Welcome to the Q&A Forum

About two weeks back I set up a new website called www.gamsatsamplequestions.co.uk.  It's a blog where, once a day, I post a set of verbal comprehension-style questions to help students prepare for the GAMSAT (the graduate entry to medicine exam used by universities in UK, Ireland and Australia.)

Along with rising traffic, I've recently started to receive spam comments. Before going ahead and activating Akismet or some other spam-blocking app I thought I might have a bit of fun with them..

I took my favourite spam comment (one allegedly about SEO) and wrote up some questions to turn it into a sample GAMSAT reading comprehension

It's not the most efficient way of moderating spam comments, and my not-so-subtle bitter rantings are unlikely to deter any future spammers, but I nonetheless had a little bit of fun doing it..

So, my question is, has anybody else experimented with interesting or unique ways of dealing with comment spam?

E.g. created a directory of all the people who spam commented you / donated their email addresses to hordes of email marketers / replied with a kindly worded email expressing concern for their well being..

Has anyone stumbled upon anything more fun/efficient than the akismet-style plugins?

Hi,

Duplicate meta descriptions are not a MAJOR seo issue, but it's likely to negatively effect your click through rate from the SERPs.

The quickest way, I've found, to fix the problem is to orient your content management system to automatically generate a meta description for each blog post by lifting lines out of the main text of the article.

You won't get any referral traffic but Forum profile links (the dofollow ones) do pass link juice. Not much, but some.

Although I wouldn't trust mass-outsourcing services, in my experience forum profile links can be used as supplementary to content-based strategies without any risk of penalty.

Hey Julian,

Can you link us the competitor's website? Maybe some of the pages that are ranking in place 1? Would need to have a look at them to be able to say with any kind of certainty.

Something to bear in mind though, if Open Site Explorer says their PA and DA is 1 and they have 0 linking domains, then OSE has not crawled their site yet. If you were using OSE only then they probably have far more links than you are seeing.

There's a Whiteboard Friday from a few years ago in which Rand talks about a couple of different tactics for dealing with this problem.

Another tactic he doesn't mention would be to remove most of the links from your linkbait pages, leaving only links to your money pages. This way a higher proportion of the 'link juice' will be directed to your money pages, rather than spread all over your domain.

Though not on your list, I would go with Perth Hotels. It has the best ratio of Keyword Difficulty to Exact Local Monthly Search Volume.

Keyword difficulty score 60 with 4,400 Exact Local Monthly Searches, according to the SEOmoz tool on Google.com.au.

I was thinking about this a bit myself recently.. I can see a few advantages to both options.

Advantages of the all in one approach:

Inbound links you get will benefit all your blogs.

If you get a link to a post about brewing beer, then a certain amount of the juice will be passed around the domain which will contribute towards ranking the rest of your content. Over time, as links amass, the DA of this all-in-one blog will be higher than that of the individual blog sites.

I'm not sure how you do it, but I would also find one site far easier to manage than juggling 5 or so of them.

Advantages of having separate domains:

All other things equal, then right off the bat **www.BRANDbicyclemaintenance.com will outrank **www.BRAND.com/bicycle-maintenance. ****The exact match domain and consistency of hyperlink anchor text within the site is likely to give you a headstart in the SERPs over the all-in-one domain.

If it was me I'd go with the all-in-one, on the basis that inbound links are harder to get than exact-match-domains - which you can always buy later. That said, I'd be really interested to hear from anyone with more experience doing this.

Linking back to them could potentially damage your rankings.

Many link-exchange setups also double as link-sellers, and most are not exactly subtle about it.  As a result of this they can potentially become blacklisted by Google.

There's no way to definitively say whether or not a site has been blacklisted by Google, but if those sites have been blacklisted and then you link to them, you can get penalised. A hyperlink is like saying you endorse these guys.

Check to make sure they are not obviously selling links or doing anything really bad before you link to them. I learned all this the hard way myself

I'm not sure if 'nofollowing' your reciprocal link will protect you from penalisation. I have never tried that myself

Only as soon as you've found another way to solve the problem that the 301s were the solution to.

hey no problem. Sounds like it's just gonna be a matter of beating those guys then.

They may have lots of rubbish links, but, chances are, these links are not the reason they are beating you. Even blog comment-spammers will occasionally stumble across a gold mine. Under all the messy links they probably have a handful of good ones that are doing all the work. 80/20 and all that.

This might be a slightly ridiculous suggestion - but try to look at everything they have as content.

Do they have a website? yes. Is it maybe good enough to submit to web design galleries.

Do they have a logo? Logo design galleries.

Is their workspace or office nice or creative in any way? Google cool office workspaces and have a scout around for a workspace appreciation website. If you can think of it, there's probably a website for it.

Where your clients are lacking in creative resources you need to pick up the slack!

Hi Dan,

1. mR means MozRank - This is a number between 1-10 which refers to the popularity/power of the links to the site. It is calculated in a similar way to Googles PageRank

2. mT means MozTrust - This is, again, provided as a number between 1-10. It refers to the distance your subdomain is from a trusted domain. For example, how many link 'hops' are you away from a site like About.com (or any other big, trusted brand name). How sure is Google that you are not a spam website? The higher the score, the better.

3. The scores are on a logarithmic scale. Not gonna lie, logarithms confuse the heck outta me, and your best bet is probably googling 'what is a logarithm'

4. The closer the scores are to 10, the better. 8.7 mT or mR, for example would be a highly trusted domain. If you've got sites with scores like that you're probably doing quite well. A score of 1 represents a site with no links or authority or anything, so you can judge in your head the value from there.

Hope that answers your question.

http://www.copyscape.com/

Is this the kinda tool your were thinking of?

Define "best"

Are you looking for 1) the most cost-efficient way to get your numbers artificially up and make your site look more attractive to advertisers?

Or  2) A company that sells qualified, useful visitors who may be in some way interested in what you have to sell?

(2 doesn't actually exist)

Also, apart from a couple of experiments posted on SEOmoz, I don't know of anybody that has managed to raise their SERP rankings through traffic spikes for more than a day or two.

Only as soon as you've found another way to solve the problem that the 301s were the solution to.

Sure no probs!

A domain is basically a website. A subdomain is a domain which is part of another larger domain.

So for example you've got the domain yahoo.com and subdomain search.yahoo.com. They're websites in themselves but the they're interconnected.  MozTrust etc refers to subdomains because it's a more specific answer than referring to domains (which may have multiple subdomains on them)

As I understand it, yes it does.

If you check out the 2011 search engine ranking factors you'll see it's estimated that about 11% of the metrics Google uses to rank pages are related to domain-wide keyword usage. This suggests that, to a limited extent, text used on any page on the domain can be used to determine the subject of the domain's pages.

Also, text in the title of the homepage could negatively effect other pages in incidents of 'keyword cannibalisation'. For example, if you're trying to get a landing page to rank for 'free range eggs' and your homepage title is also 'free range eggs' then you're sending a mixed message to Google about the subject of your pages.

Hey

1. Go to your analytics dashboard
2. Add new profile, name it "exclude indian traffic" or something you will remember
3. Then go into Filter Manager and create a new, custom filter
4. In filter type select 'exclude'
5. Now select the Visitor Country option in the Filter Field.
6. Type in India (make sure it's not case sensitive)
7. Now activate that filter on the profile named "exclude indian traffic", and wait for your new traffic to roll in.

The filters don't work retrospectively, so they will only apply to traffic from the moment you activate them.

Hey,

Google doesn't rank domains, it ranks pages. Domain Authority is kind of like an average of the authority of all your individual pages. A high domain authority score is only relevant in so far as it suggests you have a lot of authoritative (rich in link juice) individual pages - which, I would assume, are linking to this new page.

A link to your wider domain will not be as valuable as a link directly to the page you want to rank. You'll still get the 'link juice' but it will be diluted because it first has to pass from the page that received the link across the other pages on your site and to your new landing page.

There's unfortunately no quick-fix formula you can use to determine how Google values a page based solely on the number of links present - there's just too many other factors to consider.. quality of links, context, anchor text, CTR, social signals etc etc..

.. I think I may be rambling a bit now cos it's late but I hope that helps a bit.

Linking back to them could potentially damage your rankings.

Many link-exchange setups also double as link-sellers, and most are not exactly subtle about it.  As a result of this they can potentially become blacklisted by Google.

There's no way to definitively say whether or not a site has been blacklisted by Google, but if those sites have been blacklisted and then you link to them, you can get penalised. A hyperlink is like saying you endorse these guys.

Check to make sure they are not obviously selling links or doing anything really bad before you link to them. I learned all this the hard way myself

I'm not sure if 'nofollowing' your reciprocal link will protect you from penalisation. I have never tried that myself