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Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.
Moz has their own list of recommended SEO providers who they vouch for which can be found at: http://moz.com/community/recommended. You can also look for Moz Associates, like Dan Shure of Evolving SEO, who Moz trusts to provide expert advice on the Q&A forum.
Have you tried the SEOMoz LinkedIn group? I know they have a jobs board where you can post job opportunities. You could also SEOs on Twitter to share your job opportunity to their followers. Also Craigslist is usually good for receiving a lot of resumes of candidates.
They shared some insights of their production process here: "Behind the scenes of SEOmoz's Whiteboard Friday" http://wistia.com/blog/behind-the-scenes-of-seomoz-whiteboard-friday
In terms of SEO, subfolders are almost always the better option. If your brand pages are in a subfolder, they will receive more of a boost in rankings because they are considered part of the main site by search engines. More of the link authority and trust will be passed to pages in a subfolder. Subdomains are considered as a separate site by search engines - for example the blogs like sitename.blogspot.com or sitename.wordpress.com and receive little trust and authority from the rest of the site.
I try to stay away from these paid submission infographic sites. There are plenty that publish your infographics for free. I agree that it is better to target sites that are relevant to your industry. If someone has published a similar infographic in the past, use Google image search to find out where it was published. These sites may also be interested in publishing your infographic.
The toolbar PageRank doesn't update very frequently so if you moved your content to a new page it makes sense that you don't see any toolbar PageRank right away. It may reappear when Google makes their next update. However, the pages probably do have actual PageRank since the 301 redirect should transfer the authority from the old pages to the new pages. It just doesn't register yet for the toolbar PageRank that you can see.
I don't think you would get credit for your content if it was within an iframe and hosted on a different site like DotSub or YouTube. If you Google "HTML scroll box" you can find some good tutorials on adding an HTML scroll box. This should make it easy for Google to crawl and index the text content as part of your page but not take up too much space for human visitors.
If you also post the transcript on YouTube then I think this would be considered duplicate content by search engines. After the Panda update I would be cautious about having tons of duplicate content on your site.
Google wants to keep natural results and paid results separate and does not consider SEO factors when calculating your Adwords quality score to the best of my knowledge.
You also need to attract/build links to your site. If other sites are covering the same topics as you are and they have higher link authority they will push you down the search results. Also make sure that the topics that you are covering are not super competitive, otherwise you have little chance of showing up on the first page of search results without building sufficient link authority. If you have the Mozbar installed, you can enable the SERP overlay and see if sites ahead of you in the SERPs have greater link authority (PA and DA).
Mike Arneson has an excellent Mozinar where he shares some helpful Author Rank tactics. What specific tactics are you doing to boost the Author Rank of your site?
You should email Jen Lopez who manages YouMoz. You need to include the HTML for the link in your bio on your profile page. If you change your Bio now, I don't think it would change your by line on past blog posts. The SEOMoz team should be able to help you.
I have seen several highly competitive verticals where a lot of exact match anchor text links are really effective even if they are from lower quality sites. I don't think this will work forever but I think it works too well in many cases in the present. I like to think that quality links are the way to go, but I've seen a lot of cases where a high number of low quality links are winning.
That's a good point. The two-way street prevents people from faking the authorship of pages on your site. Thanks!
The only issue is whether the expert would want to say they are a contributor to our site if they only have contributed one page (the interview). It may help to suggest that it would give them more authority in their subject area from Google's point of view.
I haven't paid a lot for a domain name but I would definitely consider 5 figures if the domain was an exact match for a really important phrase. In my experience Google still gives a ton of bias to exact match domains and if that goes away you will still have a strong advantage over competitors because people are likely to link to you using an important keyword phrase in the anchor text. When considering a price, I would suggest looking at the potential extra traffic you would get if you had the exact match. If you assume that the exact match domain will help you rank #1 for an important kw phrase, the ROI could be very good.
Google says to make your pages as useful as possible, but it considers site speed into its ranking algorithm. How do you balance adding rich media like embedding useful YouTube videos with keeping your page load times low?
If you are using the Facebook social plugin on your site like ThinkGeek does for comments:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/ed6b/
Are there any positive social signals from people leaving comments that could impact the SEO of the page?
I searched the text of some comments in quotations in Google and it appears that the first few comments are indexed but most are not.
Suppose a site is related to your industry and has a relatively good domain authority of 49. However when you look at their link profile it is mostly directories and they don't seem to have any natural links from quality sites. Would you still take the link if they offered to publish your guest post?
I like this approach and it is something we have tried recently with the goal of being the best page available on the Internet.
There is also data that suggests longer pages tend to rank better, although it isn't clear to me if this is causation or correlation.
I recommend the article "How Content Length Affects Rankings and Conversions" if you haven't seen it on Quicksprout. There may be some good data that you can show your client to support why you should create the long guide.
Suppose you have a page on your site that discusses a topic that is similar to another page but targets a different keyword phrase. The page has medium quality content, no inbound links, and the attracts little traffic. Should you 301 redirect the page to a stronger page?
What are your thoughts about the following scenarios.
Scenario 1: You purchased a banner ad on a site for $50. Then you notice that the site accepts guest posts and you contribute a guest article which has a followed link.
Scenario 2: You pitch a guest post to a blog and they say sure but first pay us $50. You say, I can't pay for links but how about I buy an ad spot for $50 instead in appreciation of you reviewing by submission.
Scenario 3: You pitch a guest post to a blog and they say sure but it will cost $50 to be published. You say sure and pay them.
Which of these would go against Google's guidelines and be considered a paid link? It seems like they are all buying links to a different degree, but they would all be indistinguishable to Google.
Many people assume that .org means it is a non-profit but many people use .org TLDs for commercial purposes.
Google's Matt Cutts has said that the TLD (top level domain) doesn't affect rankings.
Here is a quote from Matt Cutts on May 14, 2012:
"Sorry, but that’s just not true, and as an engineer in the search quality team at Google, I feel the need to debunk this misconception. Google has a lot of experience in returning relevant web pages, regardless of the top-level domain (TLD). Google will attempt to rank new TLDs appropriately, but I don’t expect a new TLD to get any kind of initial preference over .com, and I wouldn’t bet on that happening in the long-term either. If you want to register an entirely new TLD for other reasons, that’s your choice, but you shouldn’t register a TLD in the mistaken belief that you’ll get some sort of boost in search engine rankings."
Another thing to consider is that when you move your website to a different domain, you can lose rankings and authority.
SEOMoz's link data is the best available in my opinion but you may want to consider looking at other sources as well like Majestic SEO and Google Webmaster Tools to supplement the SEOMoz data. Sometimes these other sources find links that SEOMoz doesn't have in their index.
Based on recent changes in Google, do you think that an off-topic guest post on a high quality domain will help you or hurt you or have no effect.
An example would be if you published a guest article on SEOMoz about SEO but your website sells basketball shoes.
As long as the low quality links are relatively low then I wouldn't worry about it. It is natural to have some spammy sites that link to you. Google probably ignores these sites. These spammy sites probably wouldn't respond to a link removal request anyways.
In the case of sites that are not adding the no-follow to advertisements, the most likely scenario according to Matt Cutts videos I have seen is that Google would disable or reduce that site's ability to pass Page Rank. The links therefore wouldn't help you but shouldn't hurt you either.
Suppose you have a page on your site that is a couple thousand words long. How would you determine when to split the page into two and are there any SEO advantages to doing this like being more focused on a specific topic. I noticed the Beginner's Guide to SEO is split into several pages, although it would concentrate the link juice if it was all on one page.
Suppose you have a lot of comments. Is it better to move comments to a second page at a certain point? Sometimes the comments are not super focused on the topic of the page compared to the main text.
They could identify if there is a higher than average number of anchor text links with specific keyword phrases. If your distribution of anchor text is very different than the average site in that niche it would be detectable.
I don't think it will hurt rankings for your other important keywords, it will just increase the number of keywords that attract traffic. Links from development sites should help your overall keyword rankings. To me, it makes sense that developers would naturally link to a site that has created a web application.
SEOMoz appears to have taken the approach you suggested with their development blog: http://devblog.seomoz.org/
Other examples:
https://developer.apple.com/news/
https://developers.facebook.com/blog/
https://developer.amazon.com/blog/index.html
I like the idea of 301 redirecting to a new URL, especially if you are planning to drop one of the products. I think that the domains are a tossup. From my experience, EMD are still very effective in many verticals.
I agree that you should look into possible causes for the penalty. Try the Panguin Tool (http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/) to see if your traffic drop aligns with a specific penalty. Did you receive any Unnatural Link Warnings in your Google Webmaster Tools? (if yes read this http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/06/backlinks-and-reconsideration-requests.html) If you know that you have some questionable links, try to have them removed or consider the Disavow Tool.
Suppose you write a guest post for an authoritative site, is it beneficial to claim authorship of the article by linking to your Google Plus profile and adding the site to your account as a site you contribute to? If yes, would you do this for dozens of sites? (since your contributor list could get really long).