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Hi fellow Mozzers! We're handling the digital marketing for a UK-based franchise of a Canadian SaaS company, and I've noticed that a large proportion of their traffic has been coming from the US (not the majority, but enough to skew the figures). The Canadian arm of the business deals with the US market, but the majority, if not all, is direct traffic which seems to suggest they've seen the web address somewhere (not sure where though). Is there a search-friendly way to move this traffic back to the Canadian site? I know I can set up a filter for US traffic so it stops distorting the stats we're seeing (which I have now done), but my worry is this is causing a high bounce rate that may be impacting Google's perception of the site quality. The traffic has a 100% bounce rate (not surprisingly), so if we could find a best practice way of sending them to the Canadian site, that would be great. My first thought was a screen that appears for US traffic prompting them to the Canadian site, but presumably this would still count as a bounce as they're only on one page? Any help much appreciated! Cheers guys,
Nick

Hey fellow Mozzers! We're in the middle of working on CRO for a client of ours and we were going to try out Google Experiments for the first time. Following the click path described on the Google help page should take me to an option that says 'Create Experiment', but this isn't coming up - do we need to create the various URLs before it will let us set up an experiment, or has the system changed now? I've found in the past Google has a habit of updating its interfaces but not the advice on using the affected tools, so wondering if I'm looking at old information? Secondly, does the Experiment show a user the same variation of the page throughout their journey? What I mean by that is: their site currently has a real mish-mash of page styles, and I think a large part of boosting their conversions is probably down to ensuring consistency across the site as it currently seems like you're bouncing around different sites. But will this issue be made worse by running Experiments - ie, will I enter the site on Variation A, click a link and be shown the next page in Variation B and so on? If so, are we better off running the experiment on one page at a time and using what we've learnt to impact the next page? Thank for any help you can give! Nick.

Hello fellow Mozzers! We've recently rewritten the content for a cloud-based project management tool, they then asked about what they could do to rank higher. As well as suggesting the usual content creation methods to help build links (which it looks like they'll need a LOT of - the field is either made up of terms that have no searches, or are extremely competitive), I wondered if there was any way of harnessing the fact they provide a cloud-based SaaS - a 'Powered by...' notice or somesuch? The only thing is they provide a project budget management tool, so I'm guessing the site itself wouldn't actually be coming into contact with the tool? Does anyone have any experience / advice working on a similar scenario where you've managed to leverage the tool for links where it's cloud-based? Thanks in advance for any help! Nick.

Hey Mozzers! Something occurred to me the other day was that, while we can write title tags and meta descriptions to be within the character count and therefore appear nice and neatly in the SERPs, when Google et al decide to pull subpages out as further site links, it seems to still pull the normal meta description but with a far lower character count. As this looks untidy and could potentially impact CTR, is there a way I can amend the preferred text for the shortened version, via Webmaster Tools, for example? Thanks in advance for your help! Nick.

Hi fellow Mozzers, We're just in the middle of relaunching our website (a design agency), and I had a few questions re: SEO of our service keywords. The designers want the site to seem light on content, despite my advice that this would reduce the terms we can rank for. With that in mind, I was going to include advice pages that can be found via the site map, site search or text links but aren't promoted via the top level or second level nav. Another alternative I was going to explore was using pdfs for design case studies, so the site would feature a light case study, but with a more in-depth pdf available if wanted. I have located numerous articles highlighting how best to optimise pdfs, but I have a few queries aside from the technical standpoint. So: is this the best way to getting round the issue of keeping the site 'light' on content? are there stats that show CTRs on pdf pages over HTML? as well as optimising the pdf content and promoting them on our social media channel, is there a benefit from including them on the likes of Scribd, Edocr and so on (from either an SEO or simply from a promotional viewpoint, or both) Hopefully that's all clear! Nick

Hey Mozzers - happy 2013 to one and all, I hope everyone had a great festive season! Now we're all back into the swing of things, we're in the process of getting our new website up and running. We're a web and graphic design agency, and I'm putting together checklists to ensure we get new projects some coverage where deserved. There will be a different checklist for the different disciplines - brand design, packaging, web design and so on. For many of these disciplines, there are multiple news sites that we can reach out to when we have relevant stories - Dieline for packaging, for example. But for web design, any searches I do either show up CSS Galleries / portfolios (which I already have on the checklist under another section) or web tutorial sites. I don't seem to be able to find decent, trustworthy sites that exclusively feature web news. I'm sure they exist and it's just a case of 'can't see for looking', but does anyone know of decent sites that carry news stories about new websites going live? Obviously we know not every new site will be newsworthy - and indeed we wouldn't try to submit every new site we have go live for that very reason - but it would be good to have a clutch of high authority, well visited sites to turn to when we do have something of note. Any help is much appreciated! Thanks Mozzers!

Hi fellow Mozzers! I am just in the process of adding various reviews to our site (a design agency), but I wanted to use the ratings in different ways depending on the page. So for the home page and the services (branding, POS, direct mail etc) I wanted to aggregate relevant reviews (giving us an average of all reviews for the home page, an average of ratings from all brand projects and so on). Then, I wanted to put specific reviews on our portfolio pages, so the review relates specifically to that project. This is the easiest to do as the hReview generator is geared up for reviews that come from one source, but I can't find a way of aggregating the star ratings to make an average rating rich snippet. Anyone know where I can get the coding for this? Thanks in advance! Nick.

Hi fellow mozzers! In an effort to ensure we're exploring every avenue when launching our new website, I was hoping to find some useful broken links / resources that we could incorporate into our link building. We have used the standard tools for this (W3C, Xenu etc), but they all seem to have the same issue in that they reveal all the missing links on a site (although some don't actually tell you the page they are on), but you still have to sort them to see if the links/ resource is related to your theme. When you're on a niche site, this obviously isn't an issue, but on a site like Mashable (to use the example given in a recent SEOmoz blog) it could result in wading through hundreds of links to find one relevant one right at the end. Is there a tool that allows you to specify what theme links you are looking for from a site, or better yet one that allows you to check multiple sites for multiple missing themed links in one go? Or is the best way to export the list and just search the document for certain keywords?

Hello there, One of the sites we do work for is a chain of care homes. We are in the process of adding a page reader so any visitors they have who are visually impaired will find it easier to access the info they need. We're doing this from a usability point of view more than anything (given their target audience), but while looking to see if there were any accessibility news sites /directories we could leverage for some links I came across mentions of the old Google Accessibility search. It seems to have been before my time as an SEO, so I wondered: is this still relevant, or has it just been assimilated into the regular algorithm (the only mentions I could find were very dated) if relevant and separate from the main search, are there many who use it what other things should we take into account when trying to optimise for this (assuming it's still relevant, of course) Cheers guys!

Hi fellow mozzers! We are currently relaunching our website and are in the process of ensuring all our local citations are up to date and consistent. In doing so, I've noticed that there are still countless listings under our old address, which probably isn't doing our local rankings a whole world of good! I have been hunting these down by searching "company name" "old address" to bring up any references, but I wondered if there was a tool to find these quicker, in the same way Whitespark finds citation sources to begin with? Similarly, is there a tool that flags up listings that have the correct NAP info, but that has maybe been formatted differently enough so as to cause consistency probs? Thanks all!

Hello fellow Mozzers! I just wondered if there was any way of finding out what terms / videos people are searching YouTube for in the same way as getting rough traffic numbers using the AdWords Keyword Suggestion tool? Or even a trends-type tool to give rough indicators as to which terms are currently more popular than others. And what people's opinions are on whether to go after terms that people are frequently putting into YouTube, or terms that are popular in general and hope your video appears in the universal search? Cheers guys, Nick.

Hello all! While doing some routine health checks on a few of our client sites, I spotted that a new client of ours - who's website was not designed built by us - is returning a 500 internal server error when I try to look at the robots.txt file. As we don't host / maintain their site, I would have to go through their head office to get this changed, which isn't a problem but I just wanted to check whether this error will actually be having a negative effect on their site / whether there's a benefit to getting this changed? Thanks in advance!

Hi there. We've been approached by a company called AdInsight, selling their Clarity product for tracking phone calls. It seems to offer a great solution in terms of knowing what keywords are actually effective, and would be particularly useful for a number of our clients whose websites have traditionally low conversion rates on the sites themselves, but which (anecdotally, at least) seem to drive business. I read up on the kinds of software these products usually use, and found numerous concerns on the negative effects on local search (which is why I looked it up to begin with). Their rep, who talked me through the system, said part of the set up involves setting a default number for people without Javascript, and that each number is used once so is unlikely to be indexed. I then asked if this counted as cloaking, and he assured me that numerous SEO companies use this product, as do major websites with large internal web teams, and that they would not do anything to compromise their sites. My question is two-fold: Has anyone used this product, and if so did it have negative effects on the local search side of things. Would this count as cloaking, or is it an accepted method of tracking web conversions? Thanks in advance

Hi there. We have recently taken over the SEO for a five-star hotel who rank very well already for a lot of their main terms, largely down to the fact they have decent off-site strength (as yet very little on-page optimisation has been done, so they aren't appearing for some quite key terms). This off-page strength includes around 2000 links, giving the home page an authority of 63 in the OSE tool. However, upon looking at the links to check they were pointing to the most relevant page etc, I notice they have A LOT of spammy links, pointing to their site with anchor text like 'cheap cialis' or 'buy valium'. Clearly these aren't the kinds of links that should be pointing to a five-star hotel, but should I expect to see much of a drop by attempting to remove these links? We obviously want to clean their link portfolio up, but I'm not sure they would be too happy if all their top rankings disappeared - even if only temporarily, and even if done with the best intentions. I ask as none of the other sites we handle SEO for have had such a proliferation of these links, so I've not seen the ramifications in full. Any help would be much appreciated, along with advice on the best way to remove these links.

I have just noticed, while checking where our hotel clients rank for certain keywords, and noticed a panel on the left hand side called Travel dates. There was a check in and check out option which could be populated manually or by using a drop down calendar. But there's no submit button or anything like that. What is this panel for, and can any benefit be had from it, because from what I can see it doesn't actually do anything (unless it's not displaying properly on my computer?

Hello fellow mozzers, Our in-house CMS - which is usually good for SEO purposes as it allows all the control over directories, filenames, browser titles etc that prevent unwieldy / meaningless URLs and generic title tags - seems to have got itself into a bit of a tiz when it comes to one of our clients. We have tried solving the problem to no avail, so I thought I'd throw it open and see if anyone has a soultion, or whether it's just a fault in our CMS. Basically, the SEs are indexing two identical pages, one ending with a / and the other ending /index.php, for one of our sites (www.signature-care-homes.co.uk). We have gone through the site and made sure the links all point to just one of these, and have done the same for off-site links, but there is still the duplicate content issue of both versions getting indexed. We also set up an htaccess file to redirect to the chosen version, but to no avail, and we're not sure canonical will work for this issue as / pages should redirect to /index.php anyway - and that's we can't work out. We have set the access file to point to index.php, and that should be what should be happening anyway, but it isn't. Is there an alternative way of telling the SE's to only look at one of these two versions? Also, we are currently rewriting the content and changing the structure - will this change the situation we find ourselves in?

Hi there. I'm just re-reading The Art of SEO to ensure we have everything in place for our own website relaunch, and there was something that left me slightly confused with regards to sitewide links. As a web design company, a lot of our links come from sitewides on client websites, currently in the pages' footer region. Would these count as sitewide links, and would varying the target page and/or anchor text make these links count for more and be less of a red flag? Alternatively, is there a way we can get credit from the sites we have designed without running the risk of having our links marked down or ignored altogether by the search engines? (As an aside, it doesn't seem to have affected us so far, although it is obvious that only a small percentage of the inbound links are passing any real value - again, is this something we can rectify somehow?)