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  • Hello, I have a client who is waivering between switching to an open source shopping platform such as Magento, or choosing a "more SEO Friendly" cart such as BigCommerce.I would love to get an opinion. They would like to control the data (open source) but existing platforms dont necessarily support some SEO efforts, opinions and wisdom welcome. Thanks!

    Technical SEO | | Giggy
    0

  • I know we should be careful of suspicious links, and that google may davalue them or even penalize, especiallysince the latest update. It seems though, however it really hasnt caught up to alot of them yet. And alot of competition is still benefitting from what seems like all garbage links in their backlink profile So could someone give their opinion about links form pages like this, assuming it is a mix of this along with other  "better" types of links? http://www.bmxplusmag.com/index.php/member/4817/ See the bio at the bottom. "At least" it is within copy, and only one link to the page? (Please do not reply with a simple "be careful" message) Also, does anyone have any update, on the benefit of TextLinkAds, since the recent algo update? Thanks Sam

    Link Building | | Impact-201555
    0

  • I am working with a friend on optimizing a site that has a troublesome set of issues. The company has integrated some ERP system that cannot be changed or removed and it is creating goofy URL's. So my question is which URL do I build links to? the www.xxx.com or the crazy URL that it is being redirected to. Site URL: www.nauticalchartsonline.com
    redirect: http://www.nauticalchartsonline.com/n.c/NauticalChartsOnline.html I would greatly appreciate constructive feedback.. Thanks, Jeannie

    Link Building | | Boogily
    0

  • HTML5 is supposed to revolutionize the way browsers, web clients and services are supposed to "understand" information on the web. I have been planning on converting my site to HTML5 ever since it went into a working draft last spring, however I wanted to know if upgrading to HTML5 would offer any SEO benefits or if it would actually have a negative effect on how my site is perceived on the web. I guess my real question here is "Do search engines recognize HTML5 sectioning?" Is content found in semantic sections like <header>, <footer>, <nav>, <aside>, treated any different than content inside generic HTML4 containers like, or ? </aside> </nav> </footer> </header>

    Web Design | | TahoeMountain40
    0

  • I understand that good link building is all about the quality of the link / the anchor text attached to it. But, what about frequency? Should I build until I can't build anymore? or create a plan to submit links to a certain # of sites per week/month?

    Link Building | | pricefutures
    0

  • My client site has a good one-way link from an authority site (in this case a member directory within the industry association). In order to use some data from the industry association on my client's site, the association has requested a link back to their site. Recognising that this will weaken the value of the one-way link, would it be make sense to no-follow the return link? But is there value in linking out to an authority site? What recommendations do you have for this situation? Thanks

    Link Building | | bjalc2011
    0

  • Hey guys, I just wanted to follow up on Rand's excellent whiteboard Friday: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/preventing-linkbased-penalties-whiteboard-friday It got me worried I think, but I'm not sure. We have a site where we are building up links in 2 ways: We have an affiliate set-up. A search widget in an i-frame, and below the i-frame a followed link pointing to the relevant page.
    The anchor text varies for each affiliate depending which region the affiliate comes from. We have awarded about 500 of our partners with trophies - i.e. - this partner has best reviews or most sales etc. Our partners are absolutely loving it.
    The trophy is an image link which they can embed on their website, with alt text only mentioning our brand - that was an oversight ( I think). I wish the alt had been dynamically generated for each partner.
    The trophies link to our partner pages.
    So we are getting many links to our deeper pages, which is great.
    The links I believe are relevant as they are coming from our partners websites and pointing to their relevant partner page on our website. So burning question is. Would you consider these links dodgy given Rands recent whiteboard friday post, and the recent farmer algorithm change? Many thanks, Croozie

    Link Building | | sichristie
    0

  • what is the best strategy for a good mesh inner portion or inheritance of PR to deep pages of a site, such as a real estate site that includes many dynamic URLs following the attendance lists of ads including photos ds property.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fares-ajroud
    0

  • I'm almost sure there is an article on SEOmoz explaining how to get good traffic estimates by running an adwords campaign but after an hour of research I still can't find it. Some help would be much appreciated. Thanks a lot.

    Keyword Research | | EndeR-
    0

  • Hi,
    do you think that the use of a single 1.8Mb background image sitewide could have a big negative impact and make a website disappear from SERPS? thank you

    On-Page Optimization | | GianniCuccu
    0

  • HI all, I've found myself in a puzzling position and not quite sure which direction to push my current SEO project so if anyone who's done this particular type of SEO can offer some suggestions I'd be eternaly grateful. I am currently working on a project for a Law Firm based in New Jersey.  Lets say the town they are in is Garfield.  What I really want to try and achieve is see them appearing in the number one spot whenever anyone within Garfield or the immediate area searches for a lawyer relating to the individuals need.  E..g searches like "personal injury lawyers", "real estate lawyer". The problem is I can see how I can easily make it to the number one position if people are specific and enter garfield in the search term but in reality they wouldn't be doing that. An additional problem is that peoples ISP's in garfield aren't located in Garfield, in some cases they're as far away as Newark so when they're doing a search for 'real estate lawyer' google is bringing up results for the Newark based firms. It seems using tools like market samurai to look at the traffic and competition is proving useless as searches like the ones I'm doing for local business are so closely tied to the ISP location I don't really know whether to target broad range searches like "Real Estate Lawyer", or to be really specific and include the town name in my page titles, H1 tags etc... I hope I put across my dilemma and someone can help me chose which direction to go in.. Thanks

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | davebrown1975
    0

  • Hello Does the Google traffic estimator include the impact of instant? For example, if I type the phrase "London restaurant", instant may provide a list of search results for the phrase "London restaurant guide" prior to me confirming whether or not I just want to search using the phrase "London restaurant". Is this registered in any way as a search for the phrase "London restaurant guide" (i.e. does Instant impact upon the search volumes presented in the Google traffic estimator)? In addition, is there any up to date assessment on how reliable the revised traffic estimator is? The tool currently suggests that for a well known brand we are working for does not have any search volume (over a whole year) for the brand keyphrase when used in isolation (there is traffic for various combinations of the brand and a generic term). However, as one would expect, our analytics data is showing that there are in excess of 1 million annual visitors that use the brand keyphrase in isolation to access the website via natural search and nearly 1.5 million via PPC. Is anyone else getting these problems? Thanks in advance for any assistance. Rgds Neil

    Keyword Research | | mccormackmorrison
    1

  • We have made modifications to the URL structure for a particular client who publishes news articles in various niche industries. In line with SEO best practice we removed the article ID from the URL - an example is below: http://www.website.com/news/123/news-article-title
    http://www.website.com/news/read/news-article-title Since this has been done we have noticed a decline in traffic volumes (we have not as yet assessed the impact on number of pages indexed). Google have suggested that we need to include unique numerical IDs in the URL somewhere to aid spidering. Firstly, is this policy for news submissions? Secondly (if the previous answer is yes), is this to overcome the obvious issue with the velocity and trend based nature of news submissions resulting in false duplicate URL/ title tag violations? Thirdly, do you have any advice on the way to go? Thanks P.S. One final one (you can count this as two question credits if required), is it possible to check the volume of pages indexed at various points in the past i.e. if you think that the number of pages being indexed may have declined, is there any way of confirming this after the event? Thanks again! Neil

    Technical SEO | | mccormackmorrison
    0

  • Why is blocking the SEOmoz crawler considered a red "error?" Please see attached image... Y3Vay.png

    Moz Pro | | vkernel
    0

  • Hey guys, What a headache i've been going through the last few days trying to make sure my upcoming move is near-perfect. Right now all my urls are written like this /page-name (all lowercase, exact, no forward slash at end). In the new CMS they will be written like this: /Page-Name/ (with the forward slash at the end). When I generate an XML sitemap in the new ecomm CMS internally it lists the category pages with a forward slash at the end, just like they show up through out the CMS. This seems sloppy to me, but I have no control over it. Is this OK for SEO? I'm worried my PR 4, well built ecommerce website is going to lose value to small (but potentially large) errors like this. If this is indeed not good practice, is there a resource about not using the forward slash at the end of URLS in sitemaps i  can present to the community at the platform? They are usually real quick to make fixes if something is not up to standards. Thanks in advance, -First Time Ecommerce Platform Transition Guy

    Technical SEO | | Hyrule
    0

  • While I'm not a subscriber to the "if you write it, links will come" mantra, there is no doubt that developing link-enticing content is a large component to effective SEO. I have experimented with "Top X Lists", interviews, how-to's, free guide downloads, and other education-based content themes for link acquisition. What content themes have you found to be the most effective link magnets?

    Link Building | | Gyi
    0

  • I'm curious if anyone here running a large, complex, dynamic site has used the Apache server mod_rewrite module  to simplify their site's URLs by rewriting them in a standard format. The chief use of this module for SEO purposes would be to aid in canonicalization and reduce duplicate content.  For example, you could easily convert all of you ALL CAPS or MixedCase URLs to lower case, change all "/index.html" URLs to just point to "/", change all word seperators to hyphens, and so on. Any server-side ninjas out there with stories to tell?  🙂

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jcolman
    0

  • Anyone else buildling their website using Ruby on Rails? If so, are you also using any memcaching? Do you have any tips on memcached concepts, tricks, caveats, and experiences. How are you also doing SEO, any tricks for generating traffic and some Google love?

    Web Design | | Goetzman
    0

  • Any well known SEO/SEM events in the midwest?

    Industry Events | | Goetzman
    0

  • Hey Guys, I created a facebook fan page and I created a twitter account. I'm following about 175 people on twitter and 30 people returned the follow. Now what? How can I keep building? Any tools to help me? if you wanna analyze: http://twitter.com/culinitweets

    Social Media | | Goetzman
    0

  • Say a business runs out of a home (so, technically, the address of the business has a land line). But the business owner works outdoors all day long and so really runs his business off his cell phone. Is it OK in Google Places to list the mobile phone as the primary contant number, and list the home phone as a secondary number? Or will Google penalize the business's ranking in local search results for using a cell number as the main number?

    Image & Video Optimization | | keethgee
    0

  • hi, i have way to many 302 redirects, how can i bulk change these to 301 i have started in cpanel but i could be old by the time i finsih

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | freedomelectronics
    1

  • We have an ecommerce site retailing relatively high value products - precious metals - We have a VeriSign SSL certificate for the domain...  Weighing up the advantages of pointing all visitors through https on the domain, there is a benefit of customer confidence, but from a search engine - say Google's point of view, will delivering the site over https have any trust factor or benefits?

    Search Behavior | | digitalarts
    0

  • I just ran our first SEOMoz pro report and it's showing that every article page on our site is missing descriptions. However, it's visible on the source and Google seems to be picking them up. 
    Can you please tell me why SEOMoz is makring them as missing? Are we doing something wrong here? http://notebooks.com

    Moz Pro | | notebooks
    0

  • Over the last month, our rankings have been in a slow slide - that is until this week, when they absolutely crashed. Here are some example phrases: Phrase 11-Mar 5-Mar bug shields 24 9
    floor mats 25 14
    nerf bars 23 12
    running boards 61 14
    snow plows 25 18 For the life of me, I can't see what would have caused such drastic changes. Our site is almost completely unique content. Some things, like Warranty & Install instructions, are from the manufacturer to protect us from liabilities. We come up with our own feature text, and we have custom written articles, blog posts, research guides, etc. We also appear to be the only one of our competitors being affected in this fashion. Any thoughts would be helpful. Domain is realtruck.com.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ShawnHerrick
    0

  • It seems like a lot of our competators are getting lots of link juice from fake/spammy looking articles on squido.  Is it worth the effort to make these articles and add links to them, or is google smarter than that? Example here: http://www.squidoo.com/selfstoragesmyrnatn links to: www.migsonstorage.com who seems to be doing pretty good according to OSE with a PA of 63 and a DA of 56

    Link Building | | adriandg
    0

  • I need to track global keywords rankings for a web based product. Only being able to add three search engines to a campaign is limiting. I need to track at least 5 regional versions of Google, and curently have to duplicate my campaign to do this. would prefer to keep it under one campaign.

    Moz Pro | | Vend
    0

  • I recently asked a question about viewing the questions I have answered already: http://www.seomoz.org/q/where-can-i-view-all-of-the-questions-that-i-have-answered It turns out the link was right under my nose (but it appears a lot of people were having this issue). I'm now having the problem of not being able to see where I can view all the Q&As that I have subscribed to. Again, I may just be missing a link that's right in front of me but it certainly isn't obvious. Any help much appreciated!

    Moz Pro | | NickPateman81
    0

  • What does youtube consider duplicated content? If I have a power point type video that I already have on youtube and I want to change the beginning and end call to action, would that be considered duplicate content? If yes then how would this effect my ranking/youtube page. Will it make a difference if I have it embedded on my blog?

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | christinarule
    0

  • I have a website that requires the site structure to be changed.  The website doesnt have many backlnks and rankings are fairly low.  I have 11,000 products on the website and want to know the best way to change the site structure without causing 404 errors all over the place.  Do I 301 redirect every page? drop all 11,000 pages from the index by adding a no follow no index to all pages? I have the following structure www.domain.co.uk/make/model/part/product I want to change this to www.domain.co.uk/Part/make/model/product whats the best way to preserve the SEO, link juice and on a large scale? 11,000 pages. thank you shivun

    Technical SEO | | seohive-222720
    0

  • We operate a Google Adwords campaign that clearly performs better conversion wise on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesdays ... What is the best way to stack a higher daily budget on specifc days in Adwords - There doesn't appear to be any formal way of doing this and the advice online is mixed...

    Paid Search Marketing | | digitalarts
    0

  • As I do a lot of keyword research for my clients, I've found the SEOmoz Keyword Difficulty tool a great way to dig deeper in the competitive data for important keywords, whenever I am at the point of choosing between a smaller number of keywords. However, in some cases I would rather have a quick idea of how competitive a large list of keywords is (for example 1000+). As the Keyword Difficulty tool has a limit of 5 per run and 300 per day, I am looking for a technique or tool to run a list of keywords and get an idea of competitiveness for each keyword. Thanks for any suggestions!

    Keyword Research | | DeptAgency
    0

  • I have been limping along doing link building myself for several months now. Creating relationships, asking for links, writing some articles and press. So far, decent results, but I need to take it to another level. I used SubmitEdge's 400 manual directory submission product, but still not seeing many links coming from it. So, I would like to hire an onshore SEO to help me with link building. After getting several quotes from reputable companies, I found the process very frustrating. I know this business is not about guarentees, but they all want $600-$1000 per month for a fairly open ended service. All they tell me is that they will submit to directories, social media sites, shopping sites, and some niche sites. No guarentees of how many (or what quality) of links I'll get, or even how much time they even plan to spend. Any suggestions on what I should expect? and any suggestion companies?

    Link Building | | paddlej
    1

  • Hello, I have what a I think it's a noob question.. I have a medium size website and need to put it into maintenance for the next 2 months, and afterwards activate a completly new site. My client asked me to do this, cause the same people whoe run the constant flow of information on the site, are the ones who are going to develop the new site, so he wants to just close it out So... what are the steps for doing this with minimum impact on any SEO advances made this past months?.. How do I tell the search engines, Hey, just under maintenance for a while....then... i'm back in the game but this is my new structure. and the old one should go here

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daniel.alvarez
    0

  • I am having a hard time understanding why we are ranking so poorly for the keyword search "self storage toronto" on google.ca We have claimed our places page, and we have 38 citations and 9 reviews.  Yet for some reason we are burried 7 pages into the places pages results way below other places pages that have far lower page authority, domain authority, and less citations and reviews on their places page. I just can't understand what we are doing wrong / overlooking. Any ideas? Here's the places page i am referring too: http://maps.google.ca/maps/place?hl=en&ie=UTF8&q=storwell&fb=1&gl=ca&hq=storwell&cid=3009236871758088464&z=14 We do happen to land very high in the organic results for the same keyword, infact we are on the first page but why is google not giving us any love in places?

    Image & Video Optimization | | adriandg
    0

  • What is the best way to evaluate external links coming in to my site?  I have been working on trying to build links by commenting on blogs/forums and adding to directories, etc. I've run link reports through Open Site Explorer and Yahoo and they never seem to show the same links coming in. For example, i run link eport on Open Site Explorer and it will show links coming into my site that Yahoo doesn't show, and vice versa. I guess I'm trying to figure best way to monitor each week new links coming into my site to determine if my efforts are fruitful.  Also, is there a certain period of time that should pass from time I put my link on another site (ie, a blog) until it will show up in OPen Site Explorer? Thanks!  Oh, and I use the NoDoFollow Add-on for Firefox to only comment on those sites that do follow.  Not sure if that's really effective or not.

    Link Building | | leonenobleseate
    0

  • Dear SEOs, I know these facts: a) not more than 70 chars b) relevant to the page subject - probably best keyword at the beginning My problem - should I rebuild the current structure of my titles which is: Main Page keywords (in my case 4) | domain name - Main Page Sub-page - one click from main page keywords (again same 4) | domain name - Sub Page Name (or as you like  Category Name) Specific page with an article / content keywords (again same 4 as on any other) | domain name - category name - title of article same as used in tag To be more precise, should this title be changed for following pages: Sub Page - where really it's page that let's you chose particular subjects (there will be few article for each subjects) so should the keywords be changed to - "chose your category" Specific page with an article - should the category name - title of article be completely removed and first part of title which at the moment contains same 4 keywords used on main page be replaced with keywords specific for the content ? To be honest I find those titles at the moment bit confusing and sort of illogical. But since I can't really change anything in the code I would like to know what's the right way before I keep pressing on the programmer 🙂 Thanks.

    On-Page Optimization | | lolskizz
    0

  • If you create a list of links to top blogs in your industry but no-follow all the links, and they link to your list, will that count as a reciprical link or a one-way link by search engines?

    Link Building | | SparkplugDigital
    0

  • Recently, there has been considerable discussion and debate about the value of choosing keyword-rich and exact-match domains. In a recent webmaster Q&A, Matt Cutts seems to suggest that google is planning on "turning down the dial" on keyword domain signals: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAWFv43qubI How will these changes (if at all) impact your advice to clients on domain selection?

    Technical SEO | | Gyi
    0

  • In light of Google's recent "social search update", I am curious to know how many Google users perform searches while logged into their Google account thereby showing "social results".

    Algorithm Updates | | Gyi
    0

  • I have recently come across several bloggers that have been trying to formulate the best concise definition of SEO. What one sentence definitions have you used / seen? Avoid run-ons. Tweetable, even better.

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gyi
    0

  • Hello fellow SEOMozzers, For a long time I've been wondering what would give the most SEO benefits for a keyword based query between these : 1. A sitewide footer link on SiteA with keyword anchor text to SiteB homepage 2. A sitewide footer link on SiteA with brand name to SiteB homepage 3. A single link on SiteA homepage to SiteB homepage 4. An editorial page on SiteA about SiteB with links to homepage and deep pages Did someone ever did that kind of experiments?  Is anyone having better results with one kind of link strategy? Best regards,
    Guillaume Voyer.

    Link Building | | G-Force
    1

  • It seems pretty well-settled that massive reciprocal linking is not a very effective strategy, and in fact, may even lead to a penatly. However, I still see massive reciprocal linking (blog roll linking even massive resource page linking) still working all the time. I'm not looking to cast aspersion on any individual or company, but I work with legal websites and I see these strategies working almost universally. My question is why is this still working? Is it because most of the reciprocally linking sites are all legally relevant? Has Google just not "gotten around" to the legal sector (doubtful considering the money and volume of online legal segment)? I have posed this question at SEOmoz in the past and it was opined that massively linking blogs through blog rolls probably wouldn't send any flags to Google. So why is that it seems that everywhere I look, this strategy is basically dismissed as a complete waste of time if not harmful? How can there be such a discrepency between what leading SEOs agree to be "bad" and the simple fact that these strategies are working en masse over the period of at least 3 years?

    White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Gyi
    0

  • Let's suppose that I want to rank for the keyword "hotels". If I put this keyword in ALL of the link anchor texts then Google will very likely penalize the site. My question is: How many keyword variations should I use in anchors (provided I want to rank for just one KW i.e. "hotels")? Would one keyword variation be okay and is it fine to use main keyword in 80% anchors and the keyword variation(s) in just 20% anchor texts, such as : hotels 80% cheap hotels 20% Note: I do not want to rank for "cheap hotels", just want to use it as an anchor variation of my desired keyword "hotels". Thanks!

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RightDirection
    0

  • In Chrome, I'll start off not logged in to the toolbar. I'll click log in which forwards me to the SEOmoz login page. I'll login. Sometimes the toolbar will reflect this login and the metrics will poplulate in the PA and DA, other times it won't. If I navigate to another page within the same tab, it may show metrics still, but it is also just as likely to show that I'm not logged in. If I open a new tab, the toolbar will show that I'm not logged in. I click the log in again but when directed to SEOmoz, it'll show that I'm already logged in. I haven't been able to pinpoint exactly when it'll work and when it won't. Seems a bit random, so am wondering if anyone else has experienced this issue and has been able to solve this logged in / not logged in problem. As a note, anytime I navigate back to the SEOmoz site, whether by opening a new tab or a new window, the SEOmoz site does show I'm logged in, while the toolbar shows I'm not. You can see a demonstration of the simultaneous logged in SEOmoz site and logged out SEOmoz toolbar in the attached screen shot. UPDATE Also having similar issues in firefox. Am wondering if this has anything to do with the fact that I changed my email address within the past few weeks. KQXxN.gif

    Moz Pro | | gregalam
    0

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