Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Georg,

I have had the same problem. It is because of the latest update by Google around 'over-optimisation'.

Don't worry though, all is not lost! There are a few things that you need to change:

• Make sure that your webpage titles are not over-optimised (i.e. 'Free Shoes, New Shoes, Sports Shoes - Shoe Company'). Make sure that they read properly and don't look spammy. Try not to repeat any of the keywords more than once, if at all.

• Check that all of the links on the page are not suspicious. For example, having loads of anchor text linking to the same page.

• See what your keyword density is on your webpage and see if you have maybe be keyword stuffing (Google is being a lot harsher and stricter on this now).

• Go through your img alt attributes and check they are all relevant and not just blatanet attempts to fit in long-tail keywords.

Once you have done this, resubmit the pages to the Google index and hopefully, after a few weeks, you should start regaining some ground. Unfortunately its a bit of a waiting game now, but make sure you do everything you can to show to Google that you are not over-optimising and you should be OK.

Also, take a look at Rand's recent whiteboard Friday which goes over this.

Good luck!

Matt.

Hi Mark,

I hope you're well.

Basically, the canonical tag is used to let Google know which URL it should refer to as the original source of the page content. So, if you had the following URLs that all go to the homepage:

www.domain.com/
www.domain.com/index.php
www.domain.com/home/

Then Google could crawl each of these pages and identify them as three different pages all with the same content. This could say to them that there is duplicate content on the site (which is not good). Usually with the homepage Google is intelligent enough to understand that there is just one page and the /index.php for example isn't a duplicate.

The problem that you do face, especially on the site that you are optimising, is with the different pages that have information on the lettings, etc (i.e. your product pages). For example, if you look at the following URL on your website:

http://www.daft.ie/searchshortterm.daft?id=23606

This is when you go through to the short-term searches and then I find the '176 Rathgar Road' apartment. Due to the dynamically generated URL (search.shortterm.daft?id=23606) I can gather that there would be several ways to get to this page with a different URL. My first suggestion would be to set up Search Engine Friendly URLs, for example, instead of having 'http://www.daft.ie/searchshortterm.daft?id=23606', it would be:

http://www.daft.ie/short-term/dublin/176-rathgar-road-apartment/

This way you could clearly optimise the page on Google search and have the canonical link to the page as:

href="http://www.daft.ie/short-term/dublin/176-rathgar-road-apartment.html" rel="canonical" />

This would improve the SEO performance on the website and avoid duplicate content issues.

I hope this helps, but if you need any more info then just let me know.

Matt.

Hi John,

Here is a list that I have given to a client before to show what we would do in terms of some SEO:

• Optimisation of on-page website technical code
• Sustained back-linking campaign to build reputable links
• Site architecture formatting and streamlining
• Conversion rate optimisation
• Webpage structure and cosmetic build changes
• Thorough analysis and A/B testing of website for continued improvement
• Directory and blogging submissions through PR routes
• Extensive competitor analysis and monthly performance reports
• Linking and distribution of content through social media platforms
• Submission of web pages to search engines and creation of sitemap

In terms of what you need to do, I would first start with the on-page work, which would consist of (not exclusively):

• page titles and meta data
• optimising page content
• img alt attributes
• URL tidying
• internal and external linking
• creation of a sitemap
• keyword analysis
• new content creation

These are just a few things but will hopefully get you on your way.

Let me know if you need any further help

Matt.

Hi Daniel,

My advice here would be to learn the basics through online resources. Subscribe to things like DistilledU, which is a great online resource and can take you through all of the basic steps in barely any time at all. Make sure that you follow all the major blogs and are always dedicating some time to reading up on SEO related stuff.

The next stage can then be looking for a mentor. Personally, I would suggest reaching out to well-known industry SEOs to see if they would be interested in doing it; you will often find that having a mentor that is currently working within the industry will give you the most value.

I personally do this kind of thing and have had most of the people that I mentor simply get in touch with me after reading some of my content. The way I charge is through an hourly rate for my time, hence why I suggested learning a lot of the basics through online resources (because it will be a lot more cost effective). Alongside this, you need to decide on what it is you want to get from the mentor - do you want to get an overall view of SEO or would you like to focus on a specific area? for example, link building, technical SEO, local SEO, etc.

If you want some more info on how I can help then drop me a private message through Moz, or just email me (my email is visible in my profile). Bare in mind that I'm based in the UK though

Hope this helps!

Matt

Hi Martin,

I wouldn't hold too much importance towards Dmoz as part of your link building because, with any directory, there are loads of outbound links on the site, which means less link juice.

I would suspect that the reason why your link is not showing on open site explorer could be that Dmoz takes a little while to upload the link onto their website so it may show up in a couple of weeks.

My advice would now be to try having a look into some other directories that are focused around the specific industry that your website operates in. You can easily find these by doing searches in Google like:

'yourindustry' + inurl:directory intitle:add

Replace 'yourindustry' with a keyword related to your site and this should show you a few quick wins that you can submit to. Just remember that directory submission is only a very small part of your link building, but it still helps.

Matt.

Hi Laura,

If you're looking for the the counter on your social media buttons to update to show the original number of social shares then it's not going to happen, I'm afraid.

When you move domain, all of the social media buttons will reset their counters and show '0' for all of your articles. Having said this, you need to make sure that you set up 301 redirects from all your old pages to the new ones. If you are just doing a straight domain swap (i.e. all the URLs will stay the same except for the domain name) then you can add the following code into your .htaccess file:

Options +FollowSymlinks 
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} \olddomain.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

You will need to replace 'olddomain.com' with your old domain name and 'newdomain.com' with your new domain name. A word of warning here is that making changes to your .htaccess file (if you don't really know what your doing) can end badly, so make sure you pass it on to your developers - otherwise, you can use that plugin.

All of the SEO benefits that your previous pages have gained (links, social shares, etc) will be stransfered to the new domain, but your social shares counters won't be updated. I would recommend giving the following article a read before moving to a new domain:

http://www.webseoanalytics.com/blog/seo-guide-how-to-change-your-domain-name-without-losing-your-rankings/

Hope this helps!

Matt

Hi Tony,

It's important that you don't focus too heavily on having a link profile that is completely dominated by exact match anchor text. Realistically, one of your most used anchors should be branded text - which looks most natural (however, this isn't the case for every website). My advice would be to ensure that all of your landing pages are well optimised for the keywords and then the next stage can be including some local citations and co-occurance links.

Getting local citations from plumbing-related sites will allow the search engines to establish your site as relevant to those related keywords (it doesn't need to be exact-match). Also, if you are having some article links done then you could look at wrapping keywords around your anchor text link, for example - on my blog I try get links that are like this:

Matthew Barby is an SEO specialist based in Birmingham, UK. He enjoys ...

In the above sentence, my name would be the only hyperlink but Google/Bing/Yahoo are intellegent enough to relate the surrounding text with me so that I can start ranking for the links of Birmingham SEO Specialist (get it?). Try looking into this and it will diversify your link profile nicely

Matt

Hi Craig,

SEOmoz has a great list of free & paid directories that you can get backlinks from:

http://www.seomoz.org/directories

Also, you can use this great list:

http://www.avangate.com/company/resources/article/blog-directories.htm

Hi Craig,

I would definitely recommend this method.

It is much better to have a wide spread of keywords within your website, because if two pages use the same keyword then they will be competing with one another for ranking, and this is not what you want.

Optimise the titles and the content around one or two major keywords; for example, 'Web Development Edinburgh' (it doesn't hurt to add Edinburgh here as you will also be optimising for Web Development as a short tail keyword anyway.

Hope this helps.

Matt.

Hi Niners52,

Personally, I like to use webconfs search engine spider tools (http://www.webconfs.com/search-engine-spider-simulator.php) but there are loads out there that you can use and it is your own preference really.

Also, I use ScreamingFrog to do similar tasks.

Matt.

Hi There,

I have been having trouble with the same thing and have found some good advice throughout the process of recovering.

One method that I have heard people suggesting was to change the URL of the page that is affected and then set up a redirect to the new page. From personal experience, I can tell you that this doesn't work. It is simply a very short-term fix (i.e., a few days if your lucky), then Google will start punishing you for the redirected page.

If it is only specific pages on the website that are being affected, try to pin-point the exact aspects of those pages that could be deemed as black/grey-hat. If it is the case that some of your webpages are ranking then you can take solace in the fact that your whole website hasn't been banned. So there is still hope to recover.

Try using OSE to check out all of your different anchor text and links, as well as looking through webmaster tools. If you can, contact these websites to have your link completely removed because at the end of the day, if your not ranking because of these links then they may as well be removed completely.

You could also attempt to remove your old pages that have been punished and create new URLs completely (don't redirect the old pages, simply delete them altogether) and just use the old content that was on them. This way you will get rid of all of the links to the punished page, and start a fresh new page with your old content. Re-index the pages through Google and slowly but surely, you will eventually start ranking again. Obviously this is not possible for your homepage, so maybe use this methods for some of your other pages and then put most of your effort into sorting out the linking profile on your index page.

I hope this has helped slightly and good luck!

Matt.

I think that a lot of people are in the same boat as you so don't worry, many sites have began the road to recovery after the recent updates.

To de-index a URl from Google, go into Google Webmaster Tools for your website, then go to 'Optimization'>'Remove URLs' then type in the old URL and Google will remove it from the search engine completely. This mayy take a couple of days though.

I would also then create a new sitemap once you have done the new pages and submit this through Webmaster Tools also.

Matt.

No problem, Gareth.

Regarding the distribution of PageRank. I gather a list of all the referring domains to the website in questions, then I lookup the PageRank for these domains (sometimes I use Domain Authority or Citation Flow - depends on your preference). Once I have a list of all the domains and their PR, I create a graph (bar chart) that shows the number of links coming from PR0 domains, PR1 domains, PR2 domains...

This is a nice visual display that you can see the kind of links coming to the site and usually gives a good signal of the quality of links coming through to the domain. Here's an awesome post by Pete Myers that goes through all of this - http://moz.com/blog/link-profiling-with-open-site-explorer

Now, in terms of what indicators I look for with regard to toxicity... I look for the following factors:

• Is the referring domain indexed by Google? If not, then it could be a signal that they have been de-indexed and I would remove this link.
• Is it a sitewide link that is part of a blogroll/footer/sidebar?
• Does the link come from a very low authority domain? (note: this isn't necessarily bad, but you will be able to see if the page has spammy looking content yourself)
• Does the link contain exact match keywords that aren't relevant to the page content at all?

These are the key factors that I look for but once you start analysing your link profile, you will be able to detect a pattern in the links.

Hope this helps

I think for your purposes, SEOmoz would more than be enough. You can carry out all of your keyword analysis, SERP rank analysis, etc all from here.

Alongside that, there are many free tools that you can utilise, most of them from Google. So Google's analytics, webmaster tools, website optimiser, etc, all work great and are free.

One area that I find particularly useful within the SEOmoz subscription is the open site explorer so make good use of that!

Try some of the free plugins that you can get for your web browser as well, they can come in extremely handy. SEO book do a great one for Firefox, and Mozbar is another great one.

Hope this helps.

Matt.

Hi Marisa,

I think what me and Billy are both saying here is to put most of your focus toward building niche-specific links. The other links will come, and it is actually good to have non-niche related links so that it looks natural to Google.

What I was trying to say was this if, for example, 80% of your links all came from motor racing websites, and your website is about cats, this can be confusing. If only 20% come from there, 20% from dog websites, 10% from directories, etc, then this is good.

Make sure that you don't focus too much on building non-niche specific links though as the most powerful links are the related ones. Also, completely agree with Billy regarding getting rid of those spammy .edu links. They could come back to haunt you.

Hope this has cleared things up,

Matt.

What I would do is to delete the old page and then create a whole new page. Because the old page is no longer on the server it shouldn't be punished for duplicate content. Just make sure that you ask Google to de-index the old URL and index the new one.

Bear in mind though that this is really a last resort method. But if you are having no luck at all with recovering from Penguin then this method could be more effective than just waiting it out.

Let me know how it goes and if you need any more info then just let me know.

Matt.

Taking from a recent blog post that I wrote today, here are a few tips:

• _Make sure that your webpage titles make sense and are relevant to the webpage content. For example, don’t have your webpage title as ‘New Shoes, Running Shoes, Sports Shoes – Sport Shoes Ltd’. This kind of title looks spammy in itself and will certainly not help with your click-through rate. Try something more along the lines of ‘Sport Shoes Ltd – High Quality, New Running Footwear’. You will have got in pretty much all of your keywords there but without the chance of being penalised.
   _
• _Check that the links on your webpages are relevant and that you don’t have too many. No webpage should have more than 100 links, and even that is pushing it. I would say that a total of 70 should be the most that you use. As well as this, make sure that the anchor text isn’t just a blatant use of an unrelated keyword; Google will notice this.
   _
• _Find out who is linking to your website to ensure that they have not been punished for carrying out ‘black-hat’ activities. This will only drag you down with them so use a utility like Open Site Explorer to check where you are getting links and check them out.
   _
• Make sure that you aren't keyword stuffing. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you have your keyword in your content 100 times (which would be a very obvious instance of keyword stuffing), but it can also be much more acute. With the use of more specific, long-tail keywords, try to refrain from putting them into text when they are not relevant, or just hiding them under image ‘alt’ attributes.

Hope this helps guys,

Matt.

Hi Colin,

No you can archive as many as you like. What I do sometimes, is if I want to dig a bit deeper into some of my accounts then I will make them active for a few weeks, then archive them and make a different one active. This is because I don't need to track all of my campaigns at the same time, but I like to keep a hold of the historical data.

Matt.

Hi Kathy,

I had a client that we recently did this for and I can say that this isn't true. What could have an effect on your rankings would be if you update to the new version and change all of the URL settings and page title settings, etc. Just make sure that you make a backup and keep your existing settings intact.

I'd start by setting up a blog on the website. I'd then write up articles related to any current offers that specific companies are running and embed the coupon code within them. Also, utilise socoal media as much as possible - get in touch with the companies that you list coupons for and see if you can run joint competitions across social media. Another great way would be to do some guest posts on other sites about topics like 'how to save some money through using coupons' etc and gain some links back to your site.

Hope this gives you something to go on!

I see.

I would presume that these guys have been penalised then. It may be that they are now trying to reindex their site and are still appearing in the listings but much lower now.

There isnt really a definite way of knowing if they have been banned, but as good practise, I would try and get any URL removed from a website that I had any doubts about.

You could maybe try contacting the Google Webmaster team to confirm this, but I don't know how useful they will be. Then again, its worth a try at least.

Matt.

Hi Will,

A C-block is part of the IP address of a website (xxx.xxx.CCC.xxx), for example, with my blog, the IP address is 173.248.188.141 - the c-block is 188.

Usually, websites that are all hosted on the same server have the same c-block. This is a way that Google can detect link-farms, where loads of sites are set up on the same server and used to link to your website. This is why it is good to have diversity in the amount of linking c-blocks.

Inevitably, you will have some identical c-block links but that's ok (and is completely natural). In terms of the links to your website, you have links from 130 root domains that are made up of 70 unique c-blocks. This ratio is perfectly fine, so don't worry.

Hope this helps.

This really depends on your CMS, but I have had some experience with this in the past so might be able to help out. Firstly, I would recommend having a good think about going with the solution... lightboxes have become a lot harder to use from a user point of view since the uptake in mobile device usage. If you're using one, make sure that it's responsive.

Take a good look at this article before you do anything - http://www.businessol.com/blog_posts/seo-javascript-lightbox-js-content/. It explains the SEO implications of using lightboxes and also gives some examples of out-the-box solutions that can be used.

I have used the following plugin before that has worked well:

http://codecanyon.net/item/jquery-lightbox-evolution/115655?WT.ac=search_item&WT.seg_1=search_item&WT.z_author=aeroalquimia

Hope this helps!

Matt

Hi Carl,

First step is to identify all of the links. Pull off the full backlink data from OSE, Majestic SEO, Ahrefs and WMT. Compile all of them into one master spreadsheet and then upload these to the Link Detox Tool (http://www.linkdetox.com/). This will give you a starting point for finding all of the toxic links - bare in mind that this is just a guide and you will still need to go over the link manually.

Start gathering webmaster details and record EVERYTHING in a Google Docs spreadsheet. Record the webmasters' contact details, URL, date you contacted them, the date of the response, any action taken, etc. Spend a good month on link removal to get as many removed manually as possible.

Once this stage is complete you will need to Disavow the rest of the links. Be careful here not to Disavow genuine good links. When it comes to the likes of SENuke links, you will want to Disavow them on domain level, i.e:

domain:jonnyhetherington. com

After you have submitted a Disavow, submit a reconsideration request and let Google know all of the bad links that were pointing to the site, why they were there and what you have done to rectify it - be explicit. Also, link to the Google Docs spreadsheet with all the details in.

If you get a negative response back then dig a little deeper with the links to Disavow - most reconsideration requests get knocked back the first time but ignore those that say 'you can't recover', because you can. Just make sure that your client understands the implications of everything. They will have further dips in rankings and traffic before it gets better.

Hope this gives you a good starting point.

Hi Morgan,

Unfortunately, there isn't a quick way to do this.

What I have done is use Open Site Explorer and downloaded the .csv file of all the linking domains to my website.

Now that I have them in a spreadsheet, it is a bit easier to filter through them. I have been drilling down on links from blogs with a particularly low PA or DA. Then just doing the hard task of checking to see if they have individually been banned by Google. You can do this by searching for their domain to see if they appear.

This is a slow process, but better safe than sorry, eh?

Hope this helps.

Matt.

This is very contextual. In basic terms, increasing your Adwords spend should just result in an increase in traffic levels. Now, this metric alone isn't always that helpful in your decision making process.

What is important is for you to be tracking conversions from PPC within Google Analytics. You can do this simply enough by just setting up a custom report in Analytics to see where your enquiries have came from and then comparing the PPC conversions over time.

What I tend to try to do is to then work out exactly how much one conversion costs me within PPC (on average, of course) and then compare this to my other online marketing activities, for example, SEO, Banner ads, social media, etc. Once you have done this you will be able to get a clearer idea on which medium is best to put more resources into.

Matt

The best place to start here is with schema.org markup code. It will allow you to markup the different parts of your product pages to signal to the search engines the different attributa that your product has.

An example of some of the code that can be used is shown below:

1. <div< span="">itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Product"></div<>

2. <span< span="">itemprop="name">Kenmore White 17" Microwave</span<>

3. <img< span="">src="kenmore-microwave-17in.jpg" alt='Kenmore 17" Microwave' /></img<>

4. <div< span="">itemprop="aggregateRating"</div<>

5. itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/AggregateRating">

6. Rated <span< span="">itemprop="ratingValue">3.5</span<>/5

7. based on <span< span="">itemprop="reviewCount">11</span<> customer reviews

8. <div< span="">itemprop="offers" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Offer"></div<>

9. <span< span="">itemprop="price">$55.00</span<>

10. <link< span="">itemprop="availability" href="http://schema.org/InStock" />In stock</link<>

11. Product description:

12. <span< span="">itemprop="description">0.7 cubic feet countertop microwave.</span<>

13. Has six preset cooking categories and convenience features like

14. Add-A-Minute and Child Lock.

15. Customer reviews:

16. <div< span="">itemprop="review" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Review"></div<>

17. <span< span="">itemprop="name">Not a happy camper</span<> -

18. by <span< span="">itemprop="author">Ellie</span<>,

19. <meta< span="">itemprop="datePublished" content="2011-04-01">April 1, 2011</meta<>

20. <div< span="">itemprop="reviewRating" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Rating"></div<>

21. <meta< span="">itemprop="worstRating" content = "1"></meta<>

22. <span< span="">itemprop="ratingValue">1</span<>/

23. <span< span="">itemprop="bestRating">5</span<>stars

24. <span< span="">itemprop="description">The lamp burned out and now I have to replace</span<>

25. it.

The itemtype tag signal what type of content the webpage is about. In this example, it is about a product. Then the itemprop tags act as labels to group the different information as the product name, rating, etc.

Full attribute lists can be found at http://schema.org I hope this has helped.

Matt.

Hi Victoria,

I wouldn't use names like 'Online for Equine | Horse Riding Clothing | Just Togs Latina Jodhpurs'. They are what your web page titles should be like (be aware the recent over-optimisation changes Google is making though).

Your image names should all be different and should be a couple of words long, just like i suggested before. So this could be:

'Riding Clothing'

'Equestrian Breeches'

'Equestrian Clothing'

Try to make sure the image names are in context though or you're in danger of being penalised by Google.

Another thing to look into is creating an image sitemap. This can help a lot with your image SEO.

Matt.

To concur with what Brent has said above; although we know that Google divides the PR passed around from links on a page, we don't know exactly how much by, or in some cases, they can actually just ignore the duplicate link.

I wouldn't worry too much about this particular case to be honest. It would be more of an issue if there were 10-15 links all pointing to the category page on each page of the website.

You could, however, maybe do a test over the space of a month or so by removing the second link and see if you get any noticeable improvement in rankings. If you do this, I would be quite interested to see the results, so let me know.

Matt.

As far as I'm aware, you would need a separate version of your page to be displayed. You can then geo-target these pages within Webmaster Tools or use the rel="alternate" hreflang="x". Check out this for more info - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

Hope this helps.

Hi Lorna,

I have recently done this on a Joomla/VirtueMart website.

You need to go in via FTP into your website's root folder and navugate to the following file:

/httpdocs/components/com_virtuemart/themes/default/templates/product_details/vmj_ritz.tpl.php

Once you have got this file you will be able to edit the actual product details page within your shop. I recently wrote a blog on on-page optimisation and there was a section on open graph/schema code so if you follow my instructions on there then it should help you out:

http://www.wowinternet.co.uk/blog/on-page-optimisation-with-a-view-to-the-off-page-seo/

Hope this helps,

Matt.

Hi Victoria,

This would probably be seen in a bad light by Google so I wouldn't recommend this.

Image SEO has several things that affect it. One factor is the filename of the image, another is the alt attribute, and another is the text around it.

Make sure that you name your image with a relevant keyword, for example, 'Riding Clothes', then you can also name the alt attribute this. Next, any text that wraps the image, try to make sure that it is related to the image. For example, use semantically similar words, like 'some of the riding clothing that is...'.

This will help you're images rank well.

Hope this helps.

Matt.

Hi Mark,

No problem.

Yes, you are correct to assume that. For each of the property listings you would need to do this (just like the example that Marcus has given below).

I think that all areas of the website should really conform to these search engine friendly URLs. It may take quite a bit of time, but it will help you avoid a lot of issues in the future (which I can guarantee you would have).

Matt.

Hey

These are the top social bookmarking websites that I use:

Twitter
Digg
Stumbleupon
Tumblr
Reddit
Inbound.org
Pinterest
Buzzfeed
Delicious
Fark
Slashdot
Newsvine
Burpalicious
Technorati
Blinklist

That's just to mention a few! Hope this helps.

Matt.

There is a solution for this by using server-side PHP tracking to monitor your PDFs, even when they're on subdomains - here's an awesome tutorial that shows you exactly how to do it - http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2013/06/04/tracking-pdfs-google-analytics-server-side/

Hope that helped

Hi Craig,

I often have the joy of trying to find where data is on Joomla.

What might be the case is that it is in a module. This is just a guess but I have found that on some websites, they keep the text (for one reason or another) within a Joomla module that is then linked to your homepage.

What is your website address so that I can have a quick peep at the code (this might help a little).

Matt.

Hi Christian,

No, this wouldn't be the case because what you are telling Google there is that "http://www.example.co.uk/properties/search" is the EXACT SAME page as the "/properties/search?page=1&commercialListingType=lease&propertyType=commercial/properties/search?page=1&commercialListingType=buy&propertyType=retail/" page.

For the likes of just search pages, you don't need to have canonical URLs because they are just dynamically generated search pages. Where you DO NEED canonical URLs is on the likes of category pages, product pages, etc.

So, in the case of Mark's website, the individual property listing pages (e.g, http://www.daft.ie/searchshortterm.daft?id=23606) need to have a canonical link because you could get to this page that has the EXACT SAME content with a similar URL (i don't know another URL to give the example here but a made up example could be http://www.daft.ie/searchshortterm.daft?id=23606keyword=dublin).

This is why you should have search engine friendly URLs to make it easy to understand which page is which. So having http://www.daft.ie/short-term/dublin/176-rathgar-road-apartment/ as the URL instead of http://www.daft.ie/searchshortterm.daft?id=23606 can make life a lot easier.

Has this helped to clear things up a bit?

Matt.

Hi Cormac,

I have had a little look around and this website seems to do what you need (and its free!):

http://www.further.co.uk/free-website-spellcheck/

Hope this helps

Matt.

Hi Steve,

I have seen quite a lot of these kind of Whiteboard Fridayesque videos created by SEO agencies. I think that they are a great way of making what would be a slightly boring article, quite enjoyable to watch/listen.

This kind of content will also encourage sharing through the likes of social media routes a lot more, which as I'm sure you are aware, can be great for building a few more links.

What I would suggest is to maybe incorporate your own spin on the traditional whiteboard Friday; something unique to you. For example, it could be something as simple as 'Blackboard Monday', where you get out the old school chalkboard! Or maybe using some sort of slideshow in the background. This will just help you stand out from the crowd a bit more.

Overall though, a good idea, and it is one that I have been considering myself!

Matt.

Hi Gary,

Yes that sounds like a server error. If you are getting a lot of 500 errors then Google will punish your website for this as they will assume that it isn't functioning correctly.

Take a look into the pages that are getting 500 errors and have a word with your web hosting company to see if they can look into the root of the problem with the server.

Once you have managed to sort out the issues with your server, go into Google Webmaster Tools and ask Google to fetch your site using Googlebot, then if there are no errors, re-submit the site to be crawled and indexed.

Hope this helps.

Matt.

No problem.

I think the URLs should be the primary focus, and if you need any help on this, feel free to drop me a private message, etc and I will help you out.

Matt.

Hi Georg,

It really depends what the link directory consists of.

From what you have said, as they have their individual page with all of the information about the website, title, etc, then this seems like a very legitimate directory.

What I think your task should be is to police the information on the individual pages. Look to see if there is use of the linking website's keywords on there, and if so, remove them. Keep only content that is relevant to the website that is being linked too.

You could add on the 'nofollow' tags to the links if you like, however, I think the most important thing is to just manage all of the pages to ensure that they are serving their purpose as a directory and not just a link network. If this is done then it should be perfectly fine.

Hope this helps

Matt.

I think that as long as you are offering something to users then it is definitely an interesting and credible way to build links.

If you simply dictate back what Rand is saying in the Whiteboard Friday vids then no, but if you add your own expertise and insights to the points that have been discussed then it would be great.

I know I would be interested in something like this.

Matt.

Hi there,

This is quite a tricky question and, unfortunately doesn't have a definite answer.

As long as you have set up the 301 redirect in your .htaccess file correctly and have informed Google, then this is all you can do. From here, it will depend on when Google next crawls your website (this differs per website). It could be today, tomorrow, next week, next month...

There are ways that you can get Google to crawl your site more often though. Add regular content to your website, submit a sitemap and keep it updated, etc.

At this point though, it is a waiting game.

Hope this has cleared things up,

Matt.

For the link audits that I do for my clients, I use a variety of different tools. With link analysis, the more tools the better really. The tools I use are as follows:

• Majestic SEO
• Open Site Explorer
• Ahrefs
• Google Webmaster Tools
• Yandex Webmaster Tools
• Link Detox Tool

I compile all the link information from the first 5 tools mentioned and then import them into Link Detox tool. I can then start manually analysing the links and highlighting any potentially toxic links. Next step is using BuzzStream to find the contact information for the toxic links and then I compile a separate spreadsheet for this. I also put together a graph that shows the distribution of PageRank from external links within Excel - this is a good visual cue for the client.

Hope this helps.

Within your title tag, you shouldn't generally use connecting words like 'and', 'is', etc. Stick to just using 'Holidays Ireland' within this part of your webpage.

For the META description you should then use connecting words to make it coherent and understandable to users. The META description doesn't actually play an effect on your SEO rankings but remember that it will show keywords in bold if a user has searched for 'Holidays in Ireland', which will increase your click-through rate.

Hope this helps

Matt.

Hi Craig,

You have a couple of option here. First thing I would do would be to analyse all of the links going to these pages. If there are any pages that you would say the links are actually of value then set up a 301 redirect to another relevant page on the site.

Alternatively, you could ask for the manual removal of links to the pages via the Google disavow tool. If there are only a couple of links going through to the old URLs then I wouldn't worry too much. I would just spend a while analysing and prioritising which pages need to be redirected urgently and then take a deeper look into their links.

Hope this helps,

Matt.

Hi Lauren,

What I would say is that it looks like you're doing everything right with your redirects - redirecting dynamic URLs through to keyword relevant URLs will work much better for SEO.

Regarding the on-page links... if you have a lot of on-page links, it means that each of the links passes a smaller proportion of PageRank around the website. This is particularly important for your internal links. For example, if you have 10 links on a webpage, each of the page you link to will be passed 1/10th of the PageRank value. This can be really important on your homepage to try and pass as much of the PageRank to your key pages of your website. If you instead had 100 links on the page, you would only be passing 1/100th of the PageRank to each page.

Having minimal links on a page is important, as long as it doesn't interfere with user experience. I would say a health number is between 20-40.

Hope this helps.

Hey there

In terms of your question of 'will it take away from the 'Audi A4' term if you put in further characters to the page titles, the answer is no.

The page titles should reflect the page content, and should also not be too short, as well as too long.

By putting in extra words after Audi A4 will only increase the amount of possible search terms that can gain entry points to the webpage. As good practice, aim to get your webpage titles between 40 and 65 characters as this is the optimum amount.

As my suggestion, go with option B, however, try doing a bit more keyword analysis to find what users search to find an Audi A4. From a brief look on Google's keyword tool, I can see that there are many searches for the product name plus engine size, i.e. Audi A4 1.9 tdi (49,500 monthly global searches). Judging by this, it may be good to put in the brief specification into the webpage title.

Hope this helps

Matt.