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Thanks for the clarification. I too saw it on the calendar earlier (set myself a reminder on my calendar) and was confused when I saw no changes on my sites... and then the 29th as the update.

I use Google Alerts to track domain-level backlinks (via the link:http://www.example.com trick) but is there a way to track/be alerted of long urls, not just the domain, without having to set an alert for each specific url?

Hmmmm okay I'll try that and send it to the programmer. Thanks!

I like the call-to-action button that HuffPo uses on its FB button, where with one click, a user on their site can 'Like' their main page on Facebook without actually having to go there (assuming that they're logged in, of course). I'd love to use it on my site but...

I'm trying to understand how this works. It seems like it's a custom wrapper, as i'm not seeing the toolset in dev tools  (http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/ etc)

Anyone know about this?

Good point, I guess I should add some color. Attached is an OSE exam of their site, our toaster landing page and then our main home page. Obviously, we are two completely different sites, and our main page holds a huge edge over the /toaster page.

Knowing this, would you:
A) play it safe, keep Kool-Kitchen-Apps.biz domain/site, and 'pretty it up' 
B) redirect to /toasters, dice roll
C) redirect to /, likely keep or  improve ranking for "toasters"
D) panic, stop using computers, hide in neighbor bushes until arrested

dPfvd.jpg

(urls have been altered)

We are KitchenApps.Com, your online portal for kitchen appliances. One of our biggest selling products is toasters, but despite SEO efforts, **KitchenApps.Com/toasters **ranks on page 6 for "toasters"  and barely budges.

One of our competitors, Kool-Kitcken-Apps.biz just tossed in the towel and sold his domain/site to our boss for the cheap. It's an old domain, but the URL isnt lovely. He's got content, but it aint pretty and of course, we sell differently than he does, have some different products, etc. BUT BUT BUT hold everything, he ranks on the first page, with his homepage, for "toasters" his best ranked keyword. A lot of sites have linked to his site for toasters, buying toasters, etc.

Of course, the boss wants to just toss his content, and since his domain is different than company name (which is literally KitchenApps.Com) we should redirect Kool-Kitchen-Apps.biz to our SEO friendly KitchenApps.com/toasters url. He expects that will keep the same positioning, and we'll snag the toaster clicks.

Can we expect to maintain the positioning on page #1?

Did you see the same results in positioning as you had before they were yanked from the index?

Right? Yeah we've done that, I just want to make sure my expectations are set correctly on a site-wide reindex. The realistic repositioning timeline, etc.

A programmers 'accidentally' put "name="robots" content="noindex" />" into every single page of one of my sites (articles, landing pages, home page etc). This happened on Monday, and we just noticed today.

Ugh...

We've fixed the issue; how long will it take to get reindexed? Will we instantly retain our same positions for keywords? Any tips?

I noticed that some sites have a specific section on Youtube, under the structure youtube.com/social/blog, which contains backlinks to the site. For example, this Twilight blog: http://www.youtube.com/social/blog/twilightish

I've had trouble finding out information about this. Is this auto-generated by Youtube, or can someone set this up?

One of my sites is getting a major refresh on the home page, which is good and bad.

The legacy homepage was very long, and had a lot of text (thousands+ of words) in the body, with about 450+ links (internal/external) on the page. A ton of graphics, etc etc. Yuck.

The revamped homepage is much improved. Very short, visual, fast, and SEO optimized.  It's more of launching pad into the rest of the site. But, the text in the body is much less, perhaps a 100 words or so.

The worry is that with so little text, matching the target kw count will appear as stuffing. The 'solution' was to include a visible text box at the bottom of the page, with about 300 words, basically what would typically appear in an 'about' section of a site. But instead, its located on the bottom of the homepage to beef up the pages content, and to avoid looking too 'stuffed'.

Visually, its unattractive IMHO and while the text is good and informative, its under the fold and will likely not change that much going forward. This all seems very 10 years ago to me, but I'd like a second opinion.

Is this box of text a good strategy?

I have a Drupal site that utilizes Solr, with 10 menu pages and about 4,000 pages of content. Redoing a few things and we'll need to revamp the sitemap. Typically I'd jam all pages into a single sitemap and that's it, but post-Panda, should I do anything different?

Seriously, Ryan is always ALL OVER Seomoz comments with good feedback

Say you've got 5,000 articles. Each of these are from 2-3 generations of taxonomy. For example:

• example.com/motherboard/pc/asus39450
• example.com/soundcard/pc/hp39
• example.com/ethernet/software/freeware/stuffit294

None of the articles were SUPER popular as is, but they still bring in a bit of residual traffic combined. Few thousand or so a day. You're switching to a brand new platform. Awesome new structure, taxonomy, etc. The real deal. But, historically, you don't have the old taxonomy functions. The articles above, if created today, file under

• example.com/hardware/

This is the way it is from here on out. But what to do with the historical files?

1. keep the original URL structure, in the new system. Readers might be confused if they try to reach example.com/motherboard, but at least you retain all SEO weight and these articles are all older anyways. Who cares? Grab some lunch.
2. change the urls to /hardware/, and redirect everything the right way. Lose some rank maybe, but its a smooth operation, nice and neat. Grab some dinner.
3. change the urls to /hardware/ DONT redirect, surprise Google with 5k articles about old computer hardware. Magical traffic splurge, go skydiving.
4. Panic, cry into your pillow. Get job signing receipts at CostCo

Thoughts?

What Ryan said. Traditionally, I've seen that Bing (and Yahoo) will ignore link shenanigans that elevate listings better in Google. An example that I personally have is a competitive kw positioned at #4 in Bing, and #81 in Google. But, most of the competition are link spammers so... Don't forget that Baidu is going to switch to Bing's engine (at least on the English side).

ha!

Referencing this article: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/07/06/google_cans_11m_dot_co_dot_cc_sites/

Curious what the ramifications of this to SEO (improve rankings over spammy results, etc) and to hear thoughts on this.

We currently use Sharethis, but I've noticed many sites using Addthis for sharing. Is there any preference or reason to use one more than the other?

My site has writers, and each has their own profile page (accessible when you click their name inside an article). We set up the code in a way that the bios, in addition to the actual writer photo/bio, would dynamically generate links to each article he/she produces. Figured that someone reading something by Bob Smith, might want to read other stuff by him.

Which was fine, initially.

Fast forward, and some of these writers have 3,4, even 15 pages of archives, as the archive system paginates every 10 articles (so www.example.com/bob-smith/archive-page3, etc)

My thinking is that this is a bad thing. The articles are likely already found elsewhere in the site (under the content landing page it was written for, for example) and I visualize spiders getting sucked into these archive black holes, never to return.

I also assume that it is just more internal mass linking (yech) and probably doesnt help the overall TOS/bounce/exit, etc.

Thoughts?

Thanks for the reply! It's definitely tough to kill content (especially when you paid a writer to do an interesting story or event coverage). So using your suggestion, I looked at a minor section, thats new, but has suffered over the past 30 days.

130 articles 
73% bounce
73% exit
1m TOS
26k pageviews
of those, 35 articles have 100% bounce rate, under 10 pageviews, under 1min TOS. I assume applying a simple metric such as this, site wide, and unpublishing articles that fall under this category, would help clear the brush away from the newer content?

After watching the white board friday re: Panda 2.2, it got me to thinking about old content.

One of the sites that I work with generates 3-10 new articles/day (movie reviews, interviews, guides, event previews, etc) and has been doing so since 2005. Now, they have almost 10k articles, 7k of which are indexed.

The quality of the content varies, and much of it is dated (movies, events) much of the amount of older content gets 0-5 pageviews/month, made in the days BEFORE the site was using Google News + social tools to spread the word (and backlinks). Note that those older articles also of course tend to have 100% bounce, and small/zero TOS.

Is this hurting the site? With 75-100 articles/month being published, I want to make sure they get maximum exposure. I'm also concerned that crawlers get sucked into the site chasing down old BS content, and that is hurting it as well.

What to do with this content? Should I unpublish unpopular, dated content and get it off the internet? Or, do I leave it on, but NOINDEX it so Google won't crawl it?

A client wants to relocate the majority of his niche news site, www.example.com, into a c-level domain on the same domain (news.example.com).

Right now, almost all the articles are populating in Google News and generating traffic, thanks to the site's age, content and its newsmap.

With the relocation, 80% of the files pulled into Google News, will now be news.example.com/tech/article-sample, as opposed to how they have been historically, www.example.com/tech/article-sample. Will that break Google News auto submission process, hurt their google news positioning, and require them to reapply for consideration?

Secondly, a good chunk of landing pages (30+) and articles (3-4k) will be relocated to the new news.example.com domain. Everything after the .com/ will of course remain the same, but the c-level will be new so essentially, a new URL. I know that redirecting will lose some pagejuice, but since its a c-level, its going to be basically like moving the urls to a brand new domain?

Quick question: I want some pages that will have canonical tags, to show up in internal results for a Google site search that's built into the site. I'm not finished with the site, but is it correct to assume that pages with canonical will NOT show up in internal site search results, when powered by Google?

I have a some experience in this. I added a directory package to an already up-and-running site, utilizing eDirectory (http://www.edirectory.com/) and we kept it on the same domain (ex: directory.example.com). Overall, aside from a few hick-ups, the installation and implementation went well, and search engines are crawling the directory. The tough part is to make sure that your template on the edirectory, matches your site. This was easy with navigation and not so easy with banner ads, but we eventually got it looking good. Depending on the size of your site, expectations of your directory and resources, you may want to consider diversifying the hosting of the directory onto separate (virtual) machines, but that's of course up to you.

The one thing I did want to mention is that when creating a directory, especially if you're considering charging for ANY aspect of it, is thinking of it from a visitor prospective. Why would I want to pay (or spend time uploading to) a directory to host info/images/etc I could do elsewhere, or am already doing elsewhere? Having a niche site might negate that question, tho. Good luck!