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It seems like Yoast won't find keywords when they are links, too. Go figure. Anyway, use Yoast, but don't rely on it. If you know it's there and looks good for the reader, then that's all you need to worry about.

I don't see why that would have any negative effect whatsoever, but at the same time it shouldn't be very difficult to change the image source to the actual url instead of the server's ip address.

To start I would make sure you have your current site structure well mapped out and that they are working with the designer to make sure pages aren't being dropped. A great tool to use is Screaming Frog for this. We find with larger sites and ones with extensive blog content that is the biggest issue that any potential 301's are in place when the new site rolls out so as not to lose rankings from broken inbound or internal links. I'd also make sure the site maps are updated and ready. You may also want to make sure the architecture of the site hasn't changed dramatically for major pages. I would look to see what are your top pages for landing pages in Organic search and make sure they aren't being buried deeper in the site for no reason. So a page may have been mysite.com/awesomelandingpage and with a redesign it gets moved to mysite.com/genericfolder/subfolder/awesomelandingpage and it could lose some of it's link authority. Just a few thoughts....

Hi Christopher, The set-up you have at the moment is actually fine for SEO - http://www.fdmgroup.com/ resolves the website. http://fdmgroup.com/ employs a 301 redirect to take users and search engines to http://www.fdmgroup.com/: http://i.imgur.com/et4AKYV.png This is correct, http://fdmgroup.com/ would be seen as a separate "version" of the home page if it was allowed to load without sending everyone on to the "www" version via the 301 redirect. Furthermore, every page within the http://fdmgroup.com/ "version" of the website would be duplicated from the "www" version of each page. If you want to change to use http://fdmgroup.com/ instead, using that both on advertising and having that be the version of the website that resolves for both users and search engines, you will need to reverse that 301 redirect. This will mean that when people try to visit http://**www.**fdmgroup.com/, they are redirected to http://fdmgroup.com/. This is a simple process. However, it is inadvisable to go through redirection like this unless you really, really have to. When you redirect a URL with a 301 redirect, a large portion of the URL's authority is passed on to the new URL. Not all of the authority is passed though. As a result, your rankings and traffic can take a little hit for a short while. This is not usually a big problem, and usually resolves itself quickly but it is best avoided unless the redirection really has to take place. I am tempted to say that "it looks cleaner" is not the best reason to go through this change when your current set-up is totally fine and correct for SEO purposes. That said, you absolutely could reference fdmgroup.com in offline advertising for stylistic purposes. When people type that URL in, they'll be redirected to the www version just as they are now. This is pretty common because of the stylistic benefits of not including www in TV / print advertising.

Hey David,Nice analysis you did for nlpca.com. Can you help me out finding major issues with my site www.shoppal.in 2 Main things I need your suggestion for are: 1. Am I stuffing the keywords in individual pages like http://www.shoppal.in/zovi-coupons. Auto generated keyword "Coupon" is arriving several number of times on this page. Is it stuffing which can be taken as over optimization ? 2. Does you feel "rel=Canonical" should be maintained in individual pages. I am new to this and really need guidance. Regards

Exactly as Anirban says. We're seeing a lot of directory SEO questions lately, and it's worrying. Both the exact anchor text and the fact that directory links are more often than not junk is why you should remove them. If they were directories that were HIGHLY relevant to your business and frequented by people looking for your type of services, they might be fine. For instance, if you found a directory listing gardeners, plumbers, electricians and builders in Los Angeles and you happen to be a gardener in Los Angeles, there is some sense here. However, the vast majority of directory submissions we see are made-for-SEO and should be removed ASAP.

On the subject of articles and pages that list headings of articles.. any idea on minimum text needed before something is regarded as 'thin content'? I have a site with pages like that and was producing to thirty to forty pages per week (news items).  I had thousands of those pages and would delete old ones about once a year.  That site got hit in one of the first Pandas.  I noindexed those pages right away and the site recovered within a few weeks.    Now I continue doing the same.  The anchor text is two to six words that are perfectly descriptive of the content or something snarky.  Since the pages  are not indexed I don't think that they are a problem. I have had some slight panda problems that I think was caused by some pages that I added to a site almost ten years ago.  It was a lot of photos with two to three sentence descriptions.  So, I noindexed them and will beef all of them up to  a couple hundred words and the really good ones up to 1000 word articles with several photos.  But, I think that a couple hundred words would be adequate - but nobody knows for sure.

Absolutely - the authority the receive from being tied to the strong root domain and from the internal links they receive from the website allows pages to rank with no third party inbound backlinks. A lot of retail queries bring up pages ranking with only internal links - a query for [yellow dresses] in Google.co.uk has Debenhams ranking second. The site has no inbound links from other websites. You will see this over and over again - a competitor ranking lower for that query may take on a link development project to increase their page on yellow dresses' authority over the Debenhams page, and from experience I can tell you that that can be very profitable! However, in an environment where no SEO has taken place on these pages, the pages from the strongest domain will often rank very well with no deliberate effort.

Hi Mark Glad I could help! Regards, Gary

do you have any evidence that linking out can improve domain authority, I don't think it can., Matt cuts once said that it can be beneficial to link out, well of cause it can, but can it make you rank higher? The evidence shows it can make you rank lower, not higher

If consolidating the domains into subdomains is inevitable, then 301s are going to be the way to go. Just be careful to redirect everything to where it should go in the subdomain, and do it one chunk if you can. You don't want to 301 some stuff, then re-301 or do a second round later. Be as clear as you can to Google. once you are ready to move the site, do it all at once, so Google can clearly see that everything from the domain is now at the new domain. So yeah, wholesale switch, just make sure the client understands what he's getting himself into. There is no exact number with regards to traffic loss, chance of recovery, risk of things not going smoothly, etc. Make sure they are aware of all the risks and how to best lower the possibility of something bad happening.

If you haven't already found it, here is what you need to implement: Schema Markup for Job Posting.

Here's another excellent source of link building ideas Ivan - http://pointblankseo.com/.

I'd concur with Marie - the use of noindex, follow is the most appropriate in this case.

Have you tried browsing the site with the googlebot user agent? Could those sites have been hacked, and only show the spam if they think you're Google? I've seen that hack before, though don't know if any of those links have ever been in a sample bad link report from Google.

Thanks. This is what I figured, but I realized that I've never tried it before and I wanted to be 100% sure before potentially noindex'ing my homepage

Thank you both! Now when is the damn Penguin update coming?!?! hahaha I wish we could have an answer.

Hi Raymond, Either canonicalisation to page 1 or noindexing would do the trick here if the content has been duplicated. If you noindex, use noindex, follow so links in and out of that page benefit the website. Cheers, Jane

I would agree with Dean just to explain that the reason www.domain.es/en is better than en.domain.es is because the /en keeps the authority in your site rather than separating to a sub domain which sort of helps you a bit.

Look at how a lot of squidoo lenses operate, they may have 0 or only a couple paragraphs of unique content, but by pulling in feeds from other sources suddenly you have maps, blog posts, images, videos, etc and are a somewhat unique source.  Another thing to consider might be to pull in the scraped content with an iframe and make sure you have enough unique on the page to still be able to rank.