Hey all, I've just started at a new company. We spend quite a bit on Adwords and I'm tasked with seeing how that is going and assessing that spend. The problem is, Adwords and Youtube ads have been given to a third-party advertising agency. They are only willing to share the number of clicks, cost and conversions, stuff like that. They refuse to give us access to the account.

Is this legal? I mostly want to get in there to look at keyword history, see what we have bid on, how often it was searched, stuff like that. But they won't let us in and I'm wondering if they are required to let us look at our account as I would think they are. Please help!

Random I know. I started a fun pet project at www.me-not-spammer.info. Total spam. Totally says it's not spam. Satire and all, something only SEO people will get really.

Anyway I want to make a sidebar of other "not spammers" and need to find a bunch of spammy websites. Problem is they don't rank in search engines obviously so I know of only the ones who leave comments on some of my wordpress sites.

Anyone have a list of a bunch of them so I can link to them in my blogroll?

Kind of a loaded question but let me see if I understand. You have a call to action button and you want to use it in multiple places on your website but don't want a duplicate content penalty. You wonder if making the button in text might be more effective. Is that correct?

First of all, I think there is a lot of research out there that your image call to action will be more effective than any styled text could be. You have a lot of options with fonts, colors, shading, etc. in images, not so when styling text. I would definitely use a button in that regard. Also, you want it to stand out. That isn't always just bright colors, it's contrasting colors. SEOMoz for example has a light blue background. Right now there is a pink "call to action" of sorts (more of a look at me I'm important note) at the top for the expiring private messages. Stands out, doesn't it? Because a warm color (pink) contrasts with the cool color palette established by the blue background.

You don't have to worry about a duplicate content penalty on images that I'm aware of. What I would do is only use it once per page in the best place you can put it and make sure every time you use it on all your pages you maintain the same alt text. I've seen that it's possible Google isn't a fan of repeating an image with different alt text or calling lots of different images but using the same alt text.

Like I said in the last paragraph, if this is temporary, 302 redirect the original destination URL to the new destination URL as well as the redirecting URL to the new destination. If these changes are permanent, make them 301 instead of 302 redirects.

Let me make sure I understand you. You have a vanity URL like bit.ly or something. It redirects to your website which is bitly.com or something like that. This redirect is a 301 permanent redirect.

Are you asking if bitly.com changed what you should do with the redirect? That's how I understood the question. So say bitly.com now goes to bitly.com/new or something along those lines.

If this is the case, all you want to do is change your 301 redirect of bit.ly to the new destination URL and keep it a 301. That is, unless bitly.com/new is only a temporary URL. If it will be reverting back to bitly.com then don't do that.

Instead, when you redirect bitly.com to bitly.com/new use a 302 redirect, keeping the 301 from bit.ly to bitly.com in tact. Hopefully that answers your question. Let me know if your scenario is different.

For me the only goal at the end of the day is to be indexed by Google and Bing as soon as possible. That is happening for me on my WordPress sites without changing any thing with the ping feature built in. So in my opinion adding more pings to more places might get you indexed elsewhere and may help in other places, but if you over ping Google or Bing I could see them not appreciating that. So I don't risk it. Kind of the don't fix what ain't broke mentality for me.

My understanding is that WordPress has a built in ping feature by default, pingomatic I think? Either way, I have never changed anything related to pings on my wordpress sites and they all get indexed very quickly. One of them is indexed within a minute or two of going live. Only way Google is finding that so fast is through the ping, so I know it must be helping. I don't think it would be all the helpful to increase the number of times or properties of Google you are pinging. I have stuck with the built in default WP feature and it is working just fine for me.

This worked like a charm! The site is on something called Zend cart I think and I had to sort through several Controllers but eventually found all the metaTag stuff in there and added a metaDesc variable next to them, unique meta descriptions on every page! Thanks!

The site I am working on is a code nightmare for starters. I'm editing a file called layout that controls the section of each page. The programmer from a while back got unique titles by putting this piece of code in:

<title><?= $this->metaTag ?></title>

In all the different controllers and stuff I can see where the title is the name of the product plus review or something to that effect.

How do I do this for the meta description? Right now the meta description is static in the layout file, and so every page has an identical one. I was hoping there was a way to make the meta description automatically use the first 140 characters on the page or something. Something like this:

I wouldn't necessarily look for stats or studies about meta descriptions here, but look at research done on PPC copy as well. There is likely a whole lot more of it for one, and its a very similar concept. Which words get more clicks? That's what it boils down to. I'm sure if you look more for stats in the PPC side of things you can find more concrete sources on what language is most effective.

The secret to good SEO is to stop wasting time with automation tools. SEO simply cannot be automated and left to a robot. If it could, none of us would have jobs

If it automates directory submissions, bookmarks, articles, blog comments or anything else, it's useless and should be left alone. Far too many SEO folks waste far too much time tinkering around with them...only to figure out they are useless and that they wasted a lot of time. The Onion comically gives us another great way to stop wasting time:

http://www.theonion.com/articles/openminded-man-grimly-realizes-how-much-life-hes-w,19273/

I wouldn't necessarily look for stats or studies about meta descriptions here, but look at research done on PPC copy as well. There is likely a whole lot more of it for one, and its a very similar concept. Which words get more clicks? That's what it boils down to. I'm sure if you look more for stats in the PPC side of things you can find more concrete sources on what language is most effective.

Hey all, I've just started at a new company. We spend quite a bit on Adwords and I'm tasked with seeing how that is going and assessing that spend. The problem is, Adwords and Youtube ads have been given to a third-party advertising agency. They are only willing to share the number of clicks, cost and conversions, stuff like that. They refuse to give us access to the account.

Is this legal? I mostly want to get in there to look at keyword history, see what we have bid on, how often it was searched, stuff like that. But they won't let us in and I'm wondering if they are required to let us look at our account as I would think they are. Please help!

Ask yourself why you are using a domain and if you can accomplish the exact same thing by simply making a subdirectory. If you can, drop the subdomain. Always use subdirectories.

Google treats sub domains as separate websites, so having a different IP address doesn't matter, just makes it more separate I guess. That's why I wouldn't bother. Why separate your content?

There is SEO benefit to forwarding these domains if they have any incoming links. If so, a 301 redirect to your main domain could send some link juice and help rankings.

If these parked domains aren't even indexed by Google and have no links, then there is no SEO value in a 301 redirect because Google won't even know about it anyway. I would still do it as there is no harm that could be done, that's for sure.

I would recommend against doing any kind of meta refresh, as Google frowns upon those. Just 301 redirect the parked domains to your live website and it will either do nothing or help a little, but it can't hurt.

I use xml-sitemaps.com if the website has proper navigation and is less than 500 pages. It works pretty well, you can download the sitemap afterwards in xml, html or txt.

Google strips special characters out of search. For one, no one in a million years will do a search with Google and include a trademark symbol anyway. But if they did for some reason, Google would simply strip it out. You do not need to optimize for keywords with special characters. Just optimize for the keyword itself and you will be fine.

Kind of a loaded question but let me see if I understand. You have a call to action button and you want to use it in multiple places on your website but don't want a duplicate content penalty. You wonder if making the button in text might be more effective. Is that correct?

First of all, I think there is a lot of research out there that your image call to action will be more effective than any styled text could be. You have a lot of options with fonts, colors, shading, etc. in images, not so when styling text. I would definitely use a button in that regard. Also, you want it to stand out. That isn't always just bright colors, it's contrasting colors. SEOMoz for example has a light blue background. Right now there is a pink "call to action" of sorts (more of a look at me I'm important note) at the top for the expiring private messages. Stands out, doesn't it? Because a warm color (pink) contrasts with the cool color palette established by the blue background.

You don't have to worry about a duplicate content penalty on images that I'm aware of. What I would do is only use it once per page in the best place you can put it and make sure every time you use it on all your pages you maintain the same alt text. I've seen that it's possible Google isn't a fan of repeating an image with different alt text or calling lots of different images but using the same alt text.

These techniques work just fine. Panda may have hurt the quality of these aggregators and directories, but they still pass link juice. I would probably not pay for it, but there are a lot of free ones, and if you have a blog you might as well submit to them as it is quick and easy.

I would probably not include all 100 customers. Maybe a sampling of your customer base?

You could also nofollow the external links to sites that could be questionable. You could also noindex, nofollow that page as well. All are options.

In fact, you could just put 100 links on the page if you want. I highly doubt you will incur any kind of penalty at all. Matt Cutts has dispelled the myth that you can only have 100 links on a page. You can have as many as you want as long as it makes sense and doesn't look like your are spamming search engines with link farms. I probably wouldn't worry too much about it.