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Great to hear. Let me know if you have any question when you start that project.

Casey

Hey Danny,

I've always done 301 redirects from the server and avoided any other method. This was more for my sanity to make sure that I was getting all the equity I could if there was a difference, not saying there is a difference but if there way, I wanted to be safe. Since it sounds like you may be constrained by your technology, the solution you are going with is fine but if you had both options available, I'd go with the server side redirect always.

Hi Danny,

The Moz.com website/blog are running on PHP/Nginx. As Matthew said, Nginx is much faster and less intensive on the servers for both CPU and memory. Nginx has some great documentation and is really easy to get things to redirect. It's as easy as adding lines like the following to your configuration and your good to go:

rewrite ^/q$ /community/q permanent;
rewrite ^/q/(.*)$ /community/q/$1 permanent;

Making the switch from Apache to Nginx was one of the best things we ever did and I would highly suggest you do the same thing for both static and any dynamic sites you may have. I'll most likely never use Apache again.

Casey

After talking with our rep we found that it wasn't needed on all pages so we now only have it on our homepage.

Hi NicB1,

We use Amazon CloudFront here at SEOmoz and it allows us to setup a CNAME for our CDN. So if you look at our images you will see we use a few different ones, such as cdn.seomoz.org, profile1.seomoz.org and profile2.seomoz.org. While I haven't done any studies on this, I can tell you that we have not seen a major change in image traffic in making the CDN switch a few months ago.

I'd check with your CDN people and see if you can setup a CNAME and place it on a subdomain.

Casey

At SEOmoz we use Amazon CloudFront that allows us to setup a CName for our CDN. For example you will see that all our CDN images come from a few different subdomains, such as cdn.seomoz.org or profile1.seomoz.org. I bet your drop is coming from the ugly url that your CDN is providing. If your CDN allows you to create a clean CName I would do that and create  your CDN at cdn.vistastores.com.

Casey

We pull the numbers via javascript. If you check out posts.js when you are on the blog you can see where we make a call to Facebook and to Twitter to get those numbers. We also have hard coded the numbers at specific dates just in case it fails so there is a number present.

For the feedburner numbers we do those server side and ping the feedburner api and cache it. So there is one unlucky sole every hour that has to ping feedburner to recache the number.

Your correct that pages needs updating an in fact we have a new version rolling out in the next few weeks. As for the "premier" level access to the Site Intelligence API, this is for one of our old PRO levels call "premier". Currently we have 5 levels of PRO, they are PRO, PRO Plus, PRO Elite, PRO Agency, and PRO Enterprise. The PRO Premier level no longer exists which is why if you want access to the Site Intelligence API you need to pay for it separately from your PRO membership.

There is no benefit to having it on every page. In talking with our Google rep they stated they just needed on our site/homepage but since sometimes they don't know what they need, it was placed on every page via our CMS. At this point we haven't seen any negative effects from it but we might try placing it only on the homepage to see if that does anything.

Casey

Hi Lara,

You can still find your old questions at http://www.seomoz.org/qa/my.  Watch the blog tomorrow for some important info about the old QA section.  Let me know if you have any further questions.

Casey

Biggest secret that I have is to make great connections to people in the business.  I can't count the number of times I've run into a strange issue and it's great to be able to email someone you've meet with your question and get some expert feedback.  Not to mention sometimes they share their super secret SEO tricks and tips.

Hi BreadMan!

If your goal is to rank #1 for this particular keyword, using the domain name with the exact match you've just bought is the best way to go. Search engines definitely reward this, though you'll also need to do all of the right things from a content, branding, marketing and linking perspective, too. Since they know that exact match domains can be easily exploited, they're sensitive to spam/manipulation, particularly so in new sites. I'd urge you to:

• Build out the new domain - perhaps redirect old content from other sites if you own it and want it associated with this one
• Make the site look great - good design is a signal of quality and detracts from the perception of spam. You want the type of look that can make it into the CSS galleries and awards and earn you some nice links and traffic that way Consider the sites that are featured in places like these: http://www.google.com/search?q=css+gallery
• Get some remarkable content on it - via a blog, an articles section, research you fund/produce/share, viral content, etc. You want to earn those first few hundred links authentically, without resorting to classic "push" link building tactics
• Earn some press - press releases, interviews, mentions on news sites, etc. - these go a long way to building credibility
• Invest in social media - the more Twitter followers, tweets, Facebook fans, shares and likes you have, the better you'll do in the engines (and these signals now count directly, too)

You can redirect the site, but you'll get little to no benefit from the domain name exact match. If you already have a very strong site and you're just seeking to protect the name and maybe use it to redirect for offline branding, that's fine, but it won't be a positive SEO contribution unless there was good content/good links pointing to it previously. Best of luck!

There is no set amount of links that a site needs to be successful. I think you may have that 150 number confused with what we usually consider an acceptable amount of links ON a page. Not links pointing TO a page.

A good strategy might be to submit your site to a few directories a month, spend time working at creating partnerships (that might bring links), while also creating compelling content that people want to link to naturally.

If you're seeking link building ideas, I'd highly recommend reading through our linkbuilding category from the blog. Tons of great ideas there!

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/4

Hi Francesco,

The problem is that .uk.com is not a true TLD, like .uk.com, .com, or .org, it's actually a subdomain of the domain uk.com.  So those 24 million links you are seeing are for the domain uk.com and not your site.  The true TLD for the UK is .co.uk and not .uk.com.  So your website is really just a subdomain of a very big domain.  To get information for your site you will only be able to look at the subdomain information and not the root domain level.

Casey

Hi,

I definitely believe Google that these won't be treated as country-specific domains, and if I were offered a keyword.co versus a keyword.info domain, I'd most certainly go with the .co. I think that it will resonate with people due to being similar to what they're used to seeing. This, of course, has nothing to do with a technical advantage: we'd like to believe that a TLD doesn't mean much from the perspective of a search engine, although you do see .com keyword-rich domains ranking better than other TLDs with the same keyword, in a lot of cases. Again, you don't want to confuse cause and effect: does the .com really help, or are .com domains usually owned by people who put up better websites? Hard to say.

When big companies use a TLD, that certainly lends some credit to it, and I think the domains you've bought are good. I don't think you've wasted your money, especially if they were quite cheap!

I wouldn't spend too much time or money buying every .co. domain under the sun, but I do think they're a better investment than many other TLDs. I don't have any stories of big successes yet, and I'd go as far as to say that the TLD is a bit too new to know what its fate will be. I do, however, doubt it will become as highly spammed and disregarded as the much-maligned .info and .biz.

Hi Kicksetc - it's not quick and easy, but you can do some comparisons that will be helpful.

Basically, you'd want to build an Excel chart (or Google Spreadsheets / OpenOffice) that mimics the metrics that might go into local rankings. For example, see this post talking about all the potential ranking factors and how they correlate - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-places-seo-lessons-learned-from-rank-correlation-data

You could extract out those data points and compare them against each other for different queries to get a sense of how competitive/hard it might be to rank in the top results on a local/maps/places search.

Sorry there's nothing quick and simple. We're working in the long term to expand our KW Difficulty tool to perform analyses on local/places results, but it's going to be a while before we get there.

Best of luck!

Hi - I tested DCMI and hoped it would work many years ago, but it had no impact. I've talked to Googlers/Bing folks and heard them on stage say that they ignore all meta tags other than those specified - http://www.ninebyblue.com/blog/managing-robots-access-to-your-website-2/

In terms of microdata - there are rich snippets that Google now employs - http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=99170 but you'll need to get accepted/reviewed by their editorial staff to be included (and then send it in via your XML Sitemap).

Sorry to say that the engines haven't agreed on any new meta data since rel=canonical (and possibly AJAX crawling protocols), but neither Dublin Core nor anything else like it is in practice to the best of our knowledge.

If you run some tests and find something, please do let us know!

Hi Eyepaq,

SEOmoz using a CDN to host all of our images, though we set up a DNS change so they can be hosting on a third party server but listed at cdn.seomoz.org.  Doing what you are talking about shouldn't effect any of your "juice" if you are just using it to display your images using the img tag or via css.  You pdfs might be affected since you are using a <a href="">tag which tells Google you are linking to that file.  In the long run you will be much better off than anything you might lose by doing something like this.</a>

<a href="">Casey</a>

First, no, SEOmoz does not offer any automatic directory submission tools. We do offer this page as a service to our customers, and you may find it useful: http://www.seomoz.org/directories

Yooda does seem like a nice piece of software, though I can't say that I've used it.

I've also heard decent things about this one:

http://www.fastdirectorysubmitter.com/tutorials/73-fast-directory-submitter-video.html

For the most part I've found automatic submission tools to be pretty frustrating, and almost certainly never worth the money. I'd also be careful not to run wild with directory submissions, as Google could pretty easily detect spikes in backlinks from directories.

I hope that helps!

Hey Donnie,

I've used both CakePHP and WordPress to some degree, in fact SEOmoz's main site is built on CakePHP.  I'd say that for someone with limited coding knowledge, I'd send them to WordPress because of all the plugins.  If you have a good handle on PHP and like creating your own plugins then first up CakePHP.