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Thanks Kane for sharing the article. There seem to be some communities which have very distinct taste, like Hacker News—I did need a different headline to make it appealing to folks there... Thanks.

Not necessarily, unless you already have something built and with enough authority on henryjewelers.com apple computer - apple.com abercrombie & fitch - abercrombie.com Tiffany & Company - tiffany.com etc.

Yes, this is a great video by Matt Cutts.  But I think he's mostly addressing how Google perceived people were trying to abuse their system, and what changes they made as a result. Basically, he's saying that a subdomain doesn't make a big difference to Google's search rankings, and that in the past, people would use subdomains so that they could get additional search ranking placements (one for the main domain, another for a subdomain).  He's made it clear that Google has put an end to this practice. What he doesn't discuss is whether putting content on a subdomain is going to affect how Google scores the site, and if it scores a subdomain separately. Most of the research out there still shows that the domain ranking is set differently for a subdomain vs. a subdirectory.  Perhaps this might change in the future, but the general school of thought is that if you put all of your inbound links, social media shares, and content development into one domain (www.domain.com), it will do better than splitting the effort (part goes to shop.domain.com and part goes to www.domain.com). Thanks!!

Thank you.  These steps are a part of our process.

The rel="canonical" tag needs to have the URL that you wish to be the primary designated URL. This tells the search engines only to index this version of the URL and no other versions, and it also tells the search engines that links to other versions of the URL need to be counted as pointing to the canonical version. So if your page is www.mysite.com/boats.php and you use www.mysite.com/boats.php?utm_medium=adwords, etc. then the canonical tag should be set to www.mysite.com/boats.php so the search engines don't bother messing with the URLs with the parameters in them.

Hey Chris and Kurt, Please do be aware that we've noindexed the majority of those pages, even around 100 that have unique content on. Our aim is to concentrate the site to a handful of select pages to see if that works first (as it should in theory). We've certainly paid a lot of attention to our content, which isn't a new thing for us. We've included videos of people unlocking the handset where we can - I've created some myself to broaden our reputation on Youtube, which also make their way onto our site. We have instructions for a large number of handsets on the pages, along with unique images and descriptions. I've even worked on numerous other "big" pieces for publication on our news pages, which have got links from the Washington Post, Huffington Post, TUAW, IntoMobile, etc and even phone networks. To manage it all, we noindex the pages with "thin" content and previously blocked Googlebot from going on them in the first place. Having unique content on all pages shouldn't be, and I don't believe is necessary (there are various examples to support that). We've even stuck close to the rules by incorporating noindex like a boss for content we don't think should be included. However, one of the kickers is that I've been reviewing our industry and our competitors, noticing time and time again that a lot of the ranking sites have even less unique content than we do. They stick solidly to a script, never creating a hint of unique content, even posting unlocking videos for unrelated phones on certain pages. Yet, they rank. They focus no attention to robots.txt or noindexing crap content and yet away they go blissfully into the SERPs sunset. These competitors certainly don't have the same links as us or comparably useful content. I'd consider myself pretty knowledgeable at SEO, yet this makes no sense. It's difficult to include all the same information on what we've done in these posts without making them stupidly long but a lot of the "standard" stuff, we've done. We've been working on getting this right for over a year, even tossing aside an extremely powerful previous domain (with some success). If Google were a person, I'd put a bag over their head and see how they like it.

Nadir- I'd always recommend putting in an Alt tag on images, to describe what the image shows. The Alt tag was developed originally for text-only browsers or visually impaired visitors to a website: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt_attribute According to the W3C's accessibility site: http://www.w3.org/standards/webdesign/accessibility "The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect." Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and inventor of the World Wide Web According to the w3Schools.com site, the Alt tag (attribute) is one of two required attributes for the tag: The tag has two required attributes: src and alt. http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_img.asp The Mozilla Develper forum says that setting the Alt tag "attribute to the empty string indicates that this image is not a key part of the content" https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/Img The latest version of Dreamweaver won't allow you to add an image onto a static HTML page, without using an Alt tag either. So, yes, you should try to always use the Alt tag, in my opinion. That said, Alt tags shouldn't be stuffed with keywords. If you do that, it will hurt you in the long run. Best practice is to describe the image. Hope this helps, -- Jeff

Could anyone provide a little more information on Whitespark?

Hi David, Typically, your main landing pages are going to be those that represent the city of location, as in: www.site.com/orlando www.site.com/miami etc. What I'm trying to understand is if you are saying you have more than one office within a single city (as in orlando office A, orlando office B, orlando office C) and are trying to hash out how to distinguish these same-city offices from one another. Is this the scenario, or am I not getting it? Please feel free to provide further details.

Do you have the penalty in available in your Google WT? What exactly does it say? Most penguin penalties I've seen are partial matched and affecting only some incoming links. Removing pages won't help as you don't know which ones are affected. Doing a link cleanup by going link after link asking for removal and then requesting a reconsideration may remove the penalty (in conjunction with the disavow file), but there's been several polls online and over 80% of the people who did this and got their penalty removed didn't see their rankings back. This is obviously true, as probably those manipulative links were the ones causing your high rankings and now gone you need to get some REAL, EARNED links to gain positions. Truth be told, no one can tell what will happen, and you can only try. The ultimate question always become: Is it really worth it? Or do I just start fresh (new Website, unrelated to the old one)?

When you say "table text", do you mean a process where you consolidate many pages into fewer pages, and where the content is presented in a way that gives one page much more depth of content? If so, consolidating many pages into fewer pages is helpful in certain situations. If individual pages themselves do not have enough text as a stand-alone page, you can consolidate them into fewer pages as long as the primary focus (topic /main keyword) across each of those is very much similar.  If there is too diverse a focus across pages, consolidating them can cause topical confusion on the consolidated page. That's the primary consideration I go with when evaluating content for SEO. Also, what about user experience - is it better with many pages, or is it better with consolidated content? That too matters and in fact, helps reinforce the issue of topical focus quality or harms it by making things confused (a page trying to do too many things for too many reasons).

Hi Ryan, try to move the sitemap to the end and leave a space before it. something like this: User-agent:* Disallow: /cgi-bin/ Disallow: /ShoppingCart.asp Disallow: /SearchResults.asp ... ... Disallow: /mailinglist_subscribe.asp Disallow: /mailinglist_unsubscribe.asp Disallow: /EmailaFriend.asp Sitemap: http://www.naturalrugco.com/sitemap.xml

Agreed - the hyphen will make little difference.

Are we talking "acupuncture" vs "acupuncturist", or are we talking "truck for sale" vs "pickup for sale"? More context along those lines would help in answering the question. In both situations you'll need to approach it based upon the keyword difficulty combined with a manual assessment of what's going on in the actual search results. If you search for "pickup for sale" and there are results showing for "trucks for sale", then you can be more liberal with your use of synonyms on the same page.

4 paragraphs is a bit much, but as long as there's significant content after that (more than 4 paragraphs) then you should be fine. The partial title shouldn't be an issue either.

Hi Ben,Where do you add the 'rel="nofollow"'? I can't seem to find it.

Hi Laura, I'm sorry that you're having this issue! The best bet is to contact help@moz.com and we can look directly at your campaign and see what's happening. Thank you!

Do you suggest we keep the site navigation link to the blog in its current location or move it some place else in the footer or in the header? If they are proud of this blog and want people to read it then it should have a link that is slappin' the visitors' face. The bounce rate for the blog is over 81%. What is a reasonable goal for a bounce rate for a blog on a business website? What are some tactics to improve the bounce rate? The best way to reduce the bounce rate is to give the visitor something juicy to click. If you want people to read a second article then featuring the best posts that your visitors will want to see, in a way that visually stands out and mentally speaks to the visitor. I would get rid of the wordcloud and change the category names to something more meaningful.  For example: "Church"... I would make it "Church Accounting"..... "Payroll" would be "NonProfit Payroll".  In the content manager I would change the visible title tag for this to "Church Accounting Software" and "NonProfit Payroll Accounting and Software".... Right now your title tags are simply "church" and "payroll".  Add more detail to compete for better traffic. The blog also need some visual appeal.  I would change that tiny gray font to something larger, blue and clickable - put more space between the lines to make them more readable. Do you suggest including a call to action to sign up for a free trial on the blog home page and/or individual posts? Yes.  And, a sign-up for people who want to receive an email message when a new blog post is published. Do these guys get lots of questions about the software?  If they do then "tips" might be good subject matter for the blog. My response here is not an answer to your question.  It is a starting point for a possible brain  storming session with the client.