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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.

Hi Sabilah

You may want to take a look at Quantcast and SimilarWeb - Quantcast in particular I think has the ability to show what you're after.

Hi there

You just need to add the unicode of the Emoji into your HTML.  You can find the unicodes for each emoji in the list here: http://apps.timwhitlock.info/emoji/tables/unicode, plus how they'll look on each device.

If you're running WordPress there's a couple of plugins that can do this for you as well, such as Hello Emoji and Open Source Emoji.

Just don't go overboard with them.  Part of me fears Google will suck the fun right out of this and block Emoji's from appearing in the SERPs if lots of people jump on the bandwagon.  Hope not, but possible.  Also consider that not every visitor on every device might be able to see the emoji properly, which could put people off.

With all that said, I love emojis. 'U+1F60D'

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.

Hey there

To Quote Google on this, with the issue of ASCII and UTF encoded characters, like Arabic:

"Yes, we can generally keep up with UTF-8 encoded URLs and we’ll generally show them to users in our search results (but link to your server with the URLs properly escaped). I would recommend that you also use escaped URLs in your links, to make sure that your site is compatible with older browsers that don’t understand straight UTF-8 URLs"

So their recommendation would be to have both URLs available (the English and the Arabic) in order to support all users.  So the fact you already do this is a good thing.

The next step would be to make sure you are handling duplicate content correctly.  If the Arabic and non Arabic URLs are linking to a page with the same content - Google _should_be able to recognise this as the same page and not penalise you for duplications.  So if the Arabic URL and the "escaped URL" (ASCII/English equivalent) both go to the same page, you should be fine.  I've experienced this quite a few times with Turkish websites, for example, that also have UTF encoded characters.

However, you can eliminate the risk further by adding a canonical tag to each page.  As far as I am aware, the canonical tag will support Arabic characters and so, on each page of the site, add a canonical tag that points to that page.  For example, with the URL above, you would want to place a canonical tag like:

You can read more on canonical tags here: http://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization

Do be aware that for XML sitemaps, the URLs in the sitemap need to be URL-escaped - that is to say, UTF encoded URLs need to be made into their ASCII equivalent.  You can read more about that in this Google guide to using non-alphanumeric characters in Sitemap URLs.

Hope this helps.

Hi Pete

Sorry that I missed your comment before.

I can absolutely understand why there would be a sense of frustration for designers and webmasters here.  First of all, as Patrick alludes, it is not exactly clear whether or not this is being accounted for (results and feedback are inconsistent, to the point where I can't see a pattern in industries/niches etc).  And secondly, Google has always been about making the page as friendly for the user as possible.  Using expandable content/internal anchors can do just that, so it's a frustrating contradiction.

My advice would be what Patrick has said and that's to test.  I'd give it 6-8 weeks to try and see any substantial change.

To add to Matt's good earlier response, the TLD extension that you use (.com, .net, .info) will have a minimal impact on your ability to rank well and the site's overall SEO.  For ranking specific websites in specific countries (and regions like London etc), Google looks at a bunch of more important factors, such as server location, schema, hreflang setup, citations, NAPs and so on.

Hi Luke

Those hashtags are internal anchors and they are quite commonplace and so Google handles them quite well.

What I would test would be how the search engines are crawling this page?  What should be happening is that the search engine can see all of the text at all times.  You can test this by entering the URL into the SEO Browser Tool - enter it there and click "simple" search (as it's free).  What do you see?  Does all of the page content show up?  If so, Google will be able to see the page.

Now there are a couple of things to consider.  There has been talk that Google will no longer index "click to expand" content.  I've seen conflicting reports as to whether this has been implemented, but if it is on Google's radar it may be wise to avoid the tactic.  From what I can gather, it looks like your page might be acting this way at the moment, in which case you may want to change that.  If your website is using internal anchors (hashtags) to merely take the user from one section of the page to another (while never hiding the content) it would be fine.

Finally, if you're using Google Analytics, by default GA will register a new page visit each time a hashtag link is clicked.  Similarly, it will not show you hashtags have been clicked and show them as visited URLs.  So, for example, if someone visits www.example.com/page and clicks 3 hashtag links, that will register as 4 page views to www.example.com/page and nothing else.

However, you change that and here's a good guide on how to do so.

Hope this helps.

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

I think the biggest influencer in this decision would be what the client is advertising.

If they're advertising mainly B2B, exclude VAT. If it's B2C, include it.

There are exceptions to the rule - for example, websites like Scan.co.uk and eBuyer.com will typically show ex VAT prices more prominently, but that's because, while being a retail website, most of their bigger orders come other businesses.

So I would ask who is it that your client typically serves - businesses or individuals?

If it is individuals you are obliged to show the VAT price before the purchasing decision (add to basket) has been placed, pretty sure that's a legal requirement.  You can display both, as Scan and Ebuyer too, and that will suffice.  And if you're paying for Google Shopping inclusion, Google is sophisticated enough to know which price is your VAT and non-VAT price and will show the VAT prices in its results (if applicable).

Nothing wrong with showing both - but if you plan on showing one, it all comes down to who the website is intending to serve.

Hi there

On the Google My Business page, reviews are counted from the page itself (obviously) and, from what I know, three other places:

Yelp (which also powers Apple Maps)

TripAdvisor

Booking.com

If you get reviews in these places, they should also aggregate into reviews on your Google My Business page.

However, how Google picks and chooses these reviews I'm afraid is a bit luck of the draw.

Hey Marton

Try and think of ways of capturing a wider audience to care about your industry.

Could you run a contest - free personal horoscopes for a year, for example - and look to promote it via social networks, bloggers and buzzfeed type news websites?

Can you think of famous horoscopes on the days of big or prophetic events? Like when a horoscope was eerily accurate to something major that happened in the world? (Think 33 Horoscope predictions that will shock you") Maybe a major sporting event? I wonder what Jordan Spieth's was before winning the Masters?

Or how about contacting a Taylor Swift or other celebrity fan site and offer them free weekly horoscopes on the celebrity every week?

These are just ideas from the top of my head - but in reality they are just variations of the principles that you mentioned - trying to earn backlinks from quality websites, increase your social footprint etc.  The added benefit of these approaches is that they - may - get a bit more exposure and so could result in more referral traffic and general good PR for your site.

No doubt, it's a tricky task - but the good thing about horoscopes is that everyone has one, if they choose to read it! So take a look to see if you could try and capture a wider audience by playing to their interests and incorporating that with your website.

Hope it helps.

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 John

Just to make sure I'm reading this correctly.

You have your homepage.  You can then click to the "about us" page.  And from there, you can click to the "competition" page.

However, instead of it looking like: www.example.com/about-us/competition, it looks like: www.example.com/competition

Is that correct?

If it is, then I don't think there is anything to worry about.  Here's why:

Think of your URL as merely a cosmetic thing.  Your URL structure does not have to reflect how a search engine or a user reaches that page.  The most important thing in terms of site structure and SEO is how a search engine crawler (and user) reaches that page - IE, how many clicks away from your root domain it is.

As a rule of thumb, you should try to keep all of your important pages no more than 3 clicks away from your homepage - and ideally as few as possible.  How the URL is presented when the user/search engine reaches that point is not relevant**

**This isn't entirely the case - there is some correlation with including your keyword in the URL and higher rankings, albeit a very slight correlation.  For example, some sites have links to their main pages from their homepage which then take you to a URL like: http://www.example.com/keyword/product-a - that doesn't mean that the search engine has to reach the page by going through that subfolder (which may not even exist), but the display URL contains the keyword and so it might be better for SEO (although I think if this does have an effect it is very, very slim).  Conversely, if your main page URL was http://www.example.com/keyword, but it takes you four clicks to reach there, it would not be good for SEO as your page is so far away from the homepage.

The main guidelines here are to:

• Keep your main pages as close to the homepage as possible (via internal links)
• Try to include the keyword in your URL if possible (or at least use friendly, readable URLs)

Now, on the "about us" page, the link that goes to the "competition" page - does it go directly to www.example.com/competition, or is it linked to www.example.com/about-us/competition and then quickly redirects?

If it's the second scenario, that would be an unnecessary redirect and might involve some of the link equity being diluted.  I'd get the agency to look at linking to the www.example.com/competition page directly if that is the case (although I doubt it will be).

I hope that helps to explain some things!

Hey

In a word, no.

GA is pretty horrendous for this.  There are several very convoluted ways of trying to get this to work - but even if you start to get there, you're hampered by the fact that all of the information is anonymised - ie, you won't see what user or user journey was responsible for which purchase (unless you have ecommerce set up and each product is a different price).

There are a lot of other solutions out there that can do this for you, each with varying price packets.  One of the better ones out there is KissMetrics - starting at $200/mo - and they have a lot of support people on hand both in pre and post sales.  I'd approach them with your query and take it from there and see if it is right for you.

If that is too high a price for now, I've heard good things about Keen IO and Calq IO - again, reach out to them with what you're trying to achieve.  Be specific as well - they should be able to help you with your queries and the one that offers the best, most comprehensive support could be your winner.

What about looking for the questions that people are asking about your industry, products or niche?

Try http://answerthepublic.com/ - just enter the keyword you want and which Google to crawl and it will find a list of questions that people are actively searching for (appearing in similar searches/autocomplete).

Could open up a couple of content ideas.

I obviously can't say for sure regarding the anchor text - however:

My understanding is that the anchor text ratio is more a signal rather than a trigger - as in it must be one of (X) amount of signals to then fire a penalty trigger (algorithmic/manual review).

So even if it was still sending a bad 'signal' as it were, it wouldn't be the final nail in the coffin.

Of course, this is my opinion, but it's based on my experience and a bit of testing with some spam sites.

Negative SEO may not be technically illegal - but extortion is.

What you have described there looks like extortion to me.  240 sites built to link to you, verifiable whois information, contacted the culprit, he has requested money from you to remove the links he built.  That's extortion - and you have it in writing.

It might not be the most solid legal case, but it can be enough to scare off any disgruntled webmaster who is doing this.  If you have anyone who can draft a legal letter to serve, I'd get on this.  It should put a stop to it.

However, as Jonathan says, it is unlikely that this kind of negative SEO will have any sort of impact, particularly if you have disavowed the links.  When uploading a disavow file, I'd also put a "# comment" in there saying that this is because of a negative SEO attack.  240 identical sites and links from the same whois (and probably IP) - Google is going to know this is a negative SEO attack on you and will discount those links.

But I'd scare that bastard into submission if I were you.

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 there

First of all - your logic is sound.  Trying to add additional, useful content to the product page could help its SEO performance.  There are obviously a number of other factors that will determine its success, but the principle logic is good.

Up until very recently, I would have said go for the solution you have proposed above.  It was a great way of getting useful information on the page - for both the search engine and the user - without having to interrupt or disturb the user journey.

However, things look to have changed within the last six months.  It began in September with this webmaster world thread saying that Google was no longer indexing content in onLoad hidden sections and was later confirmed in November with Google explicitly stating that Content In Tabs & Click To Expand May Not Be Indexed Or Ranked.

Whether that change is being fully enforced yet, I'm not sure - but if it's on Google's radar it may be wise to avoid this kind of onLoad content usage.

So that leaves you with having to present the content on the page straight off the bat. That can be tricky , as you run the risk of overloading the user.  But if you can keep the content concise and useful and can design the page accordingly, hopefully you can achieve it.

Hope the above links help.

Hi Danne

First of all, it's only the <title>tag here that is the required HTML element, when looking at <a href="http://validator.w3.org/" target="_blank">W3C Compliant Markups</a>.</p> <p>The <meta name="title"> tag is just meta data content, and different crawlers will use or not use that information as they see fit.  In the case of Google, it very seldom, if at all, ever uses this tag for its indexation purposes.</p> <p>Fast forward again to the <h1> tag, and its use is also <a href="http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/Use_h1_for_Title" target="_blank">W3C recommended</a>.</p> <p>So you can see the trend here - Google will look at the W3C elements and consider them for indexing more than the <meta name="title"> tag.  To put it bluntly, the <meta name="title"> is a waste of code.</p> <p>If you want a certain phrase to be indexed, considered, or to show up in the SERP, I would add it to your <title> tag and remove the <meta name="title"> altogether, to reduce the clutter and any chance of conflicting messages.</p></title>

Hi John

The first thing I would ask in this situation is - did you 301 redirect the non SSL (http) versions of your pages to the SSL (https)?

If you didn't - that could be a big problem.  First of all, that could run into a couple of duplicate content issues and canonical issues, as you would have two versions of each page battling each other for prominence.  However, what I think would be more of an issue is the fact that if you didn't redirect the pages and if you didn't change any of your inbound links - the links that you had pointing to the website might now be pointing to inactive pages, and the link 'equity' your site had may now be lost.

This might be a redundant point as you may have implemented the redirects - but it's always the first thing that I look out for.

If you're looking to redirect all of the http pages, this bit of code is something you can add to your htaccess file to redirect all URLs on your site:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI}

Again, apologies if you have already done this but if not, I hope it helps.

It certainly used to be a bigger factor.  And the annoying thing is that Google still has older videos up saying as much.

However, with so many new TLDs, server locations and CDNs in particular, I think the impact of server location has diminished quite a lot.  For example, on my UK sites I always try and use UK servers.  However, I often use cloudflare on them, which will be either US or Central Europe based.  It hasn't affected their performance.  Google alludes to this:

“Server location (through the IP address of the server) is frequently near your users. However, some websites use distributed content delivery networks (CDNs) or are hosted in a country with better webserver infrastructure; so, we try not to rely on the server location alone.”

So I wouldn't say a server's location will hinder a website's ability to rank in a certain country.  The only way that it might would be related to speed.  Obviously, the further away your user is from your server, the slower the website's response might be, and speed is considered to be a ranking factor.  However, if you get any decent hosting solution, the speed difference would also be negligible.

No problem Lee!

This is also a good article from SearchEngineLand on international SEO, including some pros and cons on different approaches.

Hi Lee

Would I be right in saying that the client would like to rank in both UK and US?

If so, this is possible.  What I would recommend is to create a new geo-location subfolder for the US site.  Something as simple as website.com/us/ would do.

From there, you would set up the US subfolder as basically its own website.  That starts with adding the right kind of hreflang schema code for the subfolder.

There is a fantastic guide here on Moz by Aleyda Solis on how to set up an international SEO structure.  You can find it here.

This hreflang generator tool, also from Aleyda, can help you generate the right code to add to the subfolder.

From there, as mentioned you're basically treating the subfolder as it's own individual site.  That means you can build new links to it, you should have unique content within it, and you can even set up its own individual GWT account - meaning you can set the geolocation settings in there too.

The benefit of this approach is that it would allow your client to keep the current site as-is, and not jeopardise it, while also setting up a site for the US audience.  Of course, you could do exactly the same thing on a new TLD - but that might be difficult as you're using the .com already (and besides, I like global sites using a .com /country/ subfolder setup)

Hope this helps, let me know if you'd like anything clarified.

Hi Howard

Other than using OSE, there are a couple of manual checks I like to take when checking a website's quality.

First of all - how many outbound/external links are there?  By that I mean, how many other sites are they linking to?  Are they linking only to sites related to their industry? How are they linking to them - is it brand name, URL or anchor text?

You don't want to work with a website that looks to be linking to dozens or hundreds of other websites - it might indicate a link farm (plus the link equity/strength that your link would get would be more diluted).  Similarly, if the website is linking to lots of other websites in completely different industries, it may look quite spammy.  And finally, if the website is aggressively using anchor text to link to those sites ("We recommend this company for cheap blue widgets" for example), again it would be one to avoid.

Another check I like to make is the social activity on the site and pages.  Are there facebook likes/tweets?  Comments on articles?  These may not help with your SEO efforts directly, but it's another check to see whether the website is a legitimate website with a legitimate audience, and not spammy or a link farm.  I would not rule out a website on just these grounds, but Google is quite clear in saying they want websites to engage with audiences and earn their links, rather than just get them on "strong SEO" websites.

Hope these two tips help.

Hi Ethan

In theory - yes it could.  We know that Google looks at a domain's Class-C IP level (at least - now that Google is a registrar it may extend to the full IP) when judging its quality.  If a site is in a "bad neighbourhood" - ie sitting on an IP range with a number of 'spam' sites - then theoretically it could be affected, as a kind of guilty by association.

However, in reality I have some doubts as to whether this would happen.  The fact is that the vast majority of the web uses shared hosting (particularly sme's) and so good sites are invariably always going to be mixed in with 'bad' sites.  And what's stopping me from deliberately making a bad site on your IP in order to 'poison it'?  I'm no way near that evil, but someone might be.

What I'm getting at here is that it seems extremely unlikely that there is a manageable way to differentiate these sites efficiently - which leads me to believe that having your spam site on the same IP as some 'good' sites _shouldn't _make a difference.

What you can do to reduce this risk even further would be to make sure the 'spam' site doesn't link to any properties of yours that you want to protect, to nofollow those links if feasible (not sure what CMS you're using but WordPress has a few plugins that would do this on bulk) and, if it isn't required, noindexing the site would pretty much get rid of all risk completely.

Hope this helps!

Hi Howard

Related to affiliate research: I put together this guide on how to find the affiliates that any website/company uses.  You may find it useful to put together a seed list of people you may want to work with:

http://tjproberts.com/find-the-affiliates-of-any-website/

Hi Sam

Not a perfect solution, but a good free work-a-round is to use http://page2rss.com and IFTTT.

If you enter the Moz Just Discovered URL into Page2RSS, it will create an RSS feed of the page.  When the page updates with new links, the RSS feed that you created will update to.

Then, with the IFTTT RSS feed trigger, you can create an alert to update you whenever the feed updates - IE when a new link is discovered.  You can have it fire to your email, for example.

It can be a bit tempremental, but I've had it working before.  Good for competitor spying and for negative SEO monitoring.

Hi there

Can you access all 3 versions of that page? www.site.co.uk - site.co.uk - www.site.co.uk/home.aspx

If so that is more than just a duplicate title issue - it could be a big duplicate content issue.  I'd highly recommend redirecting other versions to one single version on your site.

The easiest way to do this is through 301 redirections - you can read the Moz guide on that here.  On a related note, this bit of htaccess code will redirect all non-www pages of your site to their www. equivalent:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]

Now, if you can't redirect for whatever reason, you can use canonical tags.  Perhaps this is what you're already using?  Basically, all 3 versions of the URL should only have 1 canonical tag version, such as:

The code must be in that format and in the tag of your website.  All versions of the page should use the same version of the code.

I hope this helps.

Hey

Google trends, with the right settings, can be very useful.  In fact I'd recommend all of the methods you mentioned.

But one additional one I think you might like is FAQFox.  Basically, it's a tool that will find questions your demographic are asking online.  Enter your keyword and then either enter the sites you'd like it to scrape or click on one of the pre-defined sets the tool comes with.  It will then list the questions and links that it finds.

Might be useful in seeing what kind of questions are being asked about your topic, and I hope you can see the potential for SEO as well (creating assets and resources that tackle popular questions).

Hope this helps.

Hey there

Not sure if this is the article you read, but Yoast wrote a great article on blocking jquery and CSS and how it might affect your SEO.

The recommendation was not to block them with robots.txt.  This is reiterated by a Google-r at the recent SMX conference has said:

“We recommend making sure Googlebot can access any embedded resource that meaningfully contributes to your site’s visible content or its layout”

I'd recommend that you unlock these.

Hope this helps.

It's also worth remembering that blocking a URL in a robots.txt file does not automatically mean that the URL will be deindexed.  The robots.txt file will prevent robots, such as the Googlebot, from seeing or accessing the file and that's all.  Now obviously, if a robot repeatedly tries to access a file and gets denied it will eventually stop trying to, which is what leads to the file being deindexed (the same principle applies to 404 and 410 errors).

Therefore, if you want a quicker and more definite deindexing solution, you should use the explicit noindex robot command, as recommended above.  This will tell any visiting robot to not index it straight away, which will reduce the number of revisits and drop the page from the index faster.

Hi there

The Google Related Searches section and the Google suggested searches (the search terms suggested when you start to type in the toolbar) are both intrinsicly linked and are generated in the same way.

There are two great resources on how this works and where they come from.  The first is a Whiteboard Friday from a not-so-bearded-Rand.  The second is a great article by Rishi Lakhani on how it works and how one would go about "influencing it".  Heavy on theory, but a great read.

I hope these help.

Chris makes a fantastic point here.

You almost need to detach "what's reasonable" from what Google wants sometimes.  Chris is right - why shouldn't those two pages have the same content? But we're dealing with algorithms mainly, not reasoning.

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 Cole

1. The more you do change, the less risk involved.  Some might tell you that if you change the content enough to pass "copyscape" or other online plagiarism tools, that would protect you from a penalty. I find that to be slightly ridiculous - why would Google judge by those external standards?  The more you can change, the better in my opinion (but I can totally sympathise with the work that entails)

2. Google will know you own the websites if you link them together, share GA code, host them together, contain the same company details and so on - but my question is why would you want to do that?  I think if you tried to tell Google you owned all the sites they would come out you even harder, as they could see it as you being manipulative.

To that point, others will recommend that you only use one domain and target different KWs or locations on different pages/subfolders/subdomains, as it'll look less like a link network. Downside of that is getting Google local listings for each page/location can be a bit of a pain if the pages all come from one domain.

It's not really my place to comment on your strategy and what you should/should not be doing, but suffice to say if you go with individual domains for each location, you should aim to make those domains (and their copy) as unique and independent as possible.

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 there

What I would first do is look at two or more product pages with CSS, JS and images disabled, or run them through a "simple search" in the free SEO Browser tool.

That will show you what the page is going to look like to a Googlebot - how similar does it look to you?  Do the pages look 70% identical? 80%?  You could also use the PlagSpotter tool to see just how similar those pages appear.

The point is, it really would be best practice to get as many product descriptions ready before the site goes live - not only to avoid any duplicate/thin content issues but to also help those pages rank outright to begin with.  The Panda algorithm (that deals with thin content) refreshes monthly (perhaps even quicker), so there is a small window there to get all of the work done, if you were to set it live with no product descriptions.  Would you necessarily be penalised straight away?  Or at all?  I honestly can't say as that would be guess work - but I don't like to take chances on stuff that I can't calculate and so I really would recommend you to get as many product descriptions on there as possible.

Have you considered using Mechanical Turk for this? You could outsource the description writing at a very low cost to hundreds of people, dramatically speeding up the process.  If you give clear criteria in your job spec and provide all that a person would need to complete the job, you have a better chance at quality control.  Rand wrote a blog post on this a while back, and a great blog post, albeit on a different topic, on how someone used MTurk and how they set up their job can be found in this CustomerDevLabs post, which is well worth the read.

I hope this helps.

To be brief:

You get people and other brands paying and bidding on Adwords to appear next to a competitor when people search for that competitor.

I don't see why SEO should be any different (ethically).

Whether it's feasible and worth your time optimise, however, that's different.

Hey

Let's approach this in two parts: SEO and Branding.

If you went for an en.microdesign.nl or microdesign.nl/en structure, would you be able to rank the site in Google US/UK and for English terms?  The answer is a definite yes.  You have a country TLD, but in the end a TLD is just a TLD and it won't prevent you from ranking outside of Google NL.

Two guides from Aleyda Solis on how to set up your international campaign, the international SEO checklist and establish your SEO strategy will help you get set up correctly, in order to rank.

The second consideration, and arguably the more important one, is the issue of branding and appearance.  Will English users want to visit your site or trust your site and services if you are on a .nl domain?  Now, if you had asked me this only a few years ago, I would have said probably not, and would have recommended you do all that you can to move to a global TLD, like .com.  Now, however, with all the different TLDs out there and people and agencies seemingly using any extension to rank (.me, .pro, .anything!), I really don't think it makes much of a difference.  Provided that the search result is fully optimised for the English user and when the person reaches the site, all of what they need (including the nitty gritty like contact details, terms, privacy etc) are presented in English, then I think you would be able to make your current website a success.  Plus, you get to preserve an SEO authority your root domain currently has.

I hope this helps.

Howdy

You would need to define the keywords and the websites you want to track, but LightSERP allows you to track on an hourly basis.

If you'd rather track keywords and just see the top 20 for them, regardless of what website is ranking, and see that data over time, SERPWoo is a great tool for that.  It updates daily, however.

Both options support mobile SERPs, as far as I know.

Hope these can help.

Hey John

If you decide to take action action, then being aggressive with the links is a good approach. Both in Cyrus Shephard's great Moz blog post on the disavow tool and also advice from Google itself says if you suspect an entire domain to be spammy, go ahead and disavow all of it.

However, from my own perspective, I would only go through and create a disavow file if I knew for sure that I was suffering from a manual or algorithmic penalty.  I have seen very little benefit in being proactive with that tool (eg rankings are good, you spot bad links in your link profile and disavow them to be safe) and, in fact, I have seen a number of cases when a disavow was submitted "prematurely" - ie, a site was ranking fine and then disavowed some links and saw rankings fall.

If we want to look at it from a slightly skeptical point of view - if you're not suffering from a Google penalty, do you really want to inform Google that you have suspicious links in your profile?

However, that is a matter of preference based on my own experience.  I would certainly take note of the links you think are bad (and perhaps put together a file ready to go, just in case). Worth noting that prweb.com has made all of its links nofollow anyway, and so as they're not passing on link equity it doesn't seem logical to then disavow them (as they have no SEO benefit) Also, keep in mind though that if you visit the page and the link is not there - and especially if you do a google search for cache:http://www.example.com and see that the cached version contains no link - there's a very good chance that the link has already been discounted anyway and so would not be flagged in a manual or algorithmic check.  Seeing as you have so many links from the domains, that may be occurring.

Hope this helps

Google can be pretty anal about these things.

You'll increase your chance of a penalty removal if you physically remove the links and show evidence of your work and progression.

I can't really put it better than this guide on penalty removal by HitReach.  They've removed hundreds (or thousands) of penalties and this is their methodology.  Having done something similar myself, I can vouch for it, so I highly recommend reading it and implementing it.

And just for fun, here's a comic of theirs

Digital-Rockstars-Issue-39.gif

No experience with any of the companies you've listed, but HitReach offer white label SEO and are some of the best in the business, in my opinion.

Here are their White Label Agreements

Hi Kate

From an SEO perspective - is there anything "wrong" with your current domain, that you can see?  EG - do you have a bad backlink profile, do you think you're affected by a Google penalty?  If the answer to any of these is "yes", you might want to consider a new domain.

As a whole, I don't see any benefit with a subdomain solution.

But really, that's where I think the SEO considerations stop.  Look at it more from a business or branding point of view.  If this is a significant relaunch and rebrand, do you think that a new website would coincide with the relaunch and give it extra emphasis?  Is it a significant change of direction and do you think updating your current website would confuse or isolate your user base (as you're now something completely different)?  If yes, I'd look at a new domain.

But if you're just updating the look and feel of your site, or even if you're changing your marketing message, look and approach, but in essence you're the same company with the same values and user base, then I would stay on your current domain.  You'd get the benefit of your currently existing links yes, but really you'll be keeping continuity and you won't be interrupting your current users' journeys at all.

So there is a small SEO consideration here, but beyond that this is more of a business decision.  If you're completely changing the way you're doing business, go with a new domain.  If you're updating the brand and its appearance, but keeping the core values, then stay as you are.

Hope this helps.

It's an interesting discussion and one that I hope that the other commentor's won't dismiss out of hand.  The main hypothesis is: Does having a larger social following increase a brand's legitimacy/authenticity/trust with a consumer?

Unfortunately, there are not any case studies that I can see that test this theory, and certainly not any that bought Facebook likes outright.  As you'd expect, there are a number of sources that say it's a bad idea, such as this, and this.

On a complete hunch, I'd guess that it would help increase your perceived "trust" with a potential client, but due to a lack of evidence I can't recommend you doing so - in this way at least.

I would, however, encourage you to promote your Facebook page to increase your likes and followers with targeted and engaged users. You can do this through promoted advertising on Facebook itself, or other places like Twitter or reddit.  It will cost more to reach a figure of, say, 1000 likes than just outright buying them - but this way you'll know that the people liking your page, if targeted correctly, will be of a relevant audience and much more likely to engage with your brand.  If you have a Facebook page bursting with user activity, that will certainly help to build trust too.

I suppose it comes down to like most things in life, if you cut corners you risk doing more harm than good.  Promoting your Facebook page in a proper way will not only increase likes (and potentially perceived trust), but in doing so you are introducing your brand to your target audience - meaning you could get conversions out of it you might not have done before.

These links will help you out:

How to Use Promoted Page Ads to Get Tons of New Likes on Facebook

A Beginner’s Guide to Facebook Ads

The Ultimate Guide to Running Online Competitions

As for testing whether just buying likes increases "trust", it would be an interesting study to see that's for sure.

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.

Hey P

If you're set on taking action, then being aggressive with them is actually a good approach. Both in Cyrus Shephard's great Moz blog post on the disavow tool and also advice from Google itself says if you suspect an entire domain to be spammy, go ahead and disavow all of it.

However, from my own perspective, I would only go through and create a disavow file if I knew for sure that I was suffering from a manual or algorithmic penalty.  I have seen very little benefit in being proactive with that tool (eg rankings are good, you spot bad links in your link profile and disavow them to be safe) and, in fact, I have seen a number of cases when a disavow was submitted "prematurely" - ie, a site was ranking fine and then disavowed some links and saw rankings fall.

If we want to look at it from a slightly skeptical point of view - if you're not suffering from a Google penalty, do you really want to inform Google that you have suspicious links in your profile?

However, that is a matter of preference based on my own experience.  I would certainly take note of the links you think are bad (and perhaps put together a file ready to go, just in case). Keep in mind though that if you visit the page and the link is not there - and especially if you do a google search for cache:http://www.example.com and see that the cached version contains no link - there's a very good chance that the link has already been discounted anyway and so would not be flagged in a manual or algorithmic check.

Hope this helps