Welcome to the Q&A Forum

There certainly is!  But bear with me, this may take awhile.

You can do this through RSS feeds, I recommend using Firefox for this.

First of all, let's start with this URL: http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=valentine%20OR%20valentines&lang=en 

This will find tweets containing the words "valentine" OR "valentines" and only includes tweets in English.

Now, you can add a geocode to this.  First of all, visit this site: http://itouchmap.com/latlong.html

Next, zoom in to the location you want and left-click to drop a little pin.  Click on this pin and you should get the latitude and longitude coordinates.  For London, this is: 51.505323,-0.12085

Now you can add that geolocation to the URL above, so it becomes:

[http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=valentine OR valentines**&geocode=51.505323,-0.12085,20km&**lang=en](search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=valentine OR valentines&geocode=51.505323,-0.12085,20km&lang=en)

You can see you just need to add &geocode=, insert the geocode you got before - then add a comma plus something like 10km, 20km etc.  This km serves your radius, so this feed looks at tweets containing "valentine OR "valentines" sent from London and a 20km surrounding radius (in English)

That's all there is to it!  You can experiment with keyword variations, such as valentines AND day, you can add negative keywords, meaning you can remove certain words such as valentines -card - basically many Google search queries will work in this feed as well.  And the reason I recommend firefox is because you can type in your URL with spaces, meaning you don't have to put in %20 and so on.  Here's what I mean:

http://i.imgur.com/LJNau.png 

Hope this helps, happy twittering!

LJNau.png

In a word: no.

There's a rough sort of hierarchy for where links come from.  Up near the top, you've got mainstream news websites, reputable blogs and so on.  Somewhere near the bottom, along with the likes of free, spammy directories, SEO press release sites and article directories are forum links.

They've been devalued substantially.  Even on pages that show a decent PA/DA (just the way the Moz algo works), forum links carry very little strength.  If you're using them to build an SEO benefit, then you're wasting your time.

Now, forums that are close to your market/niche and have an active community can be a great way to build potential leads - providing that you become part of the community yourself and are not there to just drop your link and go.  I'd certainly look at the possibility of that, should you have relevant forums in your industry.

You get a belated thumbs up from me for that comment.

First of all - have there been any messages in WMT?

If you wanted to check for negative SEO, again, you could check in WMT at the recently added links or put the URL into Open Site Explorer and have a look at any suspicious links.

However, I think you've diagnosed your own problem:

"Client has done zero backlinking"

"He does zero social on his site and he has many ads above the fold."

With this taken into account, why should the website rank high?  If this is to be believed, Google will be crawling a site that no one has linked to, no one has socially shared and, ergo, nobody is reading or caring about.

The algorithm does have a "freshness" factor in it - meaning it might give a temporary boost to rankings to a website that is new and fresh.  After that, however, if nothing is pointing to the website, it could very well have been 'sand-boxed'.

My advice would be to show Google that people are actually interested in the website - and this involves earning links and social shares.

If you do a 301 redirect, it should pass on most of the domain's authority (the going estimate is about 90% of the strength).

A 302 is seen by Google as a temporary redirect and so will not pass on any authority, so make sure you use a 301 if you want to pass on the strength.

Source to help you out: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection

From what I have seen, no - the link will remain in WMT unless it is physically removed (doesn't exist when Google recrawls).

You'll need to be sure you keep up to date records of those links that you have disavowed.

If it really is word for word, then putting a canonical in place is a wise move.  It should be remembered that the canonical is only an instruction for Google, not a directive, and so it isn't 100% Panda Proof (although I would say it's pretty high)

I'm not completely sure why you would want to copy the content completely to another site, as you won't be able to rank that webpage with the duplicate content.  If it's providing users with useful information and you don't have the time/resource to rewrite it, then that would make sense to me.

To add to Irving's point - seeing as you're using Omniture I'll assume that your website will be pulling in a number of visitors.  The free version of GA, when faced with a lot of data, will use sampled data, effectively a % of your data, to give you a quicker report.  It's accuracy varies, and you musn't forget that it is an aggregated score.

I harbour resentment to omniture (unreliable reporting, filters that break, generally inaccurate data, gone downhill since Adobe etc.), but you should get more accurate results with it.

You're very welcome Paul!  It's a very important question and had we not seen Penguin, my answer may have been different.  It just shows how much that update changed the SEO landscape.

Personally, I would nofollow.

It's just being proactive - there's a pretty good chance with that amount of links (all the same anchor text as well, I presume? Could be a problem even if branded) that he may get flagged by Google for a penguin penalty.  If it was this and only this that trigged the penalty, then it might be a quick and easy fix - but you cannot be sure.

What you can be sure of is that if you make these nofollow, you're much more unlikely to get pinged by the Penguin.  So, in a choice of nofollowing now and maybe taking a slight rankings hit, or riding it out and maybe getting pinged in the future and getting a big rankings hit for an indeterminable amount of time, I'd go with the option that I could control.

There could be a compromise - if he can get the links on each listing removed, but can be listed a single time on the homepage as a partner, or on a partners page, if done in a natural way then this could still pass on the majority (if not all) of the link strength, while being a lot more safer in Google's eyes.

If you can export all of the URLs you want to check into a list, there's a few tools you can import them to to check the response code.

I think Screaming Frog does this, but a web-based solution which is quick to use is this one by Tom Anthony.  You can also define what user agent you want it to test as.

All your 301s will come up listed just as that, same for 302s, 404s etc.

Sure does.

If you install the Mozbar to your browser as well, it comes with an option to highlight follow and no-follow links on the page.

You can find Chrome and Firefox downloads for it here.

Noticed it too and it absolutely sucks.  Don't expect Google to change it any time soon.

Two ways to act on this - make sure that your Google+ local is down to a tee, first of all.  Second, start targetting those keywords without those map results.

It may well be that those keywords end up being more long-tail/better converters anyway, like buy outdoor clothing.

Keep an eye on this SERP and analytics - if the map maintains its place, see if that has a reflection on your traffic and conversion (provided you maintain your organic ranking).  It may be worth maintaining optimisation for the term if people are as annoyed as you and I by the maps and scroll right past them.

There's no doubt about it - you can rank sites on page 1 and number 1 on Google without any social media activity.

However, the strength of "social signals" increased a lot in the last year and there's every reason for it to do so this year.

Even if the social activity isn't some amazing, expensive strategy, you can do things little by little.  And as they say, every little helps.

Have you tried the Distilled Video Sitemap generator?

I think this is the Google doc for it: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AhK1-u_-nIZhdE5KdEFTYVJCN3M4Yk9Xb2pfY0hrQkE#gid=0 

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.

Couple of things just to rule something out:

If you put in the Google search bar: www.plussizeplum.com - is the first result your website?  If not, it's been deindexed. (My search brought the website up, so this doesn't look to be the case)

Second of all, SEOMoz ranking updates only take place once a week, usually on a Friday (I think).  This may also account for the discrepancy.

Finally, try searching for the site with all personalisation removed.  If you go to Impersonal.me and set up your regional settings, it will search for your keyword without any personalisation.  You'll have to manually check your site in the rankings, but it would be accurate.

There's ranking software out there that updates daily and Rankerizer is a free program that will check your rankings whenever you run the report.

Just checked it for you and it looks to be working A-OK

Basically, if you try and type in finalduties.co.uk in your URL bar now, you will see that you're taken to the www.finalduties.co.uk website - just as intended.

You've effectively got 2 versions of your homepage live and ranking.

Using web-sniffer, you can see that both finalduties.co.uk and www.finalduties.co.uk are both giving 200 responses.  Google is effectively seeing both versions as two separate pages.

This can obviously be a problem because it might lead to duplicate content.  What you would want to do is 301 redirect one URL to the other.

Looking at your site architecture and linking, it looks as though you will want to 301 redirect http://finalduties.co.uk to http://www.finalduties.co.uk.  For more info on 301 redirecting, follow this guide.

From the horse's mouth:

How is influence calculated?
Influence is an amalgamation of follower count, tweets, age of the account, and influence of followers. This is a proprietary metric of Followerwonk that is much like a Klout score.

http://www.seomoz.org/help/followerwonk 

In addition:

Influence Score

The first metric is Followerwonk's calculation of influence. A high influence score means that the followers engage with the tweets sent by the bookmaker through favorites, replies and retweets.

http://www.bettingexpert.com/blog/do-bookmakers-buy-fake-twitter-followers 

You're welcome!

Looks like a good site to me.  It's important to check the IP and neighbourhood as getting links from a site that's in a "bad" neighbourhood, ie with sites that are spammy or harmful, can sometimes be detrimental.  Also, you would be able to check whether the webmaster has any other similar sites.  This usually isn't a problem unless they are linking the sites all together (link-wheel), which is against the Google TOS.

There's a really useful tool that was in beta last time I checked that let's you check all this but the name has gone completely out of my head - it let's you check via IP, adsense account, email used to register the domain, affiliate IDs and more.  If anyone can remember it, or if I do, I'll let you know!

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!

As you may (disappointingly) expect, there is no definitive line in the sand on this, and it's very much down to opinion.

In my view, relevancy is a very important factor for links.  To that end, I would rather spend twice the time researching partners and producing content for a related niche with, say, a PA/DA of 45, than a completely unrelated niche with a PA/DA of 60 (figures off the top of my head).

Of course, there would be exceptions.  Should one of the sites I'm working on be included in a YouMoz post here and the post takes off, then there's no doubt the link would help, despite it not being that relevant at all.  Very high authority blogs are worth pursuing - provided, of course, you have something of worth to say.

There's also crossovers between niches.  Say if you were doing work for a dentist - a blog about social media might not strike you as immediately relevant, but it is if you're launching a new health awareness campaign, or a technology blog might be relevant if you're talking about how the business functions.  In this case, I'd say that DA/PA 60 blog would be worth investing that time in - but, once again, only if you have something worthwhile to say and isn't considered a stretch.

Just my two copper on this and would love to see your opinion and others' on the issue.

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

Hi Ron, welcome aboard!

I think you should approach this from a content perspective - if each of your testimonials are substantial enough to justify unique pages, then by all means go for it.

There's no particular % or threshold for a minimum number of words you should aim to have, but it might be a good idea to have at least 300+ words of unique content.  This should be easily achievable if you include a history of the company you worked with, some quotes from them on the work you did, along with a general breakdown of the work you undertook and the results that you achieved.  I don't know what services you provide, but it might also make more sense to have individual pages as the work you undertake for one company might be very different to another.

Keeping them separate as well might allow you to keep things organised in the future, should you get a steady stream of satisfied customers - and here's hoping you do!

As for the SEO benefit, there wouldn't be much difference between individual pages or one large one.  A page with more content might rank for more long-tail keywords than several smaller ones (although they may not be particularly attractive keywords), whereas you could argue that a company might be more inclined to share the testimonial page, should it be a bespoke page that is unique to them and only includes them.

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.

In this case, you might want to consider setting up a 301 redirect in the .htaccess file.  Here's a quick how-to guide.

Redirect it to a relevant page and it should pass on the strength that it had.  This in turn could help the new page to rank for the term.

If your top ranking page was returning a 404 error then yes, there's absolutely no doubt that this would effect its ranking.

The Googlebot would basically be hitting the page and being repeatedly told that there's nothing there and so would devalue its strength in the SERPs as a result (because what user wants to hit a 404 page?)

That's an ASAP-do-it-yesterday sort of fix!

I'm afraid it will have to be a case of one or the other - either create unique content for the pages or consolidate them into one listing.

You've nailed the reasons already, so I'll offer a bit of advice into making the decision of which option to choose.  I'd look at your analytics data and see how many times those individual product pages have had users entering the website from them, which you could also break down further to see which users have entered via google shopping.

If there's a substantial amount that you believe has led to conversions, then unique content might be the way forward.  If not, then I don't think it losing the other two listings from Google shopping would be much of a sacrifice.

Hi Chris, sorry for not getting back sooner.

I think you can be confident that Google will recognise your brand name if its included in all of your titles.  Case in point, if you look at the SEOMoz site - 'SEOMoz' is repeated on pretty much every page, of which there must be hundreds of thousands.

There's a couple of things I'd take issue with this title.

First of all, as you mentioned, I'd want to include a brand term.

Second, the title is 79 characters - the general consensus is that you should limit your title to 70 characters, as any more might either be abbreviated by Google in the SERPs, or even replaced altogether by Google, which will then pick what it thinks is the most appropriate title. Source.

Third, by having that many keywords, you're diluting the 'strength' you would get from it.  By limiting to 1 or 2 keywords, more of a 'focus', as it were, would be attributed to those keywords.  Furthemore, you could then optimise internal pages of the site with the other keywords, which in turn could help build up overall domain authority if you choose to link-build to those pages.

Fourth, there is a case that this could be seen as over-optimisation by Google.  And we all know what over optimisation might lead to in the future.

I wouldn't worry about what your competition is doing.  The title tag's strength has been weakened over the years, but having a particularly spammy one could do more harm than good in the future.  I would focus on two keywords at the most per page, and as I mentioned earlier, this means you could optimise internal pages for the other term, which in turn could build domain authority.

There's a couple of reasons why people might want to do this (and why I do with all my websites)

First of all, the page/site might be scraped and replicated by a bot, particularly if it's an authority domain.  Having your canonicals in place to begin with will help reduce the chance of your content being seen as duplicate, should a bot scrape your site.

Another reason would be if a website might generate any additional versions of the page through queries, eg www.domain.com/page.php?query2 - Having a self referring canonical will also tell Google that you want to rank the URL without any other queries, which can help prevent any of those queries appearing in the Google index and/or SERPs.

It's not a large enough of a drop for me to think that your site may have been effected by an update.  Regardless, if you have webmaster tools set up (and if not, do so), my first step would be to check for any messages from Google.

After that, I'd analyse your own link-building campaign over the last month or two and maybe compare it against a few competitors and see if there are any differences and short comings.  Open site explorer has recently had its index updated, so it can help in this case.

Hi Anna

It's not personally the way I'd do it, but it's not my position to tell your client how to do things.  It's slightly clumsy, but there is a way to have both domains and not worry about any duplicate content penalty.

First of all, on the print/advertising site, I would implement rel=canonical tags.  You can learn more about the tags with Moz's guides here and here.

You'll want to point the canonical tag on your print page to the corresponding page on the site you want to rank for.  This will tell Google "We know this site has similar content, but that's OK - we don't want it to rank, rank this one instead"

You can take further preventions by blocking bots from crawling, and therefore indexing your print website.  You can do this by adding text to the robots.txt.  Moz also provides a guide on this.  An example of what you'd want to to include in your txt might be:

User-agent: * Disallow: /

The reason why I say this is clumsy is that it will completely block your site to Google.  This probably serves your clients' purpose, but consider people reading your print advertising and then they type in the URL wrong, or search for the brand on Google.  In both instances, they're going to be met by the web-friendly and SEO optimised domain.

I'd be more inclined to use the same domain (let's just use domain.com here), create the print friendly URLs (domain.com/friendly) and then 301 redirect them.  This would allow users to type in your friendly URL, but still be taken to the right page on the site (eg: domain.com/friendly-not-so-friendly-12).  You can do this through the htaccess file and, you've guessed it, Moz also provides a nifty 301 guide.

Hope this helps!

Tom

Almost goes without saying, and I'm sure you've already taken this onboard, but utilising Google+ (which is now used for Google Local) is a big thing for local.

Creating content for what people are looking for is an integral part of local as well.  Almost automatically, people searching for "widgets new york" are further down the conversion channel than people looking for "widgets" - so your content can obviously utilise this and really big up the local aspect.

I've found that this extends to local directories and listings.  It's funny because as people have been moving further away from directories (and with good reason) I've seen a growing number of referrals (converting ones at that) from local listings.  As always, take care in where you list, but these can be a converter.  Users have seemingly referred to these sites, preferring them to Google (draw your own opinion from that) in order to find the targeted shop that they want.

My advice would be to utilise those local listings and directories - particularly those that might also be linked to community websites.  It's kind of like a forgotten past time, directory listing!  The SEO value couldn't hurt, but you may see a surprising number of converting referrals as well.

Seems that way, but therein lies the value and appeal.

Harder to get, but more valuable when you do.  It'll be equally as hard for your competitors and others, so if you can crack it, it's a great string to your bow.

Going on the 2012 Searchmetrics ranking factors report, the correlation in data would seem to suggest that 'shares' carry more 'value' than 'likes:

http://www.searchmetrics.com/en/white-paper/google-ranking-factors-us-2012/

The data is coming up on a year old now, but I can't see why it would have changed this year.  I would point out, however, that this an aggregated score and it is a correlation, rather than any quantitative evidence.  Results in your niche may vary, but it's a pretty decent indication.

You'll also need to be aware that you can't really force a user into one sharing/liking output - let them do as they please.  An A/B test in share banners containing facebook likes and facebook shares might be interesting to run.

It's my understanding that the Googlebot can read this text, regardless of .css styles. You can actually check this yourself by putting in the page URL on this website (do a simple search for a free report). That browser fetches your page as the Googlebot would see it, so you can see if the content is read by Google or not.

Now, as for whether or not this might be deemed duplicate content, I don't think you have much to worry about as you have already taken necessary steps to prevent any penalty. Implementing the canonical tags that you have will tell Google that any duplicate content there is for a user reason and is not trying to game the system.

Provided those tags remain in place, I think you'll be fine. A problem may occur if you're building outbound links and hiding them using display=none or other .css styles. This is a big no-no and can get your site deindexed if Google finds it. Always worth bearing in mind for people on your team, but it looks like you've got everything under control!

It's a bit of a grey area, that's for sure.  There's evidence to suggest that it works, but you'd often be taking a shot in the dark.

There's a whole number of things to consider: has the domain been dropped, has it had a penalty, has it got a number of low quality, spam links?  A few of these things you can get some idea of before any purchase, but with other factors you're taking a stab in the dark.  That's not something I want to do with my SEO - I want control and accountability.

You also need to ask yourself how exactly is this building your brand.  Buying domains and redirecting them is a classic case of chasing the algorithm; optimising for a search engine and not a user.  Again, it's not the sort of practice I'd want to engage in, regardless of whatever benefit it might provide.  Besides, if your website ever falls under manual review and a Google employee sees 100s of domains redirected to your site from a whole host of unrelated industries, I can tell you that it's not going to look good for your website.

Links/Resources pages can be, under the right circumstance, a great place to be linked from.

Now this is dependent on a number of factors.  A website that has a resource page that contains links only from within their niche/area of expertise, on a website that you can be sure has not built dodgy links itself, then there should be no harm in having a link there.  Even if the page has a lot of outbound links, if it's a reputable website then your link will still be worth something, although might be diluted due to the other links.

Of course, a site that has one link pointing to pet supplies and another linking to viagra on the same page is going to raise suspicion.  Similarly, if the resource page sits on an authoritative domain but the PA score is nil or very low, then it may not be worth pursuing.  That's why I'd also approach the issue from an issue of branding.  I'd think to myself "Would a link to my website from this website come across as authoritative to the user?"  That is to say, if someone was on a user journey to buy car parts in michigan, and on the government resource page a link to your car parts website is there, that's going to be a ringing endorsement for your website in both the eyes of the user and a Googlebot.

In many ways, you could approach links/resource pages like web directories.  If you have the opportunity to get a link from an authoritative one on a solid website, I can't see it doing much harm.

Dan Shure wrote an excellent SEOMoz blog post about optimising wordpress earlier in the year.  It really goes into all the detail you could wish for, so rather than repeat it, I'd rather just post it!

Having just quickly reminded myself of the post, it provides you with the answer I think you're looking for.

I think you're certainly looking at a duplication issue here.

Bearing in mind I don't know how your site generates pages, there's a couple of things you could do.  First of all, I can see that you have a rel=canonical system in place, which is a good start.  One option would be to choose the one version of the URL you'd wish to prioritise and then change the canonical on the other version to point to that page.  For example, you might want to change the canonical link on -> http://www.pakwheels.com/used-cars/search/-/mk_Toyota/md_Corolla/ to <rel="canonical" href:"<span="">http://www.pakwheels.com/used-cars/search/-/mk_Toyota/md_Corolla/"></rel="canonical">

Alternatively, and what I'd recommend, would be to 301 redirect the URLs to your preferred address, as the pages are serving no extra purpose for the user.  Implementing a 301 will stop Google from crawling those pages and therefore flagging up any duplicate content issue.

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.

Hi Carin

Most likely you'll be required to pay a fee to acquire the use of such images.  Getty images provides its royalty free images online, if you're interested.

A more affordable option, especially for startup blogs and authors, is to download free, royalty free images.  There are a few sites that offer this, such as http://www.sxc.hu/ and http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/

Google also allows you to search for images that are free to share or use.  If you click on this advanced search query for 'apple', you can see at the bottom of the page a setting for usage rights.  Set that to 'free to use or share' and you'll get a bunch of images you can use.

Hope this helps!

No problem, glad to have helped and hope it's not too much of a frustration for you!

This is something that was first talked about around February 2011.  SearchEngineWatch provided a great insight into how and why it was happening, which I'd highly recommend reading through.

Great answer above me, so I'd only add another resource to finding guest post opportunities.

Stoked SEO's link building query generator utilises all the different google search terms you can use to also find posting opportunities.

Don't forget to look at related blogs on sites like Technorati as well, and approach them through their contact forms.

It's certainly a safe site.

As with all article sites, its value has been diminished significantly.  As far as article sites go, SelfGrowth is probably one of the better ones out there.  I know when I've had a surplus of content on a previous site a few months back we used it.  Rankings did increase, but it's not like we used SelfGrowth exclusively, so impossible to say there's correlation.

A link from there wouldn't likely hurt and might pass on a bit of 'link-juice', for lack of a better term.  However, I'd only ever use it if you're overflowing with time-sensitive content that you don't have anywhere else to put.  Other than that circumstance, I'd nearly always recommend doing some targeted outreach and getting your article onto a related blog in your niche.

It's pretty hard to give a 'right' amount here.

Of course, it's well documented that more content on a page has a strong correlation with improved rankings (and conversions).  To say that there is a golden threshold of characters, however, is impossible to say.

I'd rather bring up the point you make about stuffing.  That's probably the main thing to keep in mind when writing descriptions or content - don't make it look like you're gaming for a search engine, but keep it great for a user.  If you can use your keyword multiple times, that's great.  But, as you allude to, writing it for the sake of getting it on the page more often is a bad move.

If 160 words for a description is the absolute most you can say on a topic, without repeating yourself, then 160 is the right amount **in this case.  **Other times it might be more, and sometimes it might be even less; it really is dependent on the context.

You might be able to squeeze more content for a description by using things like an example of how a system/process works etc.  But I'd always remain focus on writing for a user, not a search engine, and to avoid stuffing where possible, as you rightly pointed out.