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Thanks Guys, I think I just wanted validation that I'm doing the right thing.

This is my biggest client yet and my paranoia about damaging their London Google Place page has gone through the roof :D.  Ho Hum.

Thanks, I think you are agreeing with my course of action of having one brand page and a verified page for each location?

It is 1 company - it is a nationally recognised brand - but each city/town will have it's own page.  Is that what you recommend Francisco?

(just double double checking)

Hi All

I'm looking for a bit of a steer on which direction to go in here.

I have a new client and the client has a 'branch' in London.  The brand is about to be franchised across the UK.  They currently have a google places page in London (old style Google places, not a plus page) and nothing else on Google +.

I don't really want to touch the Google place (local page) because it ranks well for their business and far higher than their organic search result.

In terms of adding to their social presence, I think a Google Plus 'Brand' page would work as a generic brand, with several additional local pages being created as franchisees come on board.  They have a safe and strong brand and have plans to reinforce through social.

I'm about to set up the brand page and wondered if anyone has any thoughts, words of warning or points to consider?

I don't know why but I feel somewhat tetchy and fearful of Google places that have yet to be merged.

Thanks

Thanks all for your help, I was de-blacklisted this afternoon - phew.

I didn't check the dates  The site is less than a month old though.

When you say logs, I'm not entirely sure what I'm looking for.  I use cpanel so have access to various logs, but I have to admit, I haven't spent any time in there and now I'm conscious that this is something I need to educate myself on quick.

Any suggested resources for which logs to use for what?

Thanks, I'm not so sure!  I'm a freelancer and I wok on my own so I have nobody to really bounce ideas off, so this community is great for that.  Glad to know I'm doing it right

I'm not a bit lover of plugins and I try to keep to a minimum, but I've removed anything unessential - even my beloved Flare sharing buttons, for now anyway.

I'll let you know when Google come back to me

Thanks all for your responses, much appreciated.

I installed the timthumb vulnerability scanner and it says no instances were found.

I'm going to go through and ditch the unnecessary plugins...I use woocommerce and they have  recent upgrade but its not compatible with my theme so I can't update it, which is a giant pain.  I hope its not that.

Thanks for your help.

Good morning.

Just done my WMT ritual morning check and one of my sites has been blacklisted for malware.

It's a wordpress site - I've run various scans, e.g. http://sitecheck.sucuri.net/scanner/ and also installed wordfence and scanned with that and wordfence produced some offending files which I have now deleted.

I've also installed website defender in the hope that it wont happen again.  I'm pretty good with staying on top of updates and rarely let a few days pass without upgrading new version of wordpress or plugins etc.  I've also checked my users to make sure no new admins or anything and also changes passwords.

I've asked for a review from Google and just wondered how long these reviews take?

Also, has anybody got any advice, is there anything else I should be doing?

Thanks

Tyr this post too...

How to add an image to google images

whoops, I didn't spot that, I just saw the example and didnt read the finer details!

hmmm....I'd want a more indepth conversation with your developer, because that doesn;t make a lot of sense.

You can get loops but that happens when the redirect has been incorrectly set up, or you have a really long convoluted chain of hops..  (I have done this myself personally and got in a couple of knots).

At the end of the day, you need to be able to reasonably rewrite your urls and it is your developers job to facilitate that and do whatever is technically necessary.  You might need to look back at the history of what you've got redirecting where to prevent it going haywire.

Hi

Technically there are two pages - the old one and the new one.  That's the way Google will see it.  You need to point the old page at the new page with a 301 redirect in the htaccess file.

Are you using wordpress?  You can get an easy plugin called 'redirection'

Here are the SEOMoz best practises around redirecting.

By the way, are you in Hudds?  I'm just over the hill in Elland!

In all honesty I've never done any serious testing but I've always worked by a rule of thumb of 5 to 15 words max, with the keyword as close to the front as I can get it..

Can you post the url?

Thanks for the really helpful response, I'll do that and talk to the client about the domain change. Much appreciated.

I've got a new client who made the mistake of spending $5 on a sack load of dodgy links some time ago.

I'm redoing his site, not set up analtics or WMT or anything yet, just starting on it but I had a look at his backlink profile and it's pretty shocking.  Riddled with porn and money scams etc, but I'm concerned by the nature of one of the links....to the url is disturbing and I'm tempted to report them to the police. :(.

If I use the disavow tool will it remove the links from my backlink profile altogether or just block the dodgy site?  I want to disaccociate the site altogether.

What do you mean by a commercial theme?

I run an ecommerce site and definitely agree about the giveaways.

I notice that you are in the UK - me too.  On the site I run monthly competitions - easy question stuff and the prize value is worth upto £20 per month max.  I run an 'answer this question' in the blog comments and a winner will be chosen at random.  Also, if you think you can get away with it, get them to like, share, tweet or whatever. I then publish that on various competiton sites such as loquax, uk competition sites - there are quite a few.  A good one is HotUK deals, but you cant add your own.  Somebody has to innocently add it for you.  Once these professional compers get hold of it, they'll tweet and like it like crazy.  Make sure the offer is attached to a page on your site so it gets all the social signals.

It depends on your product, but you could hire a good PR person to see if they can tap into some contacts and get you some press about any events. A contact of mine occasionally manages a couple of celebrity endorsements on twitter, but to be honest I find them a bit embarrassing and I doubt they've done any good!

Do you use wordpress?

There are many, many ways that SEOmoz can help improve your sites performance in SERPS but none of those are direct.  Having a pro subscription to SEOMoz, or any service will never affect your rankings.

SEOmoz is really just a set of measurement tools to show you how well your optimisation efforts are working.

So, if you are optimising one particular webpage for one particular keyword you can set that up as a campaign and watch how you are progressing, allowing you to monitor against your competitors.

All of the SEO tools help you to conduct research and analysis to enable you to make decisions when doing onpage and offpage optimisation.  The purpose of the tools is to help you make the best decisions based on insight so you can improve your sites performance.

Use all the tools available in the Research tools section and learn how to use each one.  Also there's a lot of help in the beginners guide.

You can use the tools to show you any errors on your site, duplicate content warnings, keyword analysis etc.  All of this will help you go back and make your site a better place.

The report card tool is exceptionally helpful.

I think it depends on the nature and the quality of the sites.  For example, say I got a link from the Guardian and I was so chuffed I posted a link back to the article on the guardian on my blog, I'm pretty certain I would still reap the link juice benefits.

Edit - I just want to add that I do have direct experience of this on a new clients site. As a UK jounalist for a british new site he has dozens  of backlinks to his site.  They;re his only backlinks, his site isn't optimised at all and hasn't been updated in years, yet he has amazing rankings for highly competitive keywords.

All my campaigns (different sites) are crawled weekly.  As far as I understand you can;t control this.

pdfs are indexed just as html pages, so you should avoid duplicating what is on the pdf, as it will look like two duplicate pages on your site.

You can add, summarise or make sensible and good use of the html page and add unique content and that would help.

Re changing the title tags, no you don't need to add any redirection.  Yo only need to do this if you also change the url and the existing url has already been indexed.

I've done quite a bit of redirection on some sites when optimising and so far suffered no issues, but I'm going to go away and view that video!

When I do an incognito search you are number 3.

As a previous poster says, make sure your page is A+ in the analyser.

Beyond that, continue building some high quality backlinks to that page, but also some social signals might help give it a boost.  That page has no plus ones, likes or anything like that.  Tweet the page, get it retweeted, get it all over google plus.

When you use the keyword research tool on SEOMoz you can opt to run off a csv, very detailed breakdown of the stats for the top ten results for that keyword (I think you get 50 per month).  Not sure if you have done that already but I find that very helpful.  Gives all the social signals  backlinks, page authority, domain authority etc.

Hi.  Everything Tom said and I also wanted to add another extension to this - If you use Firefox this is for checking nofollow and dofollow links.  When you add the extension, if you right click and select the nodofollow it hghlights nofollows in red and dofollows in blue.  I use it all the time.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/nodofollow/

Yes, me too.

There is one that i know of that looks brilliant but I haven't got round to using it yet.

https://ifttt.com/

It's called 'If this, then that'.  It looks really useful.

I use buffer, mainly for twitter (when I remember) and it's great for spreading out the content you are sharing.  Sometimes I might be in meetings all day yet I want to be able to tweet stuff, so its fantastic for that.

Sometimes I've seen twitter feeds that look like they just churn out content, which I don;t think is wise, but as a supplement to what I'm already doing it is great and helpful.

I hope you're right Tom!  I'd hate to have to go and start de-optimising

One of mine does that for a particular search term...I haven't manipulated anything just followed the best practises of SEO across each piece of content.  If I had done any sort of dodgy manipulation, I would have been picked up by panda and penguin.

I hope they are not mistrusted because of it. If it were me experiencing it, I'd definitely remember them and probably look.

Let's face it, all SEO is manipulation of search results!  Anybody who follows the best practises is hoping that their competitor is not and will therefore rank below them.

You have to create content that people will link to.  There is no such thing as boring either.  I manage social media and SEO for nuts and bolts companies, so i understand what you mean but you have to find your market and build the links there.

Also, why would a guest post be any less boring than posting on your own blog (re your advice on this post)?

edit.. added this link about borings companies creating great content.  

Also check out what Ladders online are doing on Google plus.

You can see all links to your site using open site explorer

When you have typed in your domain name you can filter what is shows you on the inbound tab.  The Third dropdown allows you to see which pages have been linked to and by whom (and you can set to external, internal, dofollow etc).

Hope that helps.

SEO companies still focussing on this stuff are either scamming people, or just so out of date and it will catch up with them.

Backlinks are still very worthwhile, but they must be earned naturally.  Any backlink that can be bought is not natural.

SEO post penguin is actually REALLY straightforward!  Implementing it is blody hard, but the theory is straightforward.

Really, all you have to do is create good quality content, relevant to your business on a regular basis.  You also need to socialise this, be social on your social networks, publicise your content through your social means, earn backlinks by people coming across your content and deciding to link to it

Ultimately Google wants to know that your site is good quality (and it measures that by deemed good quality sites naturally linking to it because they think it is good).  Social signals, tweet, number of facebook likes, google plus ones, other kinds of shares, people talking about your site etc.

Don't focus on 'SEO'. Focus on building a great website, a great brand and getting the word out and the links should come naturally.

Obviously all the on page and technical seo, ste speed etc best practises still apply.

Bing webmaster tools is pretty helpful when it comes to this sort of thing.  Verify your site with Bing WT and in Diagnostic tools you can run SEO tests for your URLs and it will give you an outcome.  If there are any biggies on your site it will highlight in red and amber and so on.

Bing WMT is a great tool and I think it's widely underused.

Sorry, I didn't actually look at the site, but yes agreed,  I would certainly ensure St. Charles, MO was in the title tag for that page and any additional pages that they are looking to rank for!

If it makes sense to your website to add a page about that particular keyword, then yes I would definitely do that and look to rank that page for that keyword.

Creating new and unique content on your website is a positive SEO move.

I have done something similar on client sites and created a page for each service offering and written a lot of content about each service and that puts me up top for organic listings as well as the local.

As long as you aren't duplicating content, working on optimising a new page for a specific keyword is a good way to go.

Thanks Tom.

For one site in particular I have some very good reasons to link back and forth with another related and trusted site - I just wanted to be sure that I wasn't endangering myself by linking back.

Does it 'water down' the link juice if the link is reciprocal?

Are they worth anything, if they are from relevant sites?  I'm I better off avoiding linking back wherever possible?

I'm going to thumb you up because I think you deserve a Tshirt!

Hi Dusty

That is correct that a 301 does pass link juice and a 302 does not.

I would go into detail, but SEOmoz has a very detailed description here!

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection

Hope that helps

Jo

I'm recently inspired by Red Bull.  The opportunities there are endless.

A national networking company charges its members, say, a few of hundred pounds to become part of their network, which involves offline networking events and online in forums and a directory.

All the links of the directory and forum sigs etc are all do-follow.

While it's not just a directory, how beneficial a link is this likely to be?  The site itself has a DA of 60 and a PR rank of 4. 1k likes on their cnnected FB page and 21 likes on the G+.

At the networking meetings they tell new recruits that being a member gives them a very valuable backlink and everytime they participate in the forums they get another do follow backlink.  Ive checked and they are dofollow.

Is this likely to be a great value link?

Hi David

Without knowing what your errors are, it's hard to say but, I notice you have a wordpress site, so I'll offer another add-on suggestion to the other excellent suggestions above.

Some of your errors might be 404 errors - there is a great plugin called redirection.  If you have 404 errors, work through each one and redirect it to an appropriate page.

404s usually happen when you change the url, or remove a page.  Google has indexed those pages/urls and if they are no longer available Google will return a 404 error page.  With redirection you can point the old page to a new, appropriate page with a 301 redirect.

Hope that helps.

Hi Gina

I just googled your site and I can't immediately see anything to do with Google+ on there.  I can see your FB and LinkedIn icons in the footer.  Would be a good idea to put a Google+ on in there that links to your page.

I also googled your google plus page and found it I also noticed it doesn't have a lot of attention and 4 plus ones.

.

To grow that I would definitely add a plus one button to your site and when anyone clicks the plus one button on your site it will tally with the page.

I can see you post regularly on your plus page, you have only circled 5 people (from your page, not from you).  You can treat your page like a personal profile, use it to circle people, follow, engage with them, circle your clients (business pages and their personal pages) with your page profile.  It's not really possible for your page to start engaging when its only following 5 other.

Hope that helps, but feel free to ask if it doesn't make sense.

i tried to log on early this morning and it was down for quite a while.  Now it's back up it's definitely quicker!  Oh Joy!

Thank you, very much appreciate you responses.

I need to migrate a wordpress site from domainname.com to domainname.co.uk.

If I just put a 301 on every page on the .com will that cover it?

Would it make sense to go and change all the backlinks/profile links to the new .co.uk site or doesn't it matter if you have a 301 redirect on it?

Thanks