Basically the same as above; the description has almost no SEO effect apparently any more, but does have a measurable human effect since it will usually be displayed under your title in a search result. I've seen what you describe on my own pages, where Google will sometimes select part of the body instead of the Metatag, but I'm not sure if that's because they found an 'exact match' in the body text, they think it's better, or what.
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Latest posts made by icecarats
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RE: Is it damaging to have TOO long a title tag these days? i.e. well over character limit
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RE: Is it damaging to have TOO long a title tag these days? i.e. well over character limit
I would agree, but not necessarily from an SEO/'Google will downgrade you' perspective. It's not exactly clear what effect the title has, though it very obviously does have an effect. However the title is often the first thing a searcher sees when they are presented with your link as a search result, which means to me that making them as 'human' readable friendly is as important as having keyword prominence. Mind you I'm coming from an ecommerce angle, where information about the product has to be communicated clearly in those 70 characters, it may be different in other categories.
As for the keyword stuffing and H1, yes those are definitely onpage elements that you should get sorted out.
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RE: How do can I compete with 60-80 Domain Authority?
It's certainly possible. I've some sites where the DA is nearly double that of anyone else in the category but they're barely on the first page. The thing to remember about the SEOMoz numbers is that they are a diagnostic, but not based on anything 'real' when it comes to what Google is going to do. This means that you shouldn't treat them as an end all be all indicator of what's possible with a web site or not. I've since deleted the campaign but I remember one case where the site I was working on had a DA of 65 and the number 1 result had a DA of 15.
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RE: Links under Rich Snippet Text?
I thought this was about micro-formats and schema.org content but after some looking around I'm not sure now. There doesn't seem to be a consensus on how those links appear, but I haven't been able to find anyone discussing it after 2006 or so. This was the best writeup I could find:
http://www.seobythesea.com/2006/12/googles-listings-of-internal-site-links-for-top-search-results/
Basically it seems to be that if Google has 'learned' your site thoroughly they'll arbitrarily decide to shove those links in there. The discussions I can find don't really suggest a way to do it, and some express frustration over controlling which links go there. The impression I get though is:
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Google SiteMaps are probably involved
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The sub pages are usually linked to heavily
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The sub pages are usually pretty 'clean', e.g. full of content
I guess it's comparable to what Google classifies as sub-results when you search for your brand name but other than that it's a mystery to me.
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RE: WordPress blog hosted on GoDaddy domain mapping help
Isn't this more of a DNS question? Shouldn't it just go:
site.tempurl.com is an alias for newsite.realurl.com?
And then you change the base domain/config in WordPress so it never references tempurl.com ever again?
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RE: How to clean up a SERP?
You're thinking about it the right way at least. Many clients come to me with "get rid of that bad listing right now!!!" and I have to respond with "I'm sorry but if I controlled the internet I wouldn't be working for you" and then they storm out and it's generally a bad scene.
All those things you mentioned are good tactics to push something down the SERP. Some others off the top of my head:
- Press Releases
- Guest Blog/Friend Blogs about the company
- Bizarrely, YouTube works sometimes if the account is co-branded
- Registering for services like Manta, TechVibes, citdirectory, macrae's, other industry directories
- Legitimate forum postings made in the company's name
There's others, but I think you get the idea.
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RE: Is it negative to put a backlink into the footer's website of our clients ?
Speaking personally I'm not in favor of it but more from an appearance perspective. I've seen a lot of cases where this is abused by smaller operations who aren't taking their customer's overall outbound link profiles into account. We've inherited projects where the previous designer put about 100 words into the META author tag spamming his keywords, and then in addition put at least a paragraph of ALT text on his footer link. The client didn't even know it was there, or what it necessarily meant.
I also think it detracts from the appearance/professionalism of larger clients sites. I think personally I'm moving towards either very subtle and small center-footer links, with the full knowledge of the client, or a paragraph and link on the About US/Partners page. Note this is my opinion on what we're doing and not meant as an indictment of anyone else's practices.
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RE: Building A Forum
If you're going custom then I agree with Highland, phpBB is pretty okay; it's not as knock your socks off as some of the paid solutions, but what's nice is there's lots of example code out there. Forum software is generally so abstracted that it doesn't matter if there are lots of topics or not, since you can create sub-boards for each major topic. This wikipedia link has a good write up of feature-sets, and then near the bottom are links to comparison articles for PHP and ASP based forums:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Internet_forum_software
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RE: Sky Lancers: What is the deal?
Another thing to watch out for is see if someone is trying to snake your design/business model. I know in the past when I would get suspicious traffic like that I would quickly take a spin around elance/odesk/etc. and often find a competitor had posted something like 'make me a site just like (mysite.com) but cheap and scrape all their products so they're already in a database'.
If Bangladesh is nowhere near your customer base I'd do what Ryan suggests as well and block em.
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RE: Linking strategy between my own sites
I agree with EGOL; for a few years it seemed that 'microsites' were the way to go, especially in regards to B2C sales. You would have operations like CSN Stores and Net Shops all with hundreds, if not thousands of bizarrely specific domains (e.g. I believe Net Shops had something like LeatherCounterHeightBarstools.com or the like). But now, they've mostly stopped doing that.
In part, it's because they realized that having an individual brand was far better than hundreds of tiny sub-brands (they became WayFair.com and HayNeedle.com respectively). But it was also because having multiple domains increased the headache of maintenance, introduced duplicate content problems, and simply added costs. And lastly, just as EGOL says, once they 301's all those little domains back to their main one, they got tons of link juice and relevance.
Best posts made by icecarats
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RE: Sky Lancers: What is the deal?
Another thing to watch out for is see if someone is trying to snake your design/business model. I know in the past when I would get suspicious traffic like that I would quickly take a spin around elance/odesk/etc. and often find a competitor had posted something like 'make me a site just like (mysite.com) but cheap and scrape all their products so they're already in a database'.
If Bangladesh is nowhere near your customer base I'd do what Ryan suggests as well and block em.
-
RE: Is it negative to put a backlink into the footer's website of our clients ?
Speaking personally I'm not in favor of it but more from an appearance perspective. I've seen a lot of cases where this is abused by smaller operations who aren't taking their customer's overall outbound link profiles into account. We've inherited projects where the previous designer put about 100 words into the META author tag spamming his keywords, and then in addition put at least a paragraph of ALT text on his footer link. The client didn't even know it was there, or what it necessarily meant.
I also think it detracts from the appearance/professionalism of larger clients sites. I think personally I'm moving towards either very subtle and small center-footer links, with the full knowledge of the client, or a paragraph and link on the About US/Partners page. Note this is my opinion on what we're doing and not meant as an indictment of anyone else's practices.
-
RE: How to clean up a SERP?
You're thinking about it the right way at least. Many clients come to me with "get rid of that bad listing right now!!!" and I have to respond with "I'm sorry but if I controlled the internet I wouldn't be working for you" and then they storm out and it's generally a bad scene.
All those things you mentioned are good tactics to push something down the SERP. Some others off the top of my head:
- Press Releases
- Guest Blog/Friend Blogs about the company
- Bizarrely, YouTube works sometimes if the account is co-branded
- Registering for services like Manta, TechVibes, citdirectory, macrae's, other industry directories
- Legitimate forum postings made in the company's name
There's others, but I think you get the idea.
-
RE: Is it damaging to have TOO long a title tag these days? i.e. well over character limit
I would agree, but not necessarily from an SEO/'Google will downgrade you' perspective. It's not exactly clear what effect the title has, though it very obviously does have an effect. However the title is often the first thing a searcher sees when they are presented with your link as a search result, which means to me that making them as 'human' readable friendly is as important as having keyword prominence. Mind you I'm coming from an ecommerce angle, where information about the product has to be communicated clearly in those 70 characters, it may be different in other categories.
As for the keyword stuffing and H1, yes those are definitely onpage elements that you should get sorted out.
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