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Posting this for Dave SottimanoI Here's the scenario: You've got a set of URLs indexed by Google, and you want them out quickly Once you've managed to remove them, you want to block Googlebot from crawling them again - for whatever reason. Below is a sample of the URLs you want blocked, but you only want to block /beerbottles/ and anything past it: www.example.com/beers/brandofbeer/beerbottles/1 www.example.com/beers/brandofbeer/beerbottles/2 www.example.com/beers/brandofbeer/beerbottles/3 etc.. To remove the pages from the index should you?: Add the Meta=noindex,follow tag to each URL you want de-indexed Use GWT to help remove the pages Wait for Google to crawl again If that's successful, to block Googlebot from crawling again - should you?: Add this line to Robots.txt: DISALLOW */beerbottles/ Or add this line: DISALLOW: /beerbottles/ "To add the * or not to add the *, that is the question" Thanks! Dave

Hi  Spencer, I only have experieince with 2 CMS's. I was an early adopter of Word  Press so I wouldn't know my way iaround n it at all anymore as it's changed so much. I currently use Joomla 1.5 . It's relatively SE friendly, but then again so is WP theses days (so I've heard) I've also heard the current WP is much easier to customise than the older versions.

What is the purpose of your website going to be? (eg. blog, ecommerce, etc.)

What I'm about to add is more philisophical than hard data oriented. Don't be afraid to link out to relevant pages. Yes, you will lose some "juice", but you gain goodwill and "link karma" See, I tolld you it was philisophical

Seriously though, if there is a natural fit for a link out, I'd include it.

Feel free to throw this advice out the nearest window if you are in a tightly competitive space. then hoard all the link juice you can.

As far as being a Pro member,  the web app, OSE and the mozbar.for Firefox.

THe community rocks! but it's open to non Pro members as well so I didn't include it in the Pro benefits.

Hi y Kerem:

I can personally recommend three for you. as I own and have read all 3.. If you have to get just one then make it "The Art of SEO. It's written by a few co-authors, and our vey own Rand Fishkin is one of them m

Hi Brent.

My answer is geared more to "General thoughts to approach"

If you are building a site from scratch, then you need to be clear on your goals for the site, and build out  the site from there ( (SEO, content, design, etc.)

You had mentioned the following as your goal  [being] "a little different than typical.  What I am looking for in my web site is not sales, but viewership.  I want people to find my site, then keep coming back to my blog to follow what I do. So your goal is to build viewership.

From this point on you need to be in the mind of potential viewers. What kind of photos will they want to see? What will they be interested in reading about? The reason this is important is that you need to be able to get a handle on their intent. This will drive your keyword research, your content choices, etc.

As an important aside, you need to do more than just put keywords in your copy to accomplish your goals. You need some stunning photography and compelling copy. In other words, you need to create a site that is world class. So it deserves return visits from those that stumble across it.

Finally, if I were in your shoes, I would look for a niche within the world of photo blogs and start out trying to dominate that niche. This is just my personal preference. If you want to take on the whole photo blog universe right out of the chute,  then go for it.

Good luck and drop back in when you have your site and give us the URL. Good luck!

Hi Debi:

This is strictly my opinion, not backed up by any research, but if you have an ecommerce site  geared towards sales in English speaking countries, you want to get rid of any barrier in front of your customer. Poor grammar would definitely be a barrier.

I were a prospective customer I would be asking myself, will they get the order correct? If I have a problem with the order will I be able to  communicate it easily with them or will there be a language barrier?

I think it would be an important trust issue.

For that matter, I think poor grammar negatively affects native English sites.

Richard makes a great point Jan (no surprise there eh?)and it makes me realize that I completely neglected addressing user experience in my answer.

I was assuming that you would  redirect to an appropriate page. To give you an example of good and bad (from a users perspective), Let's say you had a page dedicated toa yellow 6 man camping tent. It would be acceptable to redirect that to a page listing all your camping tents especially if the yellow 6 man tent was included among them.

It would not be OK(again, from a users perspective) to redirect that yellow 6 man tent page to a page dedicated to sleeping bags.

Hi Jan: You can definitely redirect the pagesby using a 301 redirect for the pagesyou desire to swap out.

If you need help with implementing, this SEOmoz guide can help.

If you need yet more help, just post your question here in the Q&A again. It should get answered a lot faster on the weekdays.

Thanks Thomas. I'll give two of them a shot (already follow Pete who's quite funny)

Sorry for the Distilled omission mate. I fixed it in edit. Oh! forgot to say welcome to the States!

Thanks Tom. The problem I have with SearchEngineland is that there's too much info. I find that I tend to move on without reading if I'm short time. Now a "Readers Digest" of SEL would be great!

Recently on Q&A, Petra weighed in with a link tool site that had completely missed my radar. My problem is lack of time. I don't have enough of it to readthe2 dozen+ SEO blogscurrently in my RSS feed I would like to tobe able to read to  stay current. So I end up only reading at the moz.

I'm hoping the collective wisdom of the SEOmoz crowd will shine forthand set me on the road of pursuit of new knowledge with the best of the best blogs

Richard, you are a Q&A answering animal dude!

Hey Sean: I triple agree with Richard and Petra. Canonicalize

Hey Thomas: I just sat through the video for the tool and it looks amazing! They say it uses 12 different sources for their link data(SEOmoz Linkscape, Majestic SEO, Google data, Yahoo, Technorati, etc.) THen it sounds like they give you a live verification. So to answer your question, it looks like it's doing both.

Sweet Petra! This site was completely off my radar. I really like the collective intelligence this Q&A is bringing to SEOmoz.

Hahah! My favorite answer these days is...it depends.

, if you have a mortgage company to push, then find your white flag now.

But if you have a niche industry, then yes, it is possible. But like everyone else has said. make the on-page rock solid and work on links.

Petra, I wish I could give you 3 thumbs up for being tri-lingual. Between you and Gianluca,most of Europe could ask a question in their native language and get an answer.nMuy excellente yt très magnifique and well done!

Forgot to answer your beta question limit. No limit dude! Keep 'em coming. Yo'll know when it's too many when you run out of people to answer them

Hey Steven: Rather than try to tackle this by myself, I'm going to bring in some heavy hitters. Since you are a Pro member, you have free access to the Pro guides, but unfortunately I can't seem to find the Pro Guide to Link Building on the SEOmoz site at the moment to be able to give you a link.

I can however share an absolutely awesme YOUmoz post from by Scott.MClay that got promoted to the main blog:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-building-101-the-almost-complete-link-guide 

Hey Daniel:

Is there a Google benefit by having links from microsites come in to the main site?  Here are some of the drawbacks to the approach.

#1) I think that Google is really good at finding groups of related nepotistic sites. So while they won't penalize you for the links, they will dilute the amount of juice they pass. Which kinda negates the purpose of setting it up in the first place, eh?

#2 The more important (IMHO) reason to avoid this scenario is that when you create multiple sites, you have to build authority for each of them to have anything to pass along in a link. It's much easier to concentrate your efforts on getting linksfor a single site than for multiple sites.

Hi Alexa:

While strictly speaking, SEO is a separate discipline from CO (conversion optimization) it is possible to use  CO in conjunction with SEO.

Via your analytics, determine which terms are converting better or worse. When you get a handle on the jigher converting terms, start doing keyword research with those termsreplacing your targeted keywords in your SEO campaign with them.

To use  Montanna's example, you may find that the term "golf clubs" doesn't convert well, but instead the term "TX-90 does.

Hello Francisco: My answer would be "it totally depends.I would compare the results to prior results.  If you have no historical data for the account, then I'd say that it was an excellentonversion rate for a an RFQ page. I'd be interested to see the statistics of what the close ration is on the quotes.

But regardless, as far as tooting your own horn, definitely. Letting the client know that the results are 1 for 3 would make them feel great about hiring you.

Hi Rishad:

My answer to your question is soley based on SEO. The more concentrated your focus on the one site and the incoming links, the higher an authority the site will gain.

But I hadn't thought about the marketing angle until I read Gianluca's response. He makes a strong case for letting your marketing/brand requirements drive the decision.

Given the nature of Spencer's site, I wouldn't imagine that the incoming links to current job offers would have that long a life. So I wouldn't think that there'd be a mazzive pile up of incoming links getting 301'd.

Hey Sean: The only thing about 301'a and Google that I'm aware of is that 301's do lose a little "link juice" But this would be from any link, external or internal. I've not heard of a difference in ranking between the two.

Ask them to show you what that "latest intelligence" is and have them explain their rationale. If it's the real deal, they should be able to back it up with something.

Hi again Petra: My answer is strictly based on usability. If you've got a deep site,  the breadcrumbs are highly useful for the user that comes into your site from a SERP. Top placement is the standard but for long pages, they could be added elsewhere.

Hi Petra: I'm hoping someone with mobile experience jumps in, but I remembbered reading a post from Cindy Krum (suzzicks) about mobile sites that might address your question. I'll have to just give you the URL as the Q&A text box is a bit wonky for my browser:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/mobile-search-engine-transcoding

Hey Jos: I use a vector based drawing program (CorelDraw) and draw boxes with lines like you. I can highlight main pages by border thickness and colors.

It's probably not nearly as elegant as  Sameer's suggestions, but I've used it for so many years, it's as comfortable as a pair of old jeans

I use them mostly for my own study ofclient sites and competitors sites Casey. My current stable of clients tend to still dwell on  SERP rankings and numbers of visitors, while the metric I'm trying to train them in is conversions.

But if I had to explain mozRank, mozTrust, Domain Authority,and  Page Authority, I would tell them that the numbers are an approximation of what the Google algorithm assigns to pages, sites, etc. and since Google isn't sharing, it's the best method od ascertaining Google's values.

Changed my profile pick a month or so ago. I miss seeing my old dog Boozie though.

I switched from WP to Joomla because at the time, WP wasn't as ecommerce friendly. And I picked Joomla over Drupal because the general consensus was that while Drupal was more flexible, Joomla had an easier learning curve.

Good luck with whatever new CMS you choose.

Hey Donnie: While I'm only a former Wordpress user and current Joomla hack, I would guess that the MVC frameworks give them more flexibility. Though that flexibility vomes at a price of having to be more proficient at PHP.

Hi Spencer:

I use an open source product calledKeePass. It's a tiny program that resides on my flash drive. Very easy to use, and access can be password protected or you can use a physical "key" that resides on the flash drive itself (my choice as the drive never leaves my desk.

I can't imagine going back to the piece of paper method and having to manually type the characters in now. I just copy and paste and in seconds I'm in.

Hah hah. I agree with Richard. The mo community. And I'm also sympatico with Gianluca. Llong walks outside in the fresh air does wonders for my creativity. Ideas come easier.

Hi Byron. I agree with Spencer re: the rel canonical. Personally I would want to maintain access to the old sites front end during the transition as well as the admin portion. If you 301 it, all you'll see is your new site pages.

But this is purely personal preference. Both the rel acanonical and the 301 are good choices.

Hansj, you look remarkably like Petra!

As a former designer wannabe, I would always shoot for validation if possible. But since concentrating more on SEO issues these days,  like you, I personally don't think it affects rankings.

_But there will be a lot of old files left that have no equal in the new site. Do I just delete these, or noindex nofollw them? _

If any of the old pages left benind have" Page Rank" ascribed to them, you might consider creating "catch all" pages on the new site so as to be able to 301 the leftover old to the new "catch all" pages and thereby reatain the link juice.

This requires creativity as you don't want to lose usability just to catch more link juice. Not knowing your exact situation I'm not positive this is an option but mention it just  incase.

Hey Sean: The official moz info on how they calculate page authority is as follows: (apologies in advance for the garbled hyperlink. It's some kinda bug either on the mozplex's side or in Opera 11.01

SEOmoz Page Authority

http://www.seomoz.org/dp/page-authorityhttp://www.seomoz.org/dp/page-authority

Hey again Francisco, upon rereading your question, it looks like I went off half cocked when I answered it. I missed that you had solved the immediate problem and that you were wondering what course of action to takke if they don't stop. the attack

If someone continues deliberately attacking your site I'm thinking the only course of action is  to change your domain name. It's not a good solution so I hope someone else chimes in with a better one.

Hey Mike: From what I read, it was a simple case of buying links and when the NYTbrought it to Matt & Co's attention, they manually delisted them.

Vanessa Fox had a great write up on it at  Search Engine Land.

Hello Francisco: Really sorry to hear bout this. Bummer!

I've never personally experienced a DDOS attack ,so  I called the web host I use to get his advice. He said that Dreamhost should be able to offer some kind of DDOS mitigation service.He seemed surprised that they weren't able to block it if it was coming in from only 20+ IP addresses.

He also said that if the attack continued, they'd probably not want the account after a certain point. He seemed surprised that they weren't able to block it if it was coming in from only 20+ IP addresses.

One of the main reasons I use him is that he's always been helpful when I've had problems. He said that he'd be willing to host you for a month to see if he could help. His company name is   TRK hosting

I've avoided answering as I don't have any new thoughts to offer Dejan, but as your Q remains unanswered I'll at least add my two bits:

If I had a client that had a dedicated PR team, I'd task them with blogging for the client as well as being the clients "voice" on social media (specifically Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn) I'd also give them the job of tracking the clients reputation.

One last item. I'd task them with the job of bringing fresh donuts to all meetings

After rereading my answers and yours, I'm inclined to agree with you G. I interpreted the question very narrowl Most of my experience has been with sites selling things, and  the PPC used has always been to drive traffic into regular permanent pages.

I'll tell you, this Q&A is harder than I thought! I'll have to be more circumspect when I answer a question!

Hi Spencer:

I don't know if this qualifies as the easiest way , but it ranks right up there:

Virante's Recovery Tool

Hiya Craig:  This post from YOUmoz might help you to be able to wrap your mind around it better.

Hi Mike:

Keyword capitlization  makes  a difference is in the URL's. (Personally I recommend sticking to lowercase.)

As far as elsewhere on page  as far as I can tell, the search engines don't differentiate.