Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi there

It's still early days for your website, which might be one of the reasons why you're not ranking as high as you might expect.  However, I've taken a quick look at your backlink profile.

You have over 60,000 links coming from two .nl forums - courtesy of two non-contextual site-wide links to your website.  This would look extremely unnatural to Google, not only because of the huge ratio of links to referring domains, but because of how unnaturally the links look to have been placed.

I'd argue that these links are doing nothing to help improve the link value to your website and, at worse, might be negatively effecting it.  In the not too distant future I'd look at removing those site-wide links.

If you take away those links, you're left with very little else in the way of quality inbound links, so as you have identified you may want to earn some more links (and much better quality links at that).

Additionally, you may want to look at implementing the hreflang tag.

Hope this helps.

Hi Justin

As the old saying goes: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it".

If you're ranking well already, I'd keep things as they are and give yourself a pat on the back!

The TLD itself (.com, .com.au etc) has very little, if any, impact on how your website performs.  Other factors such as the onsite optimisation, link profile, NAP presence and citations etc would all have a greater effect.

Each site migration comes with its element of risk.  My main thought here is that you won't want to jeopardise your rankings unless there is a compelling business reason for wanting to do the migration.

Hi John

This mobile update effects websites on the page level only.  So if one of your pages is not mobile friendly, that page may not rank as well in mobile search, but it shouldn't mean that the rest of your site will be affected as well.  That is to say, if you have some mobile friendly pages and some not, the whole domain won't be devalued as a result.  It is strictly on a page by page basis.

Of course, if these subpages are targeting keywords and have pulled in traffic in the past, it would be very advisable to have them made to be mobile friendly.  But for those long-winded pages like a privacy policy page, it wouldn't be a priority.

I imagine we'll learn more and more as the weeks progress as well.

Hope this helps

Hi Ash

I love using Screaming Frog for this.  Great name, great tool, great price (free version!)

To help you, check out this hugely useful guide from SEER Interactive.  Specifically, this section looks at how you can find all of your internal links.

Hope this helps!

Has your website ever been hacked?

That looks like the kind of thing where someone has compromised your site, built a new page and then redirected users.

If you go to your htaccess file, do you see any rules in place for that redirect?

If you take the URL and put it into OpenSiteExplorer or Majestic, do you see any spammy backlinks going to just that URL?

If the answer is yes to either - it would suggest your site has been compromised.  Remove the redirect/disavow the links and do a clean sweep of your website to make sure it's all OK.

If none of the above is true, it might just be an error on Google's side.  As this post suggests, Google's site: command isn't entirely reliable.

That makes sense, it's good to test first.  From personal experience I can tell you that Crazy Egg was very easy to set up and gave me some great information and insight, so it is possibly worth the fee in the future.

Also, if you're a Moz member you can get Crazy Egg free for 90 days! Have a look on the Moz Perks Page.

John makes some good points.

It's worth communicating those risks to your client and make them fully aware of what such activity could end up doing to your site.

Now, occasionally, you might get a client who is happy to run the risk - they're happy to try and test and live with the consequences.  While I would usually steer them to try other avenues first, it could be that they're looking to run a test with a disposable domain.  So something like a link broker could come into play.

But then why would you want to use a link broker?  If they're publicly selling links left right and centre, how good are the links going to be? What controls do you have in place? What other sites are on there? What if the broker takes the money and runs?

So in that case, you not only have the penalty looming large over the website, but also the fact that you could literally be throwing money away.

Sometimes trying new tactics can be rewarding - but link brokers? Cons always outweigh the pros, in my opinion.

I'm fairly sure that the Yoast SEO plugin has these features - which is a terrific plugin for Wordpress for other things as well.

Hey there

That's really an unnatural amount.  And if it looks unnatural it's always in line for a penalty.

Has a commercial anchor text been used? Or is it brand? Even if it's brand, it's still a grotesque amount of links, while many of the pages linking to your client's site may be from low quality pages.  If it was a commercial anchor text, partial or exact match, then I'd be in little doubt this would cause the penalty.

I'd get the links removed ASAP, or ask the webmaster to make the links nofollow, although that may not suffice now the penalty has been put down.

If this coincided with the penguin update, the likely thing is that you won't see a recovery until the algorithm refreshes - unless we hear otherwise from Google - which is pretty frustrating.  A manual penalty can be appealed any time with a reconsideration request, of course.

Hope this helps.

I don't think it's an essential part for onsite.  I actually interpreted Steve's words to mean "If you are going to outlink, make sure you outlink to a reputable/high authority website".  So, my interpretation is that you do not have to outlink by any means, but if you do (say if you wanted to cite a source), make sure you outlink to a good quality website.

That's only my interpretation though, so would like to hear others' as well.

Hey there

It's worth clarifying here how the Penguin penalty works.

As it's an algorithmic penalty, you won't receive any message in Google Webmaster Tools.  Those messages are reserved for manual penalties only.

Submitting a disavow file, which has now likely been processed, is one way to recover from the penalty.  However, because the penalty is algorithmic, you will not see an immediate recovery by doing so.  You will have to wait until the Penguin algorithm refreshes for the effects to take place.

This can be frustrating as, before the recent update, the last publicised Penguin refresh came six months ago.  By contrast, Panda is known to refresh every 2-3 weeks.

I think it will be unlikely that we'll see such a big gap between Penguin refreshes this time round, now that the algorithm has been updated.  Nevertheless, it may take a while.  In the mean time, I would concentrate on earning more of the high quality links to your site that you have already, as these will also put you on the good side of the algorithm.  Also embrace other traffic resources, such as social media, PPC and display networks if you have the budget.

Hopefully, when the refresh comes around, your site will be in much better standing now that you've submitted the disavow.  Until then, I'm afraid you'll have to sit tight.

Hope this helps.

Hi Akram

Having a lot of 301 redirects won't effect your "authority" in a negative way.

However, having a huge amount could potentially slow down your .htaccess file, if you're running on an Apache server.  We're talking thousands before this happens, though.

I think you're right to redirect those pages with links, that's a no brainer.

As for things like the category page - I'd ask these 2 questions: Does anyone (including yourself) link to them or does anyone visit them? Use a combination of OSE and Analytics data to find out.

If the answer is yes to either of those questions, I would redirect.  If it was "no" to both - I'd consider if it was worth redirecting. Would it really break up a user journey if you didn't?

Remember, having some 404 errors is a perfectly natural occurrence.  If these pages aren't being visited, don't have links in them and aren't in the sitemap (make sure to update it when you redirect), you might get a few 404s to begin with, but eventually Google will stop trying to visit the page.

In short, 301 those pages with links. Ask the above questions about the pages that don't.

Hope this helps!

Well, that URL is already indexed, so that answers that question!

But you're walking into a bit of a minefield in this one.

These URLs have also been indexed:
http://www.misslovegirls.com/goods.php?id=3704
http://www.misslovegirls.com/goods.php?id=3705

You're going to have a big issue here with duplicate content.  You're pretty much serving the exact same page multiple times (with the only difference being price/size/title, from what I can see, which isn't going to be enough of a difference).

My advice would be to make one product page per item (ideally with a descriptive URL, not just numbers) that includes the different sizes and colours within the page.  Furthermore, you're going to need a lot more descriptive content per product to ensure that there is enough content on the page for Google to register it as unique.

Now in theory, there's nothing stopping you from indexing and ranking a URL with numbers/queries high up in Google. URLs in keywords in them are probably a bit more SEO and user experience friendly, though not absolutely essential.

I just think you have a bigger issue on your hands here - your product pages are currently too thin and will likely be seen as duplicate by Google.  I imagine you will want to rank these pages, so adding "noindex,nofollow" to the pages won't solve the problem.  You're only alternative, therefore, is to make sure that each product page is descriptive enough to be seen as unique (300-400 words as a very rough guideline) and that all variants of the product, such as size or colour, are not on separate URLs, but on the same page.

Hi Sylvana

No, images won't be seen as duplicate content - simply for the fact that they won't be seen by the Googlebot!

As the bot is not able to crawl images (which is why we use alt tags), you don't have to worry about it as duplicate content.  It's something I've toyed with before for webpages that need to have long disclaimers in the footer of every page - make them an image so the content isn't duplicated.

In addition, you can also test how your pages look in the eyes of Google by using the SEO Browser. That way you'll be able to see what content, if any, is duplicated.

Hope this helps!

Hi there

It will take a bit more time, but rewriting the content to be unique would be so, so worth it.

If Google notices that you're syndicating content with dofollow links to your site within them, it will think that the only reason you're doing so is to pass more PageRank to your site. It won't think that you're offering as much worth to the other blog and subsequent referrals if you're regurgitating what has been said.

Now, the obvious exception to this rule are Press Releases through sites like PRWeb. This is a well-known anomaly in the industry (some say it passes juice, Matt Cutts tries to say it doesn't), but it's so far down the line now that it seems unlikely that Google is going to penalise your site for it.  The worse that would happen would be not passing any SEO value.

It is not safe to assume that this would be the case for sending your articles to these other blogs - it may very well penalise you.

By rewriting the content, you negate any risk of this and also ensure that the uniqueness will most likely pass the SEO benefits from the separate blogs.

To me, it's a matter of risk management, and all signs seem to point towards rewriting the content.  It's a bit of an annoyance, but a small price to pay considering the benefits.  It's also a great compliment to what you've written before, which has obviously proven to be very valuable, so congratulations on that!

Hi David

I think this would totally fine.  You're still giving a descriptive alt text.  As a matter of fact, your alt text would be more descriptive with the change, as you're giving the company name and your primary function.  You're not unnaturally using or stuffing a keyword in there, so I would say this is completely acceptable.

I would say that the SEO benefit of this change may not be noticeable, but I think it's good practice to optimise all of your alt texts, so I would definitely go ahead and make the change.

Hope this helps.

Hey there

First of all, would the link bait page be on the same domain as your money page? If so, the SEO benefits of the link bait page will trickle down across your site, so need to worry there.  If they're separate domains, then yes you would need to link back to the money page for the 'benefits' to pass.

I would do more than that, however.  If you can include something along the lines of: "if you liked that, you'll love this..." and include a brief snippet of what you're trying to sell, I'd definitely do it.  This is dependent, of course, on your money page being somewhat relevant to your link bait page.

If it isn't that related, you may want to promote the people who came up with the idea.  If you include something like "meet the team behind this" and include a short bio of the company and individuals, along with their social media profiles, not only may you increase the social signals for those accounts, but you are attributing the brand and people to a quality bit of work. In doing so, people may be more likely to refer people to the brand/individuals, or use it as a citation of a successful strategy.

It's what I do and I know a lot of people do it too.

I think it's a good idea as it gives you consistency across the networks, which allows you to market yourself.

If you think about traditional advertising, you start to notice a brand more and think about its reputation if you constantly see it wherever you go.

It's the same for these profile pictures - I can recognise bloggers and SEOs just by their profile pictures.  Not only does that make me want to look out for their post when I see it and not just scroll over, it also adds a a touch of authority to them.

OK, strictly from an SEO perspective as you request:

1. Slight, but potentially worthwhile.  There has been a lot of talk of lexical co-occurrence or co-citation (co-occurrence would be more accurate) that talk about Google being able to recognise your website or brand as an authority in its industry even without links.  In short, if your site can be cited on a number of authority websites, even without links, Google may see it as an authority and promote it in search engine results.  Here are a few relevant posts:

http://moz.com/blog/prediction-anchor-text-is-dying-and-will-be-replaced-by-cocitation-whiteboard-friday

http://www.iacquire.com/blog/its-not-co-citation-but-its-still-awesome/

I think we're a way off seeing this as a major part of the algorithm, but there's no harm in preparing for it.

2. More influential than 1), but in essence it is a link to your site that is telling Google not to pass on any PageRank, thus it shouldn't give any SEO benefit.  There are a few case studies that, over time a nofollow link will pass value (such as this one), but I wouldn't see it as beneficial as a dofollow link.

3. The biggest benefit SEO wise.  If the link is relevant, contextual, from a page with not a lot of outbound links and on a quality website, it can be a great link for your site.  Of course, if the link comes from an irrelevant site, with loads of spammy links, lots of outbound links and your link appears in the comments, footer or blogroll, it could actually do more harm than good.  So it obviously pays to research the site before hand.

Having said all that, I'd always combine guest blogging with engaging with an active audience, not just exclusively for SEO.  But as requested, there's my analysis and I hope it helps!

Hi Erica

In my eyes, this should be a positive move.

Implementing a 301 redirect will pass all of the link equity, which should bring the new URL up to par very quickly.  Combine that with the fact that there is evidence to suggest correlation between having keywords in the URL and ranking higher for the term, albeit a slight benefit, means that for SEO purposes it could be a positive move.

In addition, I think this is a much more friendly URL structure for the user and enhancing the user experience can also result in conversions.

I'd definitely make that change, just be sure you implement the 301 correctly.  This Moz guide can help.

Hope this helps!

Technically, they are treated as separate terms, but because they are likely to be closely semantically linked you won't see any drastic variations.

If you go into the Keyword Planner tool, you can see that for that iphone example you get different search volumes for "iphone" and "i-phone".  Therefore Google does recognise them as separate search terms.

However, in 95% of cases I'd say, a hyphenated version of a keyword or keywords is more often than not showing the same search intent from a user.  Therefore, Google will do its best to serve up similar search engine results.  With the algorithm being as sophisticated as it is, it can make this connection in most instances.

Hi John

If you aim to make the alt tags descriptive and not just contain the keyword, I think it would be fine.

So, let's say your shop sells shoes, the five image alt tags could look like this

Brand Trainers Front View
Brand Trainers Side View
Brand Trainers Rear View
Brand Trainers Size Guide
Brand Trainers Packaging

The whole idea of the alt tag is to provide an accurate description of the picture.  Using a method similar to this would do exactly that, while having the product or keyword in the alt tag would be perfectly natural, as it's using the alt tag for its primary function of describing the image.

This is only based on my opinion and experience, but having used similar methods in the past, I've never had a problem with over-optimisation, as it were, so you should be grand!

Hope this helps.

Hi Tom

It's quite oxymoronic isn't it?  "Natural" link building is in itself a strange term, while Google advocates that you don't proactively link build, yet it's algorithm still relies so heavily on it.

In the purest sense, if you are ever proactively looking to build or earn links to your site from another Google is unhappy about it.  The reality is though that's completely unrealistic (never mind hard to enforce and hypocritical from them).

When people talk about "natural" link building, they are talking about the kind of link building or earning that leaves you to the lowest possible risk from Google.  Many people have their different definitions on the topic, but here's mine:

A "natural" link is one that is:

• Editorially earned
• Contextual within the content it is placed in
• Links to your site using a branded term, raw URL or non-commercial anchor text

To explain these further: By "editorially" earned, I mean that you should provide something, be it an article, resource, video or whatever, that warrants being placed and shared on someone else's website.  If your content really jumps out and makes me people go "Oh wow, look at this, I want to share it" or "Hey, that's really relevant to my site and my users", then any link you get as credit for that resource is "editorially" earned.  What you'll often find is that it usually means that the site's you get links from are relevant and contextual to your own site - eg if you ran a fishing equipment website, you may get links from local angler clubs.  You really want to warrant your link being in there by producing something of excellent value.

By "contextual", I mean that your link should appear within the body of the article or written content of the webpage.  If you've "editorially earned" your content, this should usually happen - however what has happened in the past, even on Moz, is that authors or publishers would advocate the use of an author biography that contains a link to their site.  In my mind, it is far better to have a link surrounded by the content/video/article/etc itself - as in put the link there while you're talking about it - as I feel Google are blanket devaluing author bio boxes (rightly or wrongly depending how you see it). Rather than leave it to chance, I'd rather get the link in the content of the page itself.

And finally, how the site links to you seems to be a big factor in "natural" link building.  I think Google (again, rightly or wrongly) always look for an excuse to hold it against you if they find you have links going to your site that contain anchor text that you might want to rank for. It's quite ridiculous, I know, but in order to keep things "natural", I'd say you should only have links that contain your brand, just your URL, or any miscellaneous anchor text (eg "check out what these guys did at the weekend").

So when we talk about "natural" link building that's what I think people mean.  Now, is this the way you want to do your SEO?  Is it the best way?  Is it the most suitable or usable and will it give the greatest return of investment?  That's all up for debate.  I wouldn't say I'm either for or against this method - and it really does differ depending on your resources and industry.  There are plenty of people there doing "unnatural" link building and getting results and ROI. One thing I would say though is that it's hard to build and keep a brand presence if your site is being penalised, so natural link building does come into its fore there.

I hope this helps - as you can see the question makes for a good debate and I hope my point of view helps explain a few things.

Hi Dan

In principle, I don't think it's bad at all. In fact, I actually think it's a great idea.  If kids were searching online and there favourite kids show came up as an author, it attracts their click to that link, which can be a great thing.  Bit of a throwback, but if there was a clarissaexplainsitall.com and an authorship photo of Clarissa/Melissa John Hart appearing next to it - I think that's awesome for both branding and relevancy.

However, in reality this is just not practical - because of Google's vehement opposition to such a practice.  Google can and will (and has) removed authorship attribution in the past if it thinks the profile snippet is not a real picture or author and to go one step further Google can and will (and has) suspended Google+ profiles and accounts altogether, if they think it is an impersonation and/or not a real person.

It means that all the time, effort and resource you might spend investing in that author profile, following and (dare I say it) any kind of potential future AuthorRank could be lost in an instant, without any warning.  To me, no matter how appealing it would be, that puts me off the idea of creating such a profile and authorship.

Perhaps that's the hypocrite in me, as you could say the exact same thing is true for SEO! Ha!

That's my £0.02 in any case, hope it's helpful.

Hi there

Both Articlebase and Ezines have nofollow links - meaning no equity will pass.  In fact, most article submission sites will do and you should really move away from using them as an SEO tactic.  This also means that OpenSiteExplorer is accurate.

Hope this helps.

Hi Frank

A 301 would take care of the problem very well, but where that may not be possible, using a canonical tag would do the trick.  If you can make sure that the page, in either http or https form uses a consistent canonical (one version for both), that will protect you from any duplicate issues as well.

For more information on canonicals you can read the Moz guide on them.

Hope this helps.

Hi there

The most reliable way to select a company or individual for link building is to ask them for examples of their work.  This might be complicated slightly by any existing NDA agreements that they might have, but more often than not a reputable company or individual is going to cite case studies on their website anyway.

You should ask them what they have done and who they have worked with.  Whether or not they give you specific examples of links built at this stage is actually quite irrelevant.  You should instead use tools like OSE, Majestic, Ahrefs etc. to see the links for yourself.  Are they building the kind of links you would be happy to receive.  If they have shared examples with you, does the evidence match up?

The key to all of this is transparency.  You will have infinitely more confidence with a company or individual if they are transparent with their work.  Pricing, reporting, expectations - all of these can, and should, be clearly defined.  There's no excuse nowadays for a company/individual to be obscure with the work that they have done - particularly with the myriad of tools available for you to jump in and have a look for yourself.

I hope this helps.

Hi Ravi

In short, you should be looking to link out to external, authority resources if you think it would be beneficial for the user.  Make that your main focus when doing so.

Having said that, let's look at the SEO theory behind this.  Some SEO's argue that linking out to authority websites from your content can help your own SEO.  The theory they site is that if you link to authority articles/websites within your industry from your own content/website, then your own website will be associated with that industry and subsequent authority.  This is the lexical co-occurrence theory.  The genius that is Bill Slawski goes over this topic in great depth here.

So is it really a case of linking to authority sites to be associated with them?  To be honest, I doubt it.  I don't think that part of the algorithm could be gamed so easily.  Is it likely to have a negative effect on your SEO.  Again, I'd say that's very unlikely.

If you subscribe to that theory, I don't think you'd have anything to lose - although you are sending a potential lead away from your website (plus diluting your link equity of the page a bit with an external link).  There certainly is not enough evidence or case studies to support the claim, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it wouldn't work.  In my own personal opinion, however, I don't think this will have any sort of noticeable impact on your SEO.

My $0.02. Hope this helps.

Alick

It wouldn't surprise me if Google already discounts the major coupon sites in their algorithm for this very reason.  It doesn't want to reward link building like this (if some were inclined to do it this way), while equally it wouldn't want to penalise legitimate sites that use them.

I think you'd be fine.

Hi Anthony

I can't offer the list, but I can offer the explanation, as I asked the same question about a week ago:

Hi Tom,

We've given the "keys" to our directories list/database to +Ian Lurie , who is collaborating with +Mackenzie Fogelson and Distilled to put together a more robust and scalable solution for directories. With everything else we've got going on, we decided that curating the directories list was beyond the time/resources we have to devote to it. I know this gang of trusted providers will do a great job with it! Other than redirecting the page and handing over the existing list, +Mozwon't be actively involved with the project.

Speaking from both a producer and a recipient of these reports:

The most important things for me are:

1. Revenue
2. Conversions
3. Traffic

In that order.

For any SEO report, I would be expecting to see, above all else, how much organic visitors (or people who have visited from organic search in some part of their user journey) have generated in terms of revenue.  Some companies model this entirely within Google Analytics, others may have a CRM that stores the customer financial data that you'll need to sync up with analytics.  But basically, show them **how much money **organic search has made them last month.

After that, I'd want to see how many organic search visitors converted on the site (bought something, signed up etc).  It's worth reporting this separately from revenue, as you can get an idea of which conversions are more "valuable" to you.  Show them how many conversions organic search has given them.

Next, look at traffic.  This is important to report as you need to show them how much organic search is contributing to their overall traffic, and hopefully show them it is increasing.  It can also help you identify other issues - for example, if traffic increases but revenue or conversions do not, is there a problem with the quality of the traffic or, more likely, a problem with the website's user journey or design?  Remember, organic search is inbound marketing, and so searchers are actively looking for the thing that drives them to your web page.  If you can get organic traffic but can't get it to convert, it is usually a problem with your website's design or UX.  Show them how many visitors organic search has given them.

Anything else, to a company receiving an update on how SEO is progressing, is just fluff.  My clients don't need to see things like error rate, crawl indexing, canonical reporting - even rankings (a sub-KPI of traffic, but ultimately not what the client is interested in).  For a top level report - something that says what has our money got us - I stick with these three principles.  If I'm producing a technical audit on the website, then of course you want to give more detail, but for a general monthly report it's overkill.

There are caveats to all of this (such as breaking down branded vs non-branded organic traffic), but this should be the starting point.

Hope this helps.

Hey there

I can't see any sense in doing this.

At the very least, it detracts clicks to your site, as it promotes Yahoo over your site. It may also look like to a reader that Moneywise is taking content from Yahoo (rather than the other way round), which cheapens the brand.

The worst case scenario would be that your site is seen as duplicating/stealing content - especially given at how poor Google is at identifying the original source for content.  It could also think that you're duplicating content for the sole purpose of getting links, which again could lead to penalties.

To me, this doesn't make sense.  I'd be much more inclined to keep the content on your own site - get people to come directly to you.  You're getting comments on the articles so you already have a solid user base, clearly.

If your colleagues argue that the Yahoo copies of the content bring in new people to the site, pull up a Google Analytics report and look at how many people entered your site via Yahoo over the last 3 months.  I can almost guarantee you that hardly anyone will be clicking those links in the article - those links by the way look pretty manipulative/commercial in terms of anchor text, which could prompt another penalty.

And in SEO terms, despite the link coming from Yahoo, if no one is linking or sharing that URL on Yahoo, I can tell you now that the link won't have much value to it.

In terms of your snippet question, it just looks like Yahoo are pulling the title and content from the page and generating a fresh meta description from there.  Probably a time saving solution for a website of that size, but certainly not an ideal one.  Your meta descriptions look much better.

Hope this helps.

My biggest piece of advice here is: beware.  Now that you've posted this, even on a great community like SEOMoz, you're going to get all sorts of "experts" and "gurus" offering their services to you which could be bad at best, and disastorous at worst.

You can check out SEOMoz's recommended company list here: http://www.seomoz.org/article/recommended  while it is also a good idea to make sure you're up to date with what is good SEO practice, so take a look at Moz's guide.

Hey there

Dan Shure wrote this fantastic Wordpress optimisation guide here on the Moz blog a year or so ago and it is still very relevant for today.  In that post, he goes into depth about the problems with tags and what your best practice should be.  Usually, you want to noindex the tags on your WP site - keep them for navigation purposes if you want, but letting them be indexed can lead to duplicate content issues.

I don't think you can put a general % on keyword density.  So long as it reads well and doesn't appeared to be stuffed, it should be fine.  Mention it as many times as you can without it appearing forced.  There's no doubt that having a keyword appear more times on the page will help Google deduce what the page is about, but similarly anything that would compromise a user experience or attempts to over-optimise for the algorithm can easily be penalised. Saying what number this is though is highly dependent on context, so you can't put a broad figure on an "optimal level"

If you haven't changed the density on the page, I don't believe that your density level would have caused a fall in your rankings (unless it was overdone, as said before). The strength this signal has on your rankings would be small at best, so there's very likely another reason for the fall.  I'd start looking at other on-page factors and especially what sort of links you might have earned recently (or indeed lost).

Hi Chris

One of the big, big advantages hosting with Wistia has is because your are self-hosting the content, you can help the webpage the video is on to rank, along with having a rich snippet appear in search.  With embedded YouTube videos, more often than not the video and the snippet goes straight to the page itself, causing a loss of traffic.  Self-hosting prevents this and also keeps a video surrounded by relevant content.

Embedding videos and getting rich snippets in search is a huge benefit and one well worth looking into.  With that in mind, I gone only point you towards Phil Nottingham's excellent guide on the Distilled blog.  You can find it here:

http://www.distilled.net/blog/video/creating-video-sitemaps-for-each-video-hosting-platform/

Hope this helps Chris!

Hi there

There is actually "Bounced Visits" segment you can select by default.

Go to Acquisition -> All Traffic and make sure the primary dimension selected is: Medium - so your data is grouped by paid, organic, direct etc.

Click the drop down arrow next to the default All Visits section at the top of the page and then click on the "Bounced Visits" tab to highlight it.  You can deselect All Visits at this point or use it to compare.

You should be left with a report of the amount of bounced visits per medium type, which is hopefully what you're after.

Hope this helps.

Hi Alex

Reciprocal links can be useful for SEO, user and branding purposes - provided that it is done in moderation and, as you say, done for the user.

There's nothing wrong for companies to link to each other or recommend one another (Moz and Distilled do it quite frequently) and this can help for the SEO side of things.  The main thing, however, is that Moz and Distilled do so for the user benefit, never solely for the SEO.

Your example is pretty much the same principle, but in order to replicate the "best practice" as it were, make sure the links are in relative content.  I'm not a fan of "recommended links" pages that just link out to companies.  But blog posts and other user friendly, informative and helpful content that contain links should be absolutely fine.  Just make sure you don't overdo and don't use targeted/commercial anchor text - keep it for the user and their benefit and the other benefits will follow.

Hope this helps.

Oh erm..me neither

cough

Of course John. You can make your title whatever you wish.

Your title should be descriptive and a compelling call to action.  Yes, there is a bit of benefit in having your main keywords in the title (using Apple and Pears would be fine for this on your domain, if it was your keyword), but most of all you want your title to be a big selling point.

Think about it, it's the first thing that users see.  A good title tag can steal away clicks from elsewhere - for example including "free shipping" if you're an ecommerce store is a fine idea.

Hope this helps.

In all honesty, I'd completely ignore PR.  It's a completely out-dated metric that you should not rely on for link prospecting.

All those other factors you mention, DA, PA, trust and social integration (think G+ authors) are far more important.  To add to the list, I'd look at how many sites sit on that IP/neighbourhood and check that there isn't anything dodgy going on with any of them.

Forget PR and go with your gut!

Hi Adam

I'm by no means a PPC expert, but the adwords targeting for YouTube is about as specific as regular PPC targeting.  You can target by demographics, topics, interests and so on, so in theory I think you'd be able to do what you're trying there.

Rather than babble on, I'd definitely recommend taking a look at the searchenginewatch guide on Adwords for YouTube and also take a look at the WordStream how-to guide.

Hope this helps.

Probably not the answer you're hoping for Keith, but this really will vary from industry to industry.  I've seen it work great for promotional stuff (again in the financial verticals), while it's just not worth the effort for other industries.

The only way to really get a definitive answer is to test and gather some quantitative data.  As the sub is coming up for renewal, PRWeb are going to want to keep your business.  This gives you a bit of bargaining power.  Try to negotiate a short, 4-6 week contract with them where you can test response (Vocus, the people who own/run PRWeb, are pretty reasonable and will want to satisfy a long-term subscriber, so you've got a good chance with this).

Now, when sending out your PRs for this period, try and capture the people in your conversion funnel that come from PRWeb.  Either send them to a particular landing page, give a specific cookie for a PRWeb referrer, or even have a trigger CTA in your press release (eg: search for "blue widgets" online) - anything that allows you to say "this visitor/converter came from PRWeb".

After that period and with a bit more data, you should be able to see if it is a cost effective strategy.

It has to be said that this is a response marketing outlook - we're looking at people who've visited and/or converted on your site via these PRs.  Some may argue that this negates or overlooks the branding effect that press releases have.  In my opinion, there are far better ways, both in cost and reach, to establish brand, tone of voice and share of voice than press releases.  PRs just don't cut it for me when we're talking about establishing brand and so on.  Social media can be much more effective, as you allude to, as can display advertisement buys, whether through an exchange network or direct buys with websites.  Not only that, but those purchases are often a lot more tangible in their data - you'll get impression rates, click rates and so on a lot easier with display ads.

That's how I'd approach it.  Call me a sceptic, but I think the online press release game's days are numbered.

Regarding the syndicated content, not only do I think response would be even lower for those editors, but I don't think a link from a non-original, syndicated source would offer much SEO value.

I would approach the editor or author via social media initially, thanking them for the mention.  If you strike up a conversation, you can ask to contact them regarding a change in the article - which can then be the time to ask for a link.

That's one route to go down, but I don't think you'd have much success.  The outreach is rather forced/artificial, which usually results in poor response.  Get to know the editor/author over a series of communications, however, and opportunities may open up.  Then the next time they tweet for a few sources on your topic, hey presto - you've got content for them and a legitimate request to ask for a link if used.

It's worth noting as well that many newspaper editors I've spoken with have a simple directive not to link to external websites on their articles full-stop.

Furthermore, I don't think you should be too disheartened at all by the lack of a link.  The branding and PR effect of the mention will be very strong and you can also throw in a co-citation and lexical co-occurrence element into the mix.

There is a school of thought that Google is getting much better at making the connection between your brand and keywords should they be mentioned together on high authority sites - regardless if a link is present or not.  Should this prove to be more of a factor over the year(s), this mention will be very handy.

Here's some further viewing and reading on the theories, courtesy of (beardless) Rand and IAcquire:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/prediction-anchor-text-is-dying-and-will-be-replaced-by-cocitation-whiteboard-friday

http://www.iacquire.com/blog/its-not-co-citation-but-its-still-awesome/

Hope this helps.

Hi Chris

To answer your first question, SharedCount.com will give you a list of all of the key metrics for a URL.

If you want to get the data by bulk, there's this terrific guide on Monchito on how you can setup an excel sheet to check thousands of URLs really quickly.

Hope this helps!

Your mileage will vary depending on your industry and of course the quality of your PPC

But from what I've seen in a number of industries, Bing ads come with lower cost per clicks, better click-through rate and similar conversion figures, when compared to Google.  Of course, the volume of clicks/impressions is much lower, but that's to be expected.

If you're close to running as well as you can in Adwords, it's well worth looking at Bing ads as your next step.

Hi Gary

I think what Bright Local are looking to do here is earn you more business citations, rather than directories.  It's funny, because the difference is only a subtle one, but rather than getting you on websites that are more "traditional" directories, they instead will look to get you listed on places like yelp, yell, forsquare, bing, yahoo, qype and so on.

Those kind of citations definitely do help.  It does look as though Bright Local offer directory listings on moderated, niche specific and local directories, which is less of a risk (but valuable? I'm not so sure). In the package you can also hand-pick which ones you want - so you could opt out of them all if you chose to, which might not be a bad idea.

Looks like it automates/outsources what can be a pretty laborious process, so it might be worth looking into if the price is right. Bright local are a pretty reputable brand so I'd say the quality would be there.

Of course, you could build those citations yourself and good place to start is right here on Moz.  Moz has the best ones by city, and best by category, while BrightLocal has an international list, as does WhiteSpark. You can probably find more by searching for "best citations for [country]".

Hope this helps.