"Ideally, we wouldn't want to exclude these pages from being indexed because they could have some long-tail search value.  But, obviously, we don't want to hurt the overall SEO of the site."

You say that, but I'm not entirely sure it's true.

I understand the theory - if you have 20 Citroen C1s listed on the site, you could potentially have 20 pages of yours ranking for relevant terms, right?

Well, unique content on those pages or not, I think it would be extremely unlikely that Google would want to present all of those results to the user.  Furthermore, if the pages expire or go "out of stock", as it were, when purchased, would Google want to rank it?

So I'm not convinced having all those pages indexed and treated as unique (whether they are or not) would result in traffic (please prove me wrong though - if you have lots of entrances to the site via organic search to those pages it'll show what I know!).

My preference, regardless of the above, would be to have a main page for your Citroen C1 products - a hub page - that then links to all the different products you have as and when they're available.

This has many advantages - you just need to focus on ranking one page in the category instead of several, you can collect all the link equity you earn to one page, you can ensure the page is well optimised for search engines and users, and the page will be evergreen - meaning your links would be too.

The short version:

Homepage > Hub Page > Product variant 1, variant 2 etc

Rank the homepage and the hub page.

Hope this helps.

I think you're right in suggesting to forward the .com to the .net right now.

Just as a side thought, does the company ever use offline marketing/print/TV?  If they do, could be a great opportunity to use the .com domain on that advertising while the 301 is in place.  That way, you'll know that most people coming in via the .com domain will be from those avenues, so you'll be able to calculate some form of ROI.  It can't be completely accurate, however, as the .com extension is definitely the most recognisable in the world, so someone's first intuition when they see the brand might be to use .com anyway.

With that in mind, you should anticipate that they may want to move to the .com in the future.  What I would strongly, strongly recommend is to keep the site and URL structure exactly the same - same subfolders, subdomains, same everything.  This way, all you would theoretically need to do to preserve your "link juice" is export the XML sitemap from the .net domain (or at least those with backlinks - Screaming Frog is great for this task) change the extension to .com in excel and you've got all your new URLs that you point the old ones to.

It becomes a pain when companies want to change their site structure in the migration.  I'd advise them not to, if possible.  By all means, they could use the opportunity to rebrand the website and change the content and imagery, that would look impressive.  But where possible, keep the structure the same.

Hope this helps!

There's a few solutions here.  If we rule out any chance of deleting these pages (would deleting them effect your ability to create products from those manufacturers in the future? Not sure what system you're going with here), you can take steps to limit any adverse effect this could have.

First, you could add the following code to the head tag of your HTML:

This can be easy to implement, but robots and crawlers have been known to ignore this directive.

Alternatively, you can add text to your Robots.txt file, telling crawlers to ignore certain pages.  In this case, you might want to add:

User-Agent: * Allow: /
Disallow: */littermaid-manufacturer

You'd want to do this for all of those empty pages, but this could take time and can get quite messy if there's dozens of these pages you want to block.

I'd highly recommend implementing a rel=canonical system onto your site (I would even if you didn't have this problem).  This schema language can help to reduce any negative duplicate content effect.  SEOMoz provides a detailed canonical guide here, which I recommend reading through.

Finally, as you've mentioned, adding content to these pages would also be a good idea, regardless if they're in use.  If you had a detailed description, say roughly 300+ words (very broad figure, go as detailed as you can), it would dilute any duplicate content elements on the pages.  In addition, it will be useful to have on your page if and when products are eventually added to them, which can be very useful if you wish to optimise the page itself.  Put it in the first paragraph under your topnav for now and you can always move it later.

Hope this helps - to summarise, I'd recommend implementing rel=canonical on your site, adding content to those pages and, if you want them blocked from crawlers completely, add the pages to your robots.txt.

The role of an H1 influencing rankings has certainly diminished, but I would still say it's worth having a keyword in there.

What it sounds like to me is that you're designing your page around the user first, and SEO/H1s second and that's exactly how it should be.

Now, in theory, the higher up you can have the H1 tag the better - as search engine crawlers do crawl linearly from top to bottom - and it is has been said that the crawlers sometimes do not crawl the entire page. For that reason, you'd want it nearer the top as possible.

But I'd certainly not want to skew the flow of the site just to force an H1 tag to appear higher - certainly not in this day and age where the H1 is less of a ranking factor.  I'd be confident that by having it in there somewhere in the of your site is more than good enough.  If you want, visit the site that's linked in my profile - we actually use an H1 tag that's lower down the page as well and not had any worries over it thus far.

Hope this is some use to you!

Google should recognise these links as the same page, so you shouldn't be penalised for duplicate content.

However, a problem may arise with Google preferring one version of the URL over the other.  I'm presuming you'd want Google to rank and prioritise http://www.domain.com/blog/sample-blog-post/ over http://www.domain.com/blog/sample-blog-post#more-0001.

With URLs like these (and with query strings, such as '-post?query3') it is important to implement a self-referring canonical - ie a canonical tag that points to itself, without the query.  This will tell Google that this is the URL string you would prefer it to rank highest.

You can check out more on canonicals with the SEOMoz guide on them.

Hi Candice

I've only had a brief look at your site and your link profile, but while I can see you've made a solid start, I think the reason why you're not ranking is that you'll need to be doing more of what you've done already.

I can see a a lot of links from directories in your link profile.  Personally, I would expect these to add a very small, if any, amount of benefit to your SEO, so I would focus elsewhere from here on in.

Content marketing could be a great strength of yours as you certainly look like an expert in your field.  This blog post, for instance, is very thorough and in-depth.  While I think guest posting on relevant websites is definitely worth your time, I think you should reserve your best content for your own blog and try and attract links to those posts.

The way to achieve that is to do marketing by more traditional means - get your message out there.  Your social media presence is definitely going to help with this.  But in the example of the blog post that I linked to earlier, could you maybe envisage something like that in the form of an infographic, perhaps?  That way you could get people to link to your website by also sharing with them the image that they can post on your site.  Or perhaps you can make it an interactive guide? I remember this guide on how to learn robots.txt with interactive examples - I can imagine something like that would be incredibly useful for your industry and would certainly get people talking about it and linking to it.

Similarly, tutorial videos hosted on your site can make a great educational resource that people will want to link to.  And how about a Q&A resource?  I'm sure that you'll get a lot of common questions from clients about certain drupal problems.  You could fashion these into a really cool resource.  It's a bit out there but have a look at this Q&A that the McDonalds Canada site has done.  I can totally see an equivalent for your industry - you could utilise your social media channels as well and invite people to ask any questions they have on Drupal.  It could really take off - just look at the links on that McD's subdomain. Big brand, obviously, but with thousands of links and hundreds of root domains you can see how many people like the resource.  If you can create something like that for Drupal, the links are sure to flow.

Set up some alerts on twitter using RSS feeds and IfThisThenThat that will trigger when someone asks a Drupal related question.  You can hit them up and say you've answered the question on your online resource - this may encourage more links.  Similarly, Pinterest could be a great channel for you.  Showcasing the best or most visually pleasing Drupal sites on a public board could be a fun idea.

It's gonna be a bit of hard work, but I think you've made a great start to the site already - it's now a case of scaling these methods up.  The great advantage that you and your team have is your expertise and the fact that you're already producing excellent content.  If you can market those out in different ways and encourage people to see you as an authority resource, as well as an excellent service, then I think you could go really, really far.

Hope this helps Candice! Give me a shout on Google+ if you fancy chatting some more.

I'd probably go with the larger area, like Atlanta, unless keyword research told me different.

For that, I'd jump into any existing analytics data your company might have and look at incoming search terms and see if there are any searches coming in for locations within a metro area.

Similarly, I'd go onto the Google Keyword Research Tool to get some rough idea of search volume.  So, I'd have a look at "Day Care in Metro Atlanta" and look at the search volume, then sub out "Atlanta" for one of the locations, for example: "Day Care in Metro Marietta" and so on.  If there's any decent local search volumes, I'd be tempted to optimise for that area specifically.

I think the main question should be what these 3 'sub-sites' are.

Are they individual brands/businesses that can stand-alone and offer unique content on each domain?  Do they cover different industries/niches?

If the answer to either of those is no, then I'd keep it all on the same domain.  Option 2 runs the risk of looking like a link network (existing solely to boost up the main website), which, if discovered, could heavily penalise your website.

Even if that was to be avoided, I'd still recommend keeping all of your content on one domain, unless the other sites are completely different.  This is because that any content you do produce that may accrue links or social shares will go straight to the main domain - that direct link will be the strongest SEO signal out of the lot.  Building sub-sites just to blog/build content to accrue links to the main site is pointless unless those sites get their own links - in which case, why not have that content on your site anyway, in the form of a subdomain or sub-folder?

I'd only consider splitting the sites up if they target very different industries/niches.  If they do, they will need to be fleshed out with considerable content to avoid looking like a link-network.

Simply creating microsites to create content that links to the main site just seems pointless, particularly if that content can be hosted on your domain, which would then get all the links/social signals anyway.

Hope this helps.

I agree with you Neil.  Design the navigation for the user, not a search engine.  It makes more sense to have simply "pricing" then to try and chase the algorithm and include some keywords like "web design pricing".  Furthermore, the added benefit of using a navigation like that really would be negligible.

Internal links can help your site, but I think it would be better to use the text around the site as you say, rather than the navigation, in order to utilise these.  The navigation is more for the user than the Google crawler and thus should be designed for the user.

Just my 2p!

Not only can that easily look like a link network - which will get you penalised by all the search engines - but I don't see the point in doing such a thing.

Why would you not want to build authority directly to your website - post that sort of information and product reviews to your main domain.  If the content is useful to people, they will link to it and perhaps share it on social networks.

That means all the "strength" from those shares and links will be going straight to your domain, not some sham micro-site.

The SEO companies you've spoken to are just promoting the idea of setting up a website to get some authority so it looks like you have an authority "link" to your site.  Why you wouldn't want to build authority directly to your site to begin with is lost on me.

Unless they're talking about setting up a micro site with relevant content that they can spam the hell out of with some unsavoury tactics that you wouldn't "want to risk on your main site".  So you're micro-site acts as a buffer in this sense.

Do you really want to rank in that way?

I'm much more interested in doing things in an open and tangible way.  Produce the best content that you can and promote it as much as you can.  Get legitimate authority straight to your site.  That's not to say that marketing your content won't be easy - it can be a long and difficult process to get traction.  But the rewards are infinitely better if you do.

I'm not sure where they're getting that information, but it's pretty ill-advised.

Now, there is some evidence to suggest that there is a correlation between having your keyword in the URL and higher rankings, see this searchmetrics study for more details.

The influence, however, is barely noticeable and having the keyword twice will very likely add no benefit at all. If anything, it may result in your URL looking spammy to a user, or even over-optimised to Google, which is a bad thing.

Include it once if you can, don't worry if you can't. Forcing to include it twice is definite overkill.

Hope this helps.

Hi Dan

I'd say it's Option 1...and a half!

As a general rule of thumb, I want to put a self-referring canonical tag (a tag that points to the same URL) on any page I'd want to rank.  So, I'd have one for domain.com/blog and domain.com/blog-article/how-to-set-canonical.

For any page I want Google to disregard, in terms of ranking, will have a different URL in their canonical tag.  So, you're right in this sense to have your blog category page to be like this: domain.com/blog-category/general  = <link rel="canonical" href="domain.com blog"="">.</link rel="canonical" href="domain.com>

Remembering that canonical tags are a strong directive, not command, to Google, I tend to also noindex and nofollow my category and/or tag pages as well, just to be doubly sure that Google is not flagging them as duplicate.  You can do this by simply adding to the head tag of the web page.

Hope this helps Dan.

There's a couple of reasons why this could be happening. Of course, the number of links, high authority ones at that, which are pointing to either of the pages may affect its ranking, but even if all things were even on that front, the content on the pages could be a ranking factor.

The category page for 'footwear' is likely to have a lot more user friendly content on it than individual product pages. The product pages will likely have a picture, short description, a price etc. This is pretty thin content, whereas the category page might include multiple bits of information, while also information on brands, shipping and so on.

If you want the client to start ranking their individual product pages, then they will need to add more content to those pages and encourage people to link to them.  Furthermore, you may want to "noindex" the category page so that it does not show up in the search engine results and potentially cannibalise the product pages.

However, I will say this: Having a rich category page might be easier to rank. It gives you more things to talk about, it can provide more information to the client base about the range of the stock and company information and it will naturally have more content on it than a product page.  This not only makes Google want to rank it well, but it could also encourage people to link to it more than a specific product. If you can rank or acquire link equity to that category page, then your entire domain may inherit some of the page's "strength", which could subsequently help the category pages to rank higher.

Hi Greg

If you haven't already, take a look at Moz's recommended companies list - there are a few there in the UK and also a few that specialise in ecommerce.  I know that 3DoorDigital are based in Manchester if that's far enough up north for you.

I can't vouch for any particular companies expertise when it comes to ecommerce, but I'd recommend having a look at some recommended companies and looking at their case studies, to see if they have experience with working with ecommerce.

Ecommerce SEO can be quite tricky and particular, so I think you're dead on looking for a company with a track record.  Hopefully these links help you with your search!

Yes I can.

There are 5 title tags on that page and they are:

<title><br />Choosing The Right Towels | TowelsRus.co.uk<br /></title>

<title>Free Delivery & Returns</title>

<title>Home Page Adverts</title>

<title>Choosing The Right Towels</title>

<title>Social Media & Trade Advert</title>

Only the first one appears in the head of the code, but there's no need to have the tags in the other four instances.  Replace these tags with either

or

tags.

Hope this helps.

You two flatter me greatly.

I can honestly say that I learnt from the best community and the best within the community, present company included.

Mark, if you're still reading at this point, you'd do very well to heed advice from these two, plus so so many others in this community.  Enjoy your time here!

Hi Chris

First and foremost, in my mind you don't need to change a thing.  It's working well - and here's why:

Think of a canonical tag as an instruction to Google to treat that URL is the top dog, the be all and end all - the one that you want Google to index and rank.

Any other page or URL that has the same canonical tag on it is basically your way of saying - "see this page? Don't worry about that page, it's a variant of this page that might look the same. Ignore it and rank that other page!"

Now, why would you want to do this?  Well, if Google thinks that your website has duplicated content and it believes it is being done to manipulate or game the algorithm, it might hit you with a penalty (often a Panda penalty).

Ecommerce sites often have this problem with their product pages and, while not usually intentional, Google has been known to put penalties on these sites.

Your site, in my mind, counters all of these problems very well.

Google can and will index URLs with query strings on them (anything with a "?" after it) and treat them as separate pages.  That means, theoretically, Google would have tried to index all of these URLs of yours:

http://www.bronterose.co.uk/range.html_?p=2_
http://www.bronterose.co.uk/range.html_?p=3_
http://www.bronterose.co.uk/range.html_?dir=asc&order=price_
http://www.bronterose.co.uk/range.html_?dir=asc&limit=all&order=price_

Now this would be a problem, as you'd quite likely have similar looking pages being indexed where products appear in multiple URLs.  This duplicate content could lead to a penalty.

But that's where the canonical tag comes in and does a great job.  Your tag is telling Google "ignore all versions of the http://www.bronterose.co.uk/range.html URL with a ? on the end of it - that's just to help the user and I'm not trying to duplicate content to try and rank higher. Ignore them and treat http://www.bronterose.co.uk/range.html as the main page"

So you're avoiding the problem of duplicate content and your canonicalisation is working well.  Very well, in fact.  If you do a site search (check it out here) you will see that only one version of the URL has been indexed and noted by Google - and that's the canonical version.

So keep it just as it is in my eyes - it's set up very well indeed!

Hope this helps.

Hi Jon

This is such a shame, as it looks a great website with a cool domain name. It always makes me angry when an SEO agency prays on the naivety of a webmaster, as your previous company did.

What I'd ask first is what sources have you used to identify your bad backlinks? In an ideal world, you should be using multiple. In the past, I've had success with removing penalties but only when using a combination of Google webmasters report, Open site explorer, MajesticSEO (historical index) and LinkDetox. I'd highly recommend majestic's historical index as it is the most complete crawl out there as far as I know, while LinkDetox can help you diagnose a number of links and see if they're toxic or suspicious.

The next question I'd have is how is your current SEO guy classifying the bad links? I've found that it is important to be as vigilant as possible with your classification - probably more so than you think you need to be.  This means if you see any link with targeted anchor text, either partial or exact, get rid of it.  Blogrolls/site-wide links: Gone. If at any point you can look at a link and think: "That looks like I asked for it to be there/it was placed there" consider it for removal.

Have you been explicit in your reconsideration request? Of course, this is only relevant if you get a message back confirming manual action has been taken.  If you don't and no manual action has been taken, the penalty is not present and doesn't require a reconsideration.

You need to give a detailed account to Google of what steps you have taken to have the links removed.  How you found the link (by source), where you found the contact details (on site, contact form, who.is data), when you contacted them, when you followed up etc. Anything you can't get removed after multiple requests should only then be disavowed, in Google's eyes. The Disavow tool is great but Google really wants you to be as thorough as you can and make every effort to have the links removed before you disavow.

In addition, don't be afraid to use the domain:example.com function liberally. You'll disavow any link on the entire domain with this, which can be a big help.

In some circumstances, I actually recommend starting with a fresh domain - it can actually be less work starting with a fresh, clean link profile and earning some high quality links this way. I'd consider this if I were you, but I can completely understand the attachment to your domain.

Hope this helps in some way and feel free to ask me anything else you may be wondering.

All the best!

Hi there

The important question here is: Can you get penalised for duplicate content if that content originates from a different domain.

The answer is: yes, absolutely.  I would definitely recommend that you avoid this.  You need to produce high quality and unique content for each blog, but in particular your main domain.

Hi there

Everything that Google has told us so far indicates that Analytics stat, such as click through rates, time on site, bounce rate etc. do not have an affect on organic rankings.  Here is the video on the topic from a (bald-headed) Matt Cutts.

Now, you should always take those videos with a pinch of salt, but I inclined to believe that views/time on site etc. do not fundamentally improve your chances of ranking.

However, those kind of articles you are writing about - informational, relevant, contextual articles - are exactly the kind of content that can rank for core terms.  I have on multiple occasions seen websites rank for a term, let's say "blue widgets", by producing a landing page with the title "what are blue widgets" and then information about it.  If you throw in the proposed changes in the hummingbird update, you'd expect content like this to do even better.

So, getting pages on your site with a lot of views will not fundamentally "improve" your domain's SEO, as it were.  But writing content like the kind you mentioned is a great way to improve your SEO anyway.

Hope these links help.

Hi Denis

The important thing here is to know that Google sees duplicate content via URLs.

Therefore, if two URLs exist that have similar content, it will see it as duplicate content.  These could be two different URLs, like how you described, or even two versions of the same URL, such as www.domain.com/blog.html and www.domain.com/blog?query.html

If Google indexes more than one URL with the same content on the page, it is potentially duplicate content.

Hope that answers your question. If not, let me know!

Hi Clint

I'm in agreement with your line of thinking.  Other than building links to the product page itself, you may want to change the way the page looks in order to give it that boost.

As you will have seen - in this and other industries - Google is a fan of ranking informational content.  Subsequently, your resource page, which is more likely to have said content, will often rank higher.  The solution would be to add more of this type of content - unique versions of course - to your product page for Google to crawl.  Additionally, you may want to withold or remove that kind of content from the resource page if you really don't want it to rank.

The trade-off comes with user experience - by demoting or even removing this resource page, will it come at a serious detriment to users on your site finding what they want?  If there's a hint of this answer being "yes", then I wouldn't do it.  User experience is paramount.  Instead, you may want to add my call to action/sales imagery and/or copy to the resource page to drive conversions.

Hope this helps.

Hi there

You need a closing paranthesis at the end of your canonical tag.  Basically, you need a "/" before the ">", so it should read:

Hey B

That setup will be fine - using sub-folders or sub-domains is a fine way of serving different language content.

If everything is translated as you say, there won't be any risk of duplicate content coming from the translations.

The only potential risk of dupe content would be if the product pages are "thin" on content.  That is to say, if there is not enough content on the page, Google might think all of the pages look the same.

Run the website through SEO-Browser and look at how the page appears to the Google bot.  Once the bot has seen all of the site navigation and the footer, is there enough on the product pages to differentiate themselves from the other.  If there isn't, add more content - such as extra bits of product descriptions or reviews.

Hope this helps.

Hi there

I see what you're getting at here, but there's no great cause for concern.

So, all of those hash links (#) are internal anchors. Link juice (specifically Page Rank) does not pass and is not lost with an internal anchor.  It only passes on full links - like the text links you have to other pages on the homepage.  It won't try to pass (and then fail) on any internal anchors - so link juice won't be "killed" by them, so to speak.

One thing you'll need to keep in mind is how people link to you externally.  To ensure all of the "link juice" from an external site is passed to yours, make sure that they link to you without any internal anchors (basically, your URL without any of the #'s).

However, even then, my recent tests have shown that the majority of the strength (if not all) will pass anyway.  Seems to me that Google at least treats these internal anchors very well and will recognise where to pass the "link juice" even if one is present in a URL.

So, from a strictly SEO and internal structure point of view, I don't think there's too much to be concerned about here.  If it works for you user experience wise etc. I'd say keep it for sure.

Hey Richard

This isn't a thick question at all - you're very wise to take care with this. A faulty .htaccess file can cause chaos!

Just wanted to make a suggestion - if you're running WordPress have you tried the Redirection plugin? It does all of the rewriting for you - just pop in the old URL and the new URL and you're on your way.  Comes with a few other features too and has had tons of downloads over the years.

If you want to go down the route of self-education, check out the SEOMoz redirection guide and also this blog post on some useful .htaccess snippets.

I'd recommend using the redirection plugin for 2-3 urls, check it works then look at the generated .htaccess file in your website's backend.  From there, you can see the correct format and filetype etc.  If the tool works, just continue to use it.

Hope this helps!

Hey there

I like to look at these issues in the eyes of the Googlebot.  There is a tool called SEO Browser that lets you see what your webpage looks like to the search engine crawlers.

Here is your first link in that tool

Here is the second one.

As you can see, the vast majority of the web pages are identical to each other, causing this duplication issue.  Yes, they are different products, but what Google sees are two pages with very similar text, coding etc.

To counter this, a lot of people recommend adding unique elements to your product pages.  Try to include 200+ words of content that is unique and talks about the products.  It could be a product review, a background on the product, instructions on how it use it if applicable and so on.  For your example, you might want to write a little bit about the history of Korn the band for your first page.

Essentially, you need to add more unique content that Google/Bing can see on your page in order to avoid any duplication issues.

I hope this helps.

The web page is already reasonably quick, but there are a couple of quick changes you can make to make it even quicker, and as we know page speed can be quite an important ranking and conversion factor.

Looking at the GTMetrix report for your page, you can see that you can utilise browser caching and gzip compression.  If you go to the recommendation, click on it, click "what does this mean" in the top right of the box and then click more - you'll get detailed instructions on how you can make the changes, which are relatively simple.

As for links, I'd build some directly to the page where applicable, but don't neglect the root domain, as its link equity will pass to your internal pages with the site structure that you have.

Hope this helps.

Hi Cole

That kind of duplication will almost certainly negatively impact your ability to rank.

It's the kind of dupe content that Google hates - the kind that's deliberately manipulative and used by sites just trying to rank for as many different KWs or locations as possible, without trying to give people a unique user experience.

Not to say that you couldn't possibly rank like this (I've seen it happen and will probably see it again in the future), but you're leaving yourself wide open to a Panda penalty and, as such, I'd highly recommend that you cater each site and each landing page to your particular audience.  Even by doing that, not only will you be making it unique but you would dramatically improve your chances of ranking by mentioning local things for a local page.

Give each page unique copy and really tailor it to your local audience.

Hope this helps.

Hi John

There's no problem in buying this website and business from Google's perspective - it's part of the natural cycle of a business.

The only problem that might occur is if you made the new website simply a clone of your existing one, or if you set it up just to point links to your site and offered no value to a visitor.

If you kept everything pretty much the same, you should be fine and even the website's Google News inclusion would remain, provided that the site is still accessible to Google once you take it over.

Hi Gavin

I hope Zoopla is big enough for you!

http://www.zoopla.co.uk/sitemap.xml

And here is a downloadable version:

http://www.zoopla.co.uk/sitemap.xml.gz - found from within their robots.txt file. http://www.zoopla.co.uk/robots.txt

Hope this helps!

Hi Ramesh

There's two clear choices here:

Either you redirect all of the URLs to one main URL and try to rank that website.  This will result in only one site ranking, but no risk of duplicate content and Panda penalties.

Or, you give each website its completely unique content.  And that doesn't just mean rewriting the written content of the main site - you should try and give each domain as much unique value as possible, so it is quality content in its own right.  In doing that, you will stand a much better chance of ranking all 5 websites.

Also, take care that you do not link the 5 domains together on every single page.  A few links might be OK, but having too many links could constitute as a link-wheel, which would also see your site penalised.

Hope this helps.

It certainly can.

The argument here (whether you agree with it or not) is that you would be trying to make the link blend in with the rest of the text.  You are, in essence, blending the link in and concealing the fact that it might be a link.  Google wants all the links to be visible and obvious.

I've had one example where links were deemed to be hidden because the CSS file of the website made the links appear in the same way as the normal text, same colour, decoration etc. I was pretty miffed by it, as it involved CSS changes which I'm never happy about, but it happened.

Hope this helps.

Hi Matthew

You want to add to your current list.  So you'll want to upload a file that had what you had previously disavowed in addition to what new sites you want to disavow.

It's probably worth putting in a description line like:

domain:badsite.com
badsite2.com/badpage

These files were uploaded on 19/09/2013 following a further link audit

badsite3.com/poorpage

And so on.  Showing progressive evidence of action taken is always a good sign I feel.

If you uploaded the new file without the old links, for all intents and purposes it would "de-disavow" those links, so you wanna keep them in there.

Hope that helps.

Hi there

I'd highly recommend going through Aleyda Solis' international SEO posts here on the Moz blog.  They can teach how to prepare for international SEO, how to approach site structure and how to generate relevant code and hreflang tags.

Here is her international SEO checklist

Here is her Hreflang blog post and generator tool

And 40 tools to help advance your international SEO

They're great reading and nothing that I'd be able to do add to, so I hope this helps!

Hi Niraj

The absolute best practice would be to change the URL on the listing page.  However, this might not be possible.

In addition, you are right in thinking that a 301 will pass the same "link juice", for lack of a better term, as having an original link.  This was confirmed by Matt Cutts fairly recently in this video - a 301 redirect will pass the same strength as a link would.  Always worth remembering that, with each link or 301, some link juice is always lost - but you won't lose additional strength by using a 301.

So your assumptions are correct.  Like I said, if there is anyway to change the listing page I'd do that too, but a 301 will suffice.

Hi David

There's obviously a few things just to check on - such as checking the right localised version of Google is being tracked and also the fact that the rankings update each Friday and not daily.

Having said that, seeing such dramatic fluctuations is a bit much.  It's probably a good idea to flag this to the customer support team and see if there are any issues.

In the mean time, if you're looking for a free keyword tracker that is accurate the majority of the time, you might want to try Rank Checker Ace for a web-based platform, or Rankerizer for a program that you can install on your PC.

Hope this helps.

What else do you offer?

Do you do free shipping? Running any discounts?

I'd be much more inclined to click a title tag that says: "Buy Cane Beds - Free UK Shipping | Boogie Beds".  Looks like it fits in the Moz Title Tool too.

You definitely want to get your primary keyword in there - it's good for SEO and for users. But after that, make it as compelling as possible that will drive people to click your ad, even if you're #3 instead of #1.  Your title tag and meta description are your shop window - make sure you stand out.

Neither make any difference for rankings, strictly from an SEO point of view.

This video way back in 2009 discusses as such and in my years of testing and looking around I've never seen a notable difference in which separator was used. Pipes (|) and Hypens (-) are the most common.  I mention that because you should consider what separator you use for user experience and click through purposes.

You might want to test which version gets better click throughs - or trump for the one that you think looks the best (this might be influenced on your competitors for your keywords.  If everyone is using pipes, you'd immediately stand out if you used hyphens).  I don't buy into the fact that clickthrough rate (CTR) affects SEO rankings (although some do), but all things considered you will want to use separators that will help increase your CTR, and as a rule of thumb either pipes or hyphens will help you with that. Commas can often look clunky and dated in SERPs (although that's more of a personal opinion).

Hope this helps.

Obviously, time is an issue here.  With the Mozscape updating once every 3 weeks (roughly), you might get some PA 1 pages that would be great to have a link on.

By in large, I also wouldn't remove links solely on PA/DA.  If you're trying to identify spammy links, you may want to start at something that is PA >20 and DA>15 for example, but you'll need to look at a lot of other elements.  What is the websites link profile like? Is it in a bad neighbourhood? Is it indexed in Google? Is it over-optimised on site? How many outbound links are there? Where do they link to? Do they have dodgy blogrolls etc.

PA/DA may start this process, but you do run the risk of missing other offending sites with a higher score.  Directories are often one of these, but you could get a decent DA/PA blog that has been deindexed, or is blatantly selling links.

It's a decent metric for finding dodgy links, but by no means the be all and end all.  I'd recommend taking a look at the LinkDetox tool - you can pay for one complete scan with just a tweet.  It looks at your link profile and categorises what links may be toxic and suspicious, based on a number of metrics that they've put together.  Put in tandem with PA/DA, you'd be well on your way in identifying any bad links.

Hi Alan

Bear in mind this is me coming in with no prior knowledge of you, your company or your developers - so its worth taking my comment with a pinch of salt.

With that said, I think 9 hours does sound reasonable for all parties.  I'm struggling to think of a WordPress plugin that allows you to accomplish what you're trying to achieve (which also makes good business sense btw). I can think of popup plugins, but I'm not sure if there are any that allow you to alter the popup itself based on historical sessions, nor see which popup someone eventually saw and "converted" (filled in the form) on, or indeed send information to you via a form.

Getting all of things into place and then reliably testing it - I think 9 hours billed is a good estimate (based on my coding experience, albeit by no means expert, and my 'client' experience). What's more, working with a developer you're happy with and trust, one that understands your goals and your business, is worth its weight in gold I can assure you. Having a clear spec before you begin means you'll get a bespoke solution, which will always be better than a ready-made plugin anyway.

I think it's a smart idea and one that is worth doing right - so I'd definitely go with the developer and I think the quote sounds reasonable.  But as I say, that's coming from an outsider.

I hope this helps.

Hey

You can't do this yet, but I know something like this is definitely in the pipeline.  A few discussions on the FWE blog posts here at SEOMoz talked about looking at targeting by location and .tld, so I think we'll be seeing it soon.

Posts in question: here and here.

Looks like we may be getting alerts too.

Hi Shalin

You've already listed the best option available.

Add those articles on your new website and then 301 the old pages to the new ones.  That is the best possible solution.

Alternatively, you could change the canonical tags on the old website to point to the new website - ie on www.oldsite.com/article-1 you have this canonical tag:  and so on.  However, this is a longer way of doing the same thing as a 301, while the effect may not be instant either.

A third option would be to add a noindex,nofollow tag on the old site pages to deindex the pages.

The last two solutions would let you keep the articles on both sites - but in this case I would not recommend it, because even with the canonical change and/or noindexing, it could be misinterpreted as you looking to flesh out your site with more content that isn't original.  I'd recommend the 301 redirect.

Hi Soren

You're spot on there, really.  For images, your alt-text is, in effect, your anchor text.  If one isn't set, OSE will report it like this.

No doubt you'll know what image those pages are using to link to you, so only you know whether or not it would be realistic to ask them to add in an alt-text.  I'd say, where you can, use a descriptive alt text that may or may not include the keyword you're trying to rank for.  There is a school of thought that if you have lots and lots of images linking to your site with the same alt-text, particular if it's an exact match keyword, Google might see it as spammy.  This is particularly relevant for those who use infographics for inbound marketing, although iAcquire did bring out this guide about how you can randomise the alt-text of your images to negate this effect.

In summary, treat alt-text like your anchor text.  Use keywords in them sparingly and correctly, be descriptive where you can.  But if you don't get an alt-text it's not the end of the world by any means.  It's still a link - in some ways it would act like a raw URL text link.

Hope this helps!

Hi there

If you're doing a web based search, try this:

"SEARCH TERM" -yourdomain.com

So, put your search term in quotation marks and simply put a minus ( - ) in front of your domain name, or any domain name, to exclude results from that website.

Hope that helps.

Hi Sam

Of course, this is all theory work, but I would say option 2.

If we look at the most recent Moz Ranking Factors and the Searchmetrics Ranking factors, we can see that # Unique cblocks Linking to the Page, # of Unique IPs Linking to the Page, # of Root Domains Linking to the Page (Moz) are among the strongest correlations for higher rankings.

Certainly from my own experience (and ultimately it's your own data that you should trust the most), I have seen rankings increase more consistently when I have earned links from multiple domains/IPs, as opposed to, say, 3 from the same website.

Your mileage may vary, but in most scenarios I'd look at option 2 as the better option.  Of course, you need to do all of your quality assurance to make sure that it is the kind of website you would want a link from, but if it is then go for it.