Welcome to the Q&A Forum

This process may lend itself to PPC a bit more than SEO. When split testing you will need to be aware of duplicate content, and considering that your ultimate goal is to figure out which landing pages are more effective, you will end up removing some of the pages anyway. On a large scale this isn't going to be as effective.

I would consider running a PPC account to test these pages and not have them indexed. Then, once you have a landing page that performs well, create it on the site and promote it with SEO.

Hi Vince,

I would recommend authors byline for a few reasons:

1. link diversity - more domains linking
2. more natural - less likely to be placed around other paid links
3. less devaluation - generally the first link from a domain is the strongest, a blogroll link wouldn't give you the value of a link * 1,000 (or however many pages).
4. Build relationships through posting

Create good content and share it with people, you will benefit much more this way.

Ben

If your customers would find it useful I can't see it being too much of a problem. I like a small selection of links in the footer. Often customers will look in the footer for contact links and information.

If it's just for SEO and you are putting in some keyword links I would probably say avoid it.

Just checked how you have done it and I see what you mean - it's a bit tricky. One thing I noticed is that all that text is wrapped in a h1. I would take it out and put it in as standard content.

Also if you could take the text that is in your slideshow images and convert it to readable text that would provide you with a bit more relevant content on the site that may help.

Best of luck with it!

Hi Zack,

Have you recently changed the extensions on your URLs? e.g. removed .html

This could be one cause.

Ben

I understand where you're coming from, but I would personally spend as little time as possible focusing on the keywords tag. If there is any benefit to come from these directories it's going to be minute compared to the return from quality link building.

Competitors aren't going to be led astray by incorrect meta keywords, as most of the time you can tell what people are trying to target anyway.

I would say you need to have crawlable links from the initial landing page. Can you not create a page with links to the different sites rather than having a drop down box? You could then have text links for the search engines to crawl. Alternatively you could use a javascript drop down.

As long as the search engines can get past the initial page there should be no issues with them crawling the rest of the site.

I would also question how you are going to display the different versions of the site in terms of duplicate content. Are the different sites going to be hosted in different subfolders? e.g. www.domain.com/en and www.domain.com/us?

If they are going to be hosted like this I would strongly recommend considering your strategy for avoiding duplicate content across these sites.

Hi Richard,

My thoughts would initially be:

a) yes a 301 redirect is probably the best way to avoid the duplicated pages and pass the weight on

b) if you have 301 redirected them they won't be 404 errors, the weight of the previous URLs will be passed on (although there is a slight decay factor involved with redirects so you won't get 100% of the weight)

c) I can't see how there will be too many errors as long as you 301 small.com to big.com sitewide. If anything big.com should get a boost from any links that the small.com pages had. Also this should help clear up the duplicate content issues.

Hope that helps,

Ben

Hi Alan,

It's not as easy being hosted on windows. I would suggest a 301 redirect from this URL to the homepage through IIS and after having a quick look around there seems to be this guide. http://www.hpseo.co.uk/301-redirect-tutorial-iis/

Have a look see if that helps. You could also try adding the rel=canonical tag into the head pointing to the homepage to help the search engines determine the right one.

Have a look at this article for the differences http://www.seomoz.org/blog/301-redirect-or-relcanonical-which-one-should-you-use

Ben

Hi Walid,

I would personally eliminate A and B purely based on the fact that they aren't targeted enough. I would put the "Free dliver on $50 purchase" in the meta description to encourage the click through, but C seems the most concise and targeted out of all of them.

Plus I'm a big fan of the " | " symbol

There's been a bit of dicussion about this before and I seem to remember that using CSS to push content up the page actually had a slightly beneficial effect on rankings.

It's mainly going to be an issue if your content is really low down on the page due to things like intrusive banner ads or lots of adverts.

I meant the links themselves were fairly strong, not the total amount

There's a PR6 page linking to one of the sites which looks quite strong.

My advice would be to give it some time. OSE can take a while to update sometimes and when it does you will have a better overview of your link profile. You can then approach it with a bit more information.

Until then just keep on promoting!

In that case you will have all new URLs and the google toolbar won't be pulling off the data. This is why the homepage still has the PR as it hasn't changed.

It's just a case of waiting to get that back, you have done a redirect but it may take a while for these to be updated on the website. As the URL is different Google will still be waiting to update the toolbar.

I would personally not worry about it, at least you have the mozbar details.

Hope this helps,

Ben

Hi Guy,

I would question why you were looking to do this in the first place. Removing these links will not have a positive effect on the "weight" of the homepage, this is not quite how it works.

Basically all of the weight of the page will be divided by the amount of links on it. So if you remove links the these internal pages, you will not make the homepage stronger, you will make the remaining links stronger.

In the case of nofollow, this has the effect of vanishing linkjuice. If you no followed half of your existing links, the followed links would still pass on the same weight as they did before, but the no followed links will now pass on nothing, effectively halving the weight passed on by the homepage. This is not the scenario you want.

So in answer to your question, I wouldn't actually do either of these, unless there is a different reason for you having to make these changes?

Hope that helps.

Whenever I notice big fluctuations in rankings the first thing I do is note what changes I have made directly to site around the time of the change.

I also check for any recent algorithm changes to see if anything coincides with the drop.

There's an articles on the SEOmoz blog which you may want to look at:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/identifying-link-penalties-in-2012

I think Alice is right, it has the potential to become manipulated as with most link building methods. I have often considered whether it's even worth trying to avoid using the term "guest post" for this very reason.

If you are selective about which sites you post on you shouldn't worry too much. You will find targeting higher quality sites will not only improve the value of the link and the size of the audience, but it will also ensure you are creating top quality content which is worthy of being published.

Hi Atul,

As far as I am aware, Google will count all 50 of them, the only thing that changes is the way the PR is distributed. Even though you have nofollowed 20 of them, Google will still only pass on 1/50th of the PR to the followed links, meaning the PR that would have been sent to the nofollowed links vanishes.

This means that the page will only pass on 3/5ths of the PR it would have done if all the links were followed.

Hope this helps

Ah I see, if that's what you are wanting to do then yes there is benefit to removing links to unnecessary pages and putting these on a customer service tab.

I would also consider the effect this has on user experience, not just search engines. If those pages have useful information for customers then it is worth having them easily accessible.

Have you tried using a .htaccess file to redirect individual URLs and then a sitewide one for the others?

If it doesn't let you do this at the same time, redirect the individual pages first, wait until the SEs have picked up on the redirect and then redirect the rest of the site. I would have thought you should be able to do both at the same time though.

I would say this is not an issue, Google is able to see and match images, but I would assume that these only make up a very small percentage of the overall page which isn't going to set any duplication alarms ringing.

If you were worried you could always change alt text and filenames, but I really don't think this would be a major issue as long as all the text is unique.

I think if you were to do a "site:www. competitor.com" query in google it will bring up the list of indexed pages for that site, with the strongest ones generally appearing higher up the results. It may be worth having a look at this method also and combining the two methods.

Hi Peter,

I'd attempt some sort of export of both indexed URLs and actual URLs into an Excel file and try and remove duplicates.

You would need to look into it but I'm sure there's a way of matching and removing duplicates.

Other than that I wouldn't know.

Ben

It has the potential to go either way. You would really need to look at these links as a percentage of the overall backlink profile.

If 90% of the links have this in then it's probably going to look manipulative - on the other hand, they are going to be semi branded links if the company is called something like "superb web design" and these may be considered Brand links.

A good article to have a look at is one posted on search engine journal recently -

|

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/post-penguin-seo-link-building-the-naked-url-truth/

Also you would want to have a look at Open Site Explorer to see the diversity of anchor text to the site:

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/

Ben

|

Looks like it's to do with windows mail. Maybe people are being referred through links in an email?

You wouldn't be able to judge your sites rankings on this metric alone.

How long are the URLs? I would say this factor has a very small weighting when it comes to rankings. If you have a strong domain the search engines shouldn't have a problem with ranking it.

The main issue directly affecting rankings is diluting the keyword match in the URL. This article has a section on URL length which you will probably find helpful:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/should-i-change-my-urls-for-seo

Hi Dave,

I am personally against the idea of article spinning as a whole. It's strange to see the Market Samurai guys positioning this as a tactic. I would be interested in knowing if there are firms out there who do employ this tactic.

I myself am a fan of content creation, but I much prefer "real" websites as opposed to article directories and find that the entry level for these sites requires better content. This requires unique, higher quality content which really rules out the spinning side of things.

I tried spinning a couple of times and got very disappointing results, but if these guys are saying it is one of the most effective tactics it would be useful to hear a few more opinions. It can be quite dangerous when guys with that much weight suggest tactics like this if they aren't based on real results.

Ben

Hi Nick,

You're probably best looking around for some more detailed articles on different types of keyword research. It's a broad area with lots of different approaches and tools.

Here's a few links to SEOmoz articles to get you started. I'm sure more people will give their opinions on tools etc.

http://www.seomoz.org/article/keyword-research-guide

http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/keyword-research

Ben

Hi Daniel,

Links from your target location will help, both in terms of IP and TLD (.co.uk). I wouldn't overlook the opportunity to get links from international sites though as they will all pass value and strengthen your domain.

Also it's important to get links from other areas, not just directories.

In that case I would suggest changing a couple and reviewing any changes in rankings as a result. This is one to approach slowly.

Not sure how you have access (are they paid?), but by changing a large amount of links at the same time it may alert Google to some suspicious activity. Large changes in anchor text can be a sign of changes to bought links.

Personally, I wouldn't change them all either. Even though the year is wrong, there's still going to be benefits. e.g. if you are trying to rank for "holiday in new york 2013", your rankings will still benefit from keywords saying "holiday in new york 2012".

Take it steady and keep reviewing the results, but bear in mind you may be better focusing your efforts on building new links with new anchor text.

Hope that helps,

Ben