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It seems to me that all the articles (http://moz.com/learn/seo/on-page-factors) written by seasoned SEO professionals are now obsolete if this website can rank so well yet doesn't even have some of what people consider important onsite SEO ranking factors in place.. That is a very interesting observation.  I have not thought of things in that way. But, hearing your comment, I would say that the comment is absolutely correct for a query like "pizza".   The results that I see are all local pizza shops, except for one wikipedia entry. When the query is about a product or service that is locally available then local businesses and organizations will dominate the SERPs.   A couple powerful articles might sneak in... like the wikipedia pizza article...   but they have to be on very powerful sites or very relevant sites... or sites that google can associate with the geographic location. SEO is not obsolete because most queries are not tied to a location.  My site gets most of its traffic from queries that are not linked to a geographic location. However, when a location is involved, it becomes important for the website to have locational information properly displayed on the site (such as address and phone in the footer) and be associated with other websites that are related to that geographic location.  These associations could be links, reviews, mentions, etc.

I completely understand wanting to target both. Since your title tag is too long, it seems to me that it would be better to choose one of the other to shorten it. Keep it in page copy and meta description where natural though... don't go changing that. But your title needs to be closer to 64 characters long. Plus Google takes into account pixel width to determine how long a title can be before it gets truncated. As to the redirect. Link equity does get passed with a 301. As long as the links are relevant, authoritative, and/or not spammy then that's a plus.

I think you're right to keep them on the site.  The biggest reason is probably so that people can still have access to the information through search and other means.  As for linking to them from the site, I think the same idea applies.  If you get a new follower and they love your content, they may want to read all of your historical posts.  And you shouldn't make it difficult for them to do that.  When I first discovered what is now one of my favorite blogs, I went back and read every post since it was started 3 or 4 years earlier.

Hey Chris, Don't get me wrong, I am with you in leaving behind the high risks, my frustration comes more from Google's SERP results and behavior on spam sites than what you say, but I dont think a footer link for a web design company produce any sort of threat or places a site on a "churn and burn" status or even high risk. Then again I bring MNS, quick cash in, affiliates and spam in mind when I see "churn and burn" so it might be me.

Hey Marc, Yes, you're right. Its better to be safe than sorry. Thanks a lot for suggesting. Appreciated...!

Daniel, Unfortunately, there isn't any tool that can tell you if you received an algo "penalty". The only way to know is looking at your organic traffic, if you see some drop from one day to another then you probably did. In any case, algo penalties are applied and removed in the same way, just fix what you think caused the issue and then wait

Fred, Indeed, we are using magento Blake

http://www.greatfirewallofchina.org/ is a great test of sites for China.  Not all Wordpress based sites are banned, but you should check yours. Also keep in mind that your site needs to be in simplified Chinese to be indexed by Baidu, and there are some other considerations like having a local TLD and loads of other things.  Here's a good article on Baidu SEO: http://searchengineland.com/the-b2b-marketers-guide-to-baidu-seo-180658

It's going to come down to just a couple of things: How well the content is written--what's the reading grade level score, are there grammatical errors, etc. How close the content comes to existing content on the web. I'm not familiar with these two companies, but from what you say, it sounds like #1 isn't going to be an issue.  And most likely #2 won't be a problem either--even though realistically they're going to be looking up the raw data from somewhere (Wikipedia!) and doing their best to completely rewrite it....and that's always a challenge. But the reason I don't think #2 is honestly going to be a problem is because right now, Google doesn't seem to be very good at spotting near duplicate content with even just light edits.  Or even WITHOUT edits, just with other content on the page.  As an example, search for this phrase (including the quotes) in Google (it's taken straight from Freebase, i.e. Wikipedia's back door): "The local people are mainly Maasai, but people from other parts of the country have settled there" Google finds and displays 96 YES NINETY-SIX pages before chopping it off and leaving it to the supplementals. Will this go on forever?  Of course not, Google is undoubtedly working at trying to handle detection of this kind of thing.  Certainly it isn't in Google's quality interests to list 96 pages all that suck the description of something straight out of Freebase.  But, this paints a picture of where they are today in doing that....and that tells us that they're a long ways from taking a run at content that you've hand-rewritten from other sources....even if it's a light rewrite.

Unfortunately I don't know enough of the specific intricacies of how each plugin performs for speed. But you pretty much named all the top plugins I can think of. What I am suggesting is, to choose your favorite plugin and then use caching and maybe even a CDN to help with pagespeed. Webpagetest shows you are using neither right now: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/140108_9E_b84581251c692e8e31f098c5f3ad5917/ - and it shows that images are not compressed either. So in other words, make everything else about the site as fast as possible. If you examine the waterfall view for example, there is a file taking over 1.3 seconds to load --> http://screencast.com/t/UooUNXsuiZ Here's one of the best posts I've ever seen on speeding up wordpress - http://www.wphub.com/tutorials/speeding-up-wordpress-website/

Hey there So Chris is right, this isn't always the meta description showing, but often snippets of text based upon what the searcher typed. But Google is getting the text from somewhere on the partner's website. One thing you should do is check Google's text only cache - type cache:www.domain.com/url-name (adding cache: in front will give you Google's cache - and then click "text-only" in the top right. Search for the text in question there. It's possible either the content is "hidden" somehow but crawled, or maybe it used to be there, and it's still in Google's cache even thought the current page is different.

I don't think there's a clear answer. Longer headlines are harder to share on some social media sites (especially twitter) and Google won't display much past 55-75 characters in search results. But from a user engagement perspective, I bet Huffington post is finding some success with the longer headlines. This probably has as much to do with how they display the headlines on their site, and also how they distribute the content and share, so it doesn't mean this is a system that would work for everyone. Best practice remains writing headlines between 55-75 characters. But best practices were made to be broken

I think Anthony's idea on this is a good one and would be worth considering. I guess it depends on how many of these you have rotating at any one time and how many URLs you therefore have to maintain. My thought on it would be to create a custom 404 page for your site that is a more pleasant landing page than regular 404 pages are. It could provide a nice apology that the content the link took them the person to is no longer available and show a number of anchored links for where the visitor may like to go to next, e.g. where to view other promotional flyers or other pages on the site which may be important to the visitor. By doing that you provide a better visitor experience. Here are the recommendations from Moz's page on HTTP status codes. I think these make a lot of sense: ----------------------------- When visitors reach 404 pages, they should be given navigational options so they do not leave the given site. Web optimized 404 errors pages should contain: notification that the user has reached a page that does not exist a search box a easy to understand navigation system so the user can potentially find what they were orginally looking to access a link to the home page ----------------------------- I hope that helps, Peter

I can see what your SEO person is saying, in creating a themed silo site structure. However, you can do this with virtual structural changes vs. UI changes. Also, if you are battling to get back on top less changes to what Google has already spidered the better. And I agree with Claudio as well, don't make it harder for Google to do their job. Review your content to review cross linking abnormalities as well as missed opportunities in 'theming' your site structure and content. Answer the question: Does this link from page a <-> page b useful to the reader / shopper and subsequently, the search engine.

I'm guessing the companies on the Moz recommend list are going to be a bit above the project scale and budget for this (and most) similar inquiries. I think this video about "How to Find a SEO Company" will be much more helpful. There are a lot of great SEOs out there. There are also some bad ones. As with any industry, sometimes, you get what you pay for. Sometimes you pay for the brand/recognition...but I would avoid going really cheap, as you don't want to hire someone who will potentially cause harm to your website. Watch the video above and best of luck.

Oh that is great. I've used it before but then I read somewhere in google tutorials that it can cause problems if you use it when it's not an emergency.

I would prefer to share your blog URL over here and I believe me and some other folks will help you do the basic audit and indicate you where the problem is! hope this helps!

Everything Alex said right on the money. With southeast Asia being your main target can I ask you have a specific part of Southeast Asia? But you're targeting because I normally do a lot of things that are targeting people that use Google however if you're targeting people that use Yahoo or Bing or some other search engine you may have certain things that will not work as well http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2107128/Asia-Search-Update-Yahoo-Algo-Transition-Goes-to-India-Google-Eyes-Southeast-Asia For instance you're going to want to have a domain with whatever part of southeast Asia you're targeting as I do not believe that Baidu , Naver, Yahoo or Bing allows you to Geo target with a .com or .net or .org The same thing goes for hosting you weigh want to make sure that you have an IP address out of that country and that you are being hosted out of that country if you're not targeting people primarily using Google all this is not a big deal I Google it is a big deal with other search engines http://m.clickz.com/clickz/column/2281703/getting-into-naver-3-seo-tactics-that-can-make-a-difference If you're not already hosting in Asia I would move your server to an Asian data center As far as Asia goes I my first choice would be Verizon Terremark they recently purchased edge cast which is a super pop there as well http://www.terremark.com/data-centers/asia-pacific.aspx I know Rackspace has recently opened up a data center in Hong Kong http://www.rackspace.com.hk http://www.rackspace.com/blog/the-rackspace-cloud-has-arrived-in-hong-kong/ Same with soft layer in Singapore http://www.softlayer.com/singapore-hosting As far as hosting goes I know and NNT has a very strong network in that area of the world https://www.ntt.com/resource-center/topics-asia/data/singapore.html http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1307684 http://www.rackspace.com/information/mediacenter/announcements/akamai/ Like Alex said a lot of work and a lot of high-quality content is what's going to really make you stand out. Then you're going to have to find out what the best search engine is for your target market in Southeast Asia I hope this is of help to you Sincerely, Thomas

It happened to me, too! This is what people said to my question http://moz.com/community/q/my-g-picture-stopped-showing-up-on-my-rankings-what-do-i-do The one thing I don't understand is how people who have written far fewer articles than I have still have their picture. They all seemed to be in a lot more circles on g+ than I do, but that could just a coincidence. I hope this helps you. Ruben

Hi Wayne, Is Indiana Accident Attorney the name of your website or are you purposely manipulating the title tag for certain landing pages?  I think that branding your content is fine as long as it is not manipulative.  For instance if you're changing the title depending on the page content I think that's a bit mis-leading and while it may not hurt you in googles eyes it's confusing to all humans who visit.  If you're consistent throughout or only modify it to say Indiana Accident Attorney Blog or some sub-section of your site that should be fine.  Moz.com uses the title tag the same way for branding purposes as do most CMS platforms out of the box. Good luck, -Nick