthy of indexing.

Ask yourself this question...what keyword is a user likely to type in to Google where they would receive this page listed in SERPs and think to themselves "I am so glad I found this page! It's exactly what I wanted." I will suggest none.

Even if OSE showed the link, it is highly likely Google would offer it no weight at all.

Whats with the backslash in the url adding as duplicate content?

A backslash is viewed as a character. You could choose to present different content on a URL with a backslash versus without one.

mysite.com/testing does not necessarily offer the same content as mysite.com/testing/. Just because you choose to offer the same content on both pages does not mean search engines will understand your choice by default. Each URL is unique and viewed separately.

Is this a bug or something that needs to be addressed? If so, just use a redirect?

If you used the SEOmoz crawler and it notified you of an issue with some pages on your site which are viewed as duplicate content due to the addition of a backlash, it is not a bug. This issue should be addressed. A 301 redirect would likely be the best solution.

A hyphen, comma or pipe can be used as a word separator in the title tag. None of these choices are considered as superior from a SEO perspective. It's up to you to determine which method works best for your site.