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I do not have any experience with this company, BUT what really makes me listen up is that they GUARANTEE you to get into LA Times. I may lack a bit of knowledge here (hopefully not) but I believe that this most definitely means advertising / advertorials. Within a journalistic context I don't think they can guarantee you to get onto a site as they would have to bribe somebody to write stuff that he/she is probably not interested in. I have a partnership with a very big European PR company and even though one of Europe's most favourable skiing resorts is one of their clients they still do not get everything they write about that resort published, whether it is small or big magazines / sites. I'd be very suspicious about that point and ask them how exactly they manage to get you there...

If they come up with advertorials / advertising, I think you should be aware of that fact that Google doesn't like followed links within an advertising context. They most often see it as a bought link (which it is in fact) and ranking could go south for your page.

One method: Install JMeter on a remote machine in a VERY remote location and perform regular performance tests with it. Downside to this method: Values may not be exact as JMeter is not a browser but a site testing tool, so values may differ significantly from your browser experience. http://jakarta.apache.org/jmeter/

Another method: Webservices such as yottaa.com. They offer performance testing and monitoring. I think they also might be using a JMeter implementation, at least it sounds like it www.yottaa.com This may be the easiest solution, and I'd definitely give it a spin, but maybe you shouldn't rely on their data as your only source.

Third method: Build your own testing tool based on Googles PageSpeed SDK. http://code.google.com/p/page-speed/ That would be my favourite, but you need someone with coding experience

Sure, these were all rather advanced options (except for yottaa.com) but if you want to have reliable data you should take your time and use a proper tool.

For REALLY large sites: M$ Visio. For smaller to intermediate sites I use a mindmapping tool all the time. My favourite ones are:

• Mindmanager Pro
• XMind (free / OpenSource)
• iThoughtsHD (on my iPad, actually my favourite)

If I am not working digitally (which is kinda luring out those interesting ideas in the back of your head) I usually go with a large pile of paper. I write each menu item on its own sheet and lay them out across the floor, walking around those items and constantly improving the order of those. If you really want to get a good overview on what you are doing, this is the best method. Later capture your work with a digital camera and transfer it to a digital tool mentioned above Have fun!

Hi, just today Rand Fishkin released another Whiteboard Friday, which almost exactly tackles that topic. Okay the Whiteboard Friday is on Googles PageRank, but he almost certainly explains an awful lot on Seomoz' own ranking parameters and also tackles the question what a good domain authority and bad page authority meand. Definitely worth watching

http://itunes.apple.com/ch/podcast/whiteboard-friday/id411307102 (2011-08-12 PageRank.mov)

Sorry for the itunes link, but the podcast hasn't appeared on seomoz.org yet (sure it will a bit later..)

PS: In a nutshell: High domain authority is much more important, than high page authority. A good domain can give you much more "link juice" than a good article. Or as Rand says it in the vid: A link from an article on CNN with a low PageRank / page authority? Go grab that stuff! It is on CNN!!!! Hope that helped

As for the traffic: Most people don't manually enter a URL in their browser's adress bar anymore. They usually use Google to find / identify sites of interest. IMHO only a very small minority (tech geeks like me, etc. ) still use their adress bar. Whenever I talk to someone and mention the adress bar they think I was talking about the Google search bar on google.com. So you'd be only losing a small proportion of traffic. I remember that years ago when a company got a new domain they registered it in like 300 different kinds of spelling.. Still: Less than 2 % of total traffic was coming through those sites, as they were never properly advertised nor used. Here in Germany even Google has a problem with that. There's a guy, who owns gmail.de and sent a court order to Googleplex that they may not use gmail.com for German users but that they have to run their service via google.com/mail . I don't suspect Google Mail has gotten a lot les popular by that

Hi this one's tricky Your result most probably didn't show up in Google Analytics (GA) because the 301 is performed by your server BEFORE the GA tracking code is displayed. What I'd do for starters (very basic concept):

1. Create a HTML page on your "redirection URL" www.domain.com/ad1 that has the tracking code properly embedded (check with GA)

2. Have the page say something like "Taking you to your desired page" and have a meta refresh on that page. As you don't want that page to appear in SERPs I'd set that page to noindex aswell. This way using meta refresh doesn't matter

3. Make sure you have a link to the proper page on your redirection page, just in case the meta refresh isn't performed

4. Tada, that's it your page should show up in GA

If I come up with another solution this afternoon I'll add a post...

Totally agree with EGOL. Here's my 2 cents to that: Simply ASK your customers, what they want you to write about Start a mini-survey and let your customers openly discuss your content. Ask them if there's something particular that they don't like about your content. Also ask them on how often you should write something. Sometimes you'd be amazed to hear that your customers either want more or less from you.If users get what they want when they want it, they are more probable to retweet it

Even though that may not sound very new to you, it is most often neglected when creating content.

Totally agree with Ryan, but IMHO a link from a YT video could be seen as almost NO effect to PR.

Mike said it all. What could affect your SEO in a way, although only very slightly: Reciprocal links from both domains to the other domain. As they both reside on the same webspace, which is obviously on the same server, that has the very same IP-adress for both servers... they both sit on the same Class-C IP-network. Links from domains that reside on the same Class-C tend to not have the same impact as links from other Class-C networks. But as your linkbuilding shouldn't rely too much on two links you won't run into massive trouble here.

Totally agree with mike and john.

Basically that wouldn't affect anything, I do that myself all the time. But if I were the guy at Google, who has to manually reconsider your request to drop a penalty and I read "SEO company" in the footer section I wouldn't be too generous with your request. That is more or less a "psychological" factor, so I would rather call that link: Webdesign & Consulting: biggestleaf.

But that is no proven factor, just my 2 cents to how I think somebody at GooglePlex could react..

Something odd, that might or might not have decreased your rankings: Mentioning a SEO company in the footer section If I were you I'd remove that just to make sure, you don't arouse too much suspicion, whenever you file a Google WMT reconsideration request, as Ryan pointed out correctly.

Other than that I totally agree with Ryan and Bix.

I think that linking out with followed links is generally a good idea So, No you shouldn't.

Here's something from a previous SEOMOZ Whiteboard Friday, that you should maybe read / watch on that topic:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/33

How about having your developers script something, that scrapes all 18.000 h1, h2, h3 for each article and store them in a database. Finding dupes then would be a piece of cake, even for a less experienced developer You could easily export all your duplicates to csv and then manually rename them based on their content.

Dev time: about 1 day max. (Developed a lot of software myself and IMHO a good developer should get this up and running within 4 hours)

If you don't have toooooo many duplicate tags, correcting those in question shouldn't be taking too long aswell.

If you have done your chores you could reimport your corrected title-tags to the database. Your developer could write a script in the meantime, that sets the title-tag of a page according to the title-tag you stated in your database.

Hope that helped If you have further questions on this, just go ahead. Had a similar problem with 25k+ pages for a major health insurance and we figured out, that the best way to prevent problems was to do most of the work manually than with a script. Helped us a lot to stay within the budget and given timeframe.

Hi everyone,

During linkbuilding you often stumble upon those links you are not quite sure of. At first it may seem like a brilliant idea to get a link fom that site but on a second look it may be not.

So what would be a checklist of things to look for, if one is asessing a website's link quality? (e.g. how do you spot a bad neighborhood?)

If you are using SEOmoz tools for the quality asessment, which one would you use?

Looking forward to your answers! Thx for the help in advance!

Regards

Thorsten

I guess one thing that certainly helps is to take your time: Linkbuilding is all about creating relationships and so don't use a bulk mail tool to approach the people you want to give you a link. Remember that there's always people behind a website and try to be as polite as you would be in the offline world, if you were asking somebody for a favor.

It often helps to take your time and to do some research on WHO is operating this website. Personalize your e-mail and if you make them an offer, offer them something that you think fits their needs 100%. Don't offer them something that has nothing to do with their topics or target audience.

Yes linkbuilding is time consuming. But very rewarding in the same way. Think about your link partners as partners and not as websites giving you something. Establish a meaningful connection and get those links in no time