Hi Donnie

Thanks, I totally agree with your comments on EMD's. In this instance I think the hyphen is perfectly acceptable.

Thanks again.

Hi Billy

You must have been waiting for the next Q & A question......congrats on the extra points and thanks for your thoughts

Trevor

Hi Mozzers

Just after some opinions really. Basically a client wants a restaurant website developing and had already chosen a name for it as (example) "englishroserestaurant.co.uk". They wanted to register it themselves but unfortunately before they had time to someone else did.

Now they have come back to me and said about using the name (example) "englishrose.me.uk".

I know these .me.uk names are supposedly for personal websites and not businesses but I assume that, by itself, shouldn't be an issue as there are many commercial sites that do use them.

However as all the combinations have been taken I have suggested that they use a "domain-domain.com as an alternative so just wanted to know which option you guys would go for out of:

1. englishrose.me.uk

2. english-rose.com

Although I avoid hyphens whenever I can in this instance 100% I would go for number 2 as it's only one hyphen and it's a business and looks more professional......having said that I would welcome any comments or opinions.

Thanks in advance.

Hi Ravi

I don't use them as it does make it very easy for competitors to quickly look to see what keywords you're trying to rank for.

Having said that take a look at this post and read the comments, you'll see it's a mixed bag!

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/why-i-still-use-meta-keywords

Personal preference really.

Hi Diane

Just checked your homepage in a crawler and It looks like the 301 redirect is working. Not sure if you or your hosting company did it last night but certainly it's there.

If you type into your browser just 'in2town.co.uk' it redirects to 'www.in2town.co.uk'.

Very best wishes for the site.

Hi Diane

Don't worry about asking your hosting company I will let you know exactly what  you need to do, although likely to be tomorrow morning now

Very best wishes

Trevor

Hi Diane Just away from computer at the moment but will reply later with how to do it. I'm assuming you're running on a unix server? Cheers Trevor

Hi Diane

Just looked at the OSE numbers and going with redirecting to the 'www' version will be the way to go as you have many more links pointing to that version.

In OSE if you type in http://www.in2town.co.uk then 'add URL' http://in2town.co.uk then 'Compare Metrics' you'll see the difference between the two.

Very best wishes

Hi Diane

Looks like you need to set a canonical version for your site.

Importantly before deciding on either http://in2town.co.uk or http://www.in2town.co.uk you need to check if one or other has many more links or one has more authoritative links as redirecting will reduce the link juice passed.

You can set the canonical version in the .htaccess file on your site and also as a preference in Google Webmaster Tools.

If you let us know what server your site works on we can better advise you.

Very best wishes

Trevor

I'd 2nd Dan's response with Screaming Frog. Been using it for a number of months now and love how easy it is to use. I have the pro version which gives you the option to limit crawl depth and what it crawls etc but the free one is great too.

Hi Keri

Thanks for the thumbs up

Must be a lot of people out there with the same question; the post on this topic, on my site, gets a lot of visitors.

Thanks again.

Hi John

Thank you for your reply. It's kind of what I was thinking - if it feels grey or iffy....it probably is!

The reasoning was that it is a custom system with a list of car manufacturers, with outbound links to their websites. That's 34 external links on every page.

The client didn't develop the system so I'm trying to work with it and optimise as best I can, without needing them to incur development costs.

Thanks again for your reply.

Trevor

Hi mozzers

Just looking for opinions/answers on if it is ever appropriate to use obfuscated Javascript on links when a page has many links but they need to be there for usability?

It seems grey/black hat to me as it shows users something different to Google (alarm bells are sounding already!) BUT if the page has many links it's losing juice which could be saved.......

Any thoughts appreciated, thanks.

Hi Thanks for the reply. I think you may be getting confused with textlinkbrokers. We're talking about getting content written by textbrokers! Totally agree with not buying links. Wouldn't dream of it. Best wishes Trevor

Hi Joseph, thanks for that. Definitely would be looking at the top level for quality but that is still pretty cheap! Not looking to spend more than I have to but want quality.

Thanks again.

Hi mozzers

Just looking for opinions on textbroker.com. They seem very affordable so thinking that post panda this level may not be good enough.....so any experiences shared would be appreciated.

Thanks

I can confirm that Raven would be perfect for this. You can monitor changes in anchor text, destination url, follow status and changes in DA and PA as well. You can upload a csv file too.

Thanks Kieran

Hi Kieran

Thanks for the reply. My question, rather badly worded perhaps, was whether it's normal for a new site to be ranked much higher (in this case page 1) in Bing and Yahoo but much lower (this case page 7) in Google.

Thanks again.

Cheers

Trevor

Hi just wondered what other people's experience is with a new domain.

Basically have a client with a domain registered end of May this year, so less than 3 months old!

The site ranks for his keyword choice (not very competitive), which is in the domain name. For me I'm not at all surprised with Google's low ranking after such a short period but quite surprsied to see it ranking page 1 on Bing and Yahoo.

No seo work has been done yet and there are no inbound links.

Anyone else have experience of this? Should I be surprised or is that normal in the other two search engines?

Thanks in advance

Trevor

Hi Frank

As Michael and Simon have said the SEOmoz on page tool is great for this.

In terms of getting good recommendations for how to optimise you just need to look at the 'Factor Overview' and then go through each of the factors in 'Page Analysis Detail', click 'more' and it explains what is best practice there.

I really don't think you need any other software or tools for on-page optimisation although as suggested there are some for Wordpress but unfortunately I don't know any for the two you mentioned.

If, as you say, you get grade A but you're on page 3 of the serps then your on-page seo is good but perhaps the competition is stronger off-page and that is the area that needs the attention?

How do your domain and page metrics compare to the competition? Have you tried the keyword difficulty tool which is fantastic:

Keyword Difficulty Tool

Run that for your keyword and then run a full serps report to see the competition level?

Let us know how you get on.

Cheers

Trevor

Hi Paul, no problem at all. As Ryan says, we all like a mystery.

As for the canonicals they can have a big effect if all variations of the domain are present. i.e.

• www.mydomain.com
• mydomain.com/
• www.mydomain.com/index.php
• mydomain.com/index.php

etc

Not only are these duplicate pages they will most likely split up any inbound link juice as you can see from the PA of the pages you mention. Go to the http:// version and the http://www and you'll see the problem!

Using <link rel="canonical" href="<a href="http://www.vibralogix.com/">http://www.mydomain.com/" /> would probably be sufficient, and should be included, but I think it's best to have the canonicals redirected properly in the htaccess.</link rel="canonical" href="<a>

Very best wishes

Trevor

Hi guys

Not sure if I can get mozpoints for answering my own question - perhaps someone can thumb it up

Anyway below is the .htaccess code that seems to work for canonicalization and allowing POST:

http:// to http://www.

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

REDIRECT /folder/index.php to /folder/

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET.index.php\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^(([^/]+/))index.php$ http://www.mydomainexample.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Cheers

Yep those PAs are strong even without canonicalization. Let's hope for Paul's sake that the site doesn't get an seo audit anytime soon!

Hi Ryan I noticed that the site has a canonical issue with both an http and www version too. Nice and thorough analysis, really interesting regarding the flag. Now I'm back home I might just have to take a look....although really should think about getting some shut eye here in blighty

Hi Paul

Wow! To me that just looks so spammy and over-optimised. I would think that the SE's would think the same too but as you say the urls rank #1.

What are the other metrics like for the site, perhaps they may show the reasons for high rankings?

Update: Just taken a quick look and it does seem the domain is quite strong with a DA 60. Having said that they have a canonical issue which,, if they sorted may make them even stronger.....so keep that quiet!

Hi guys

I'm after some help with trying to achieve the following:

1. Canonicalise to http://www.

2. Remove the index.php from root and subfolders.

I have the .htaccess code below, which seemed to work fine, but the urls use the POST method and this isn't working with the rewrites.

Can anyone please advise as to what I am doing wrong? As you can probably guess .htaccess isn't my strongest SEO discipline!

The code I have is:

http:// to http://www.

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

/index.php to /

Options +FollowSymLinks
DirectoryIndex index.php

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index.php\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index.php$ http://www.mydomainexample.com/ [R=301,L]

Subdirectory /index.php to /

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]+\ /([^/]+/)index.(php|html|htm?)[#?]?
RewriteRule ^(([^/]+/))index.(php|html|htm?)$ http://www.mydomainexample.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Just to add to this I have found this which I think is what I need to restrict it to GET:

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET.*index\.php [NC]RewriteRule (.*?)index\.php/*(.*) /$1$2 [R=301,L]

Thank you in advance for any suggestions as to how I may put this code together..

Trevor

Hi Ryan (x2)

Looked at that faqme system and thanks for the tip but would have to agree that faqme looks very seo unfriendly.

We've found a couple which we're looking at and I will update with the 'chosen one' soon.

Thanks again guys for your help.

Trevor

Hi Ennovation Thanks for link - site looks nice. I will chat with my client and see if that could be a better option for them. Thanks again. Trevor

Hi Ennovation Thanks I'll take a look at zend.

Hi Ryan

Thanks for your reply.

Just been looking at knowledgebase-script which seems to offer all that is required as the client is looking for a 'ready to go' kind of solution rather than add on cms like wp - which would be cheaper but require more work to set up.

Any experience with this or similar packages?

Thanks again for taking the time to reply, it's appreciated.

Trevor

Hi I am looking for an FAQ system that is seo friendly, naturally , so wondered what other people use or would recommend for a website that's isn't using a cms like wordpress etc.

Basically looking to add the question as the title and the answer as the page content to get the pages indexed.

Thanks in advance.

Trevor

Hi Adam Yes, I replied too quickly before putting my brain in gear! Will sift through the data and take a closer look. Thanks again

Hi Adam

Thanks for the prompt reply. Yes, I agree that such a large difference I assume must be down to Google filtering out link juice from large amounts of links as I can't think of any other reasons.

The site has 40k links from 140 root domains and I'm not aware of any prior linkbuilding except a natural one over the years.

Will be checking out the link profile anyway so will be looking for anything dodgy!

Thanks again

Hi seomozzers

I have a question regarding metrics on a site I am looking at. Basically the homepage has the following:

DA 33, PA41

mR 5.09, mT 5.84

PR 1

I have also checked an internal page and that has similar mozrank and moztrust and PA 37 but has PR 0.

Can anyone shed any light on the possible reasons (other than a Google penalty) why there should be such a difference between PR and mR as I understood that in general the difference is more likely to be 0.5 to 1. As I do not believe that the site has had any 'help' from black hat tactics and is 9 years old I'm a little perplexed.

Anyone else experience such a discrepancy?

Thanks in advance.

Trevor