Welcome to the Q&A Forum

What is this conspiracy theory EGOL?

Hey, Okay, couple of things. It seems the SEOMoz crawler is picking up the WordPress shortlink. This is not really a problem and the two pages have the same canonical URL and both feature this exact piece of markup. So, these two pages: http://www.finalduties.co.uk/probate/mother-and-daughter-found-guilty-of-forging-will/ href='http://www.finalduties.co.uk/?p=1011 Both feature: Explained What we are seeing here is not duplicates but the seomoz crawler just not picking up the canonical for some reason so this is kind of misleading. I have seen this before though and will flag it with Dr. Pete as he fed back onto a previous discussion about this. So, you could ignore this. Or, you could remove the shortlink url for cleaner reporting. Either way, I would not worry about it too much! I added a line to your functions.php file that will remove the shortlink (and tested it). remove_action( 'wp_head', 'wp_shortlink_wp_head', 10, 0 ); I then commented this out with // so if you want to remove the shortlink to simplify the reporting then just remove the // from functions.php (or give me a shout). Hope that helps! Marcus

You know, I was going to mention that you could use the disavow tool if you suspected negative SEO.  My issue with this, though, is that I think that the vast majority of people who think they have been affected by negative SEO really have not. I regularly get people telling me that someone is negative SEO'ing them when really they've just picked up some of the low quality odd backlinks that most sites get. There have been many discussions about whether or not negative SEO exists.  I think that it can happen but that it doesn't happen often.  So, if you were very confident that you have been negative SEO'd then yes, this is a place to use the disavow tool too.

Oh erm..me neither cough

Thank you. Can you also not only check if the visitor is coming via search BUT also keyword used so I can make my notices more specific?

The trick is finding someone that covers your sector. If it's an e-com site, the Internet Retailer Top 500 is popular and a newer list from website magazine: https://www.internetretailer.com/top500/ http://www.websitemagazine.com/web100/2013/ There are a variety of comercial services: Compete.com alexa.com comscore.com Many vendors work with a large number of sites and get access to their analytics, and it's not uncommon for them to publish aggregate benchmarks from their client bases: http://www.rimmkaufman.com/thought-leadership/quarterly-reports/ http://monetate.com/research/#axzz2MP5G0Wug

Always take a deposit and also get them to sign a contract outlining what your going to provide and what you expect from them.  It then stops any issues over service levels and also it makes sure you get paid. I always get 50% upfront for once of projects and then first payment upfront for any monthly work. Contracts are the key and also your terms and conditions are key.

Could also create two Advanced Segments, one showing traffic only from Safari, the other showing all traffic except from Safari, then compare the metrics to see how the Safari traffic differs from that which is not Safari (assuming it does).

Hi sherohass and Wendy Ang Thanks for your replies! Ha, I like the one about Google continuously changing their  algorithms to their own benefit. Yeah, even though some people would disagree, it's a constant battle with a monopoly that has grown out of proportion. Therefore, if you want to rank profitably before 10 years have gone by and before you've smothered your identity across all them social networks out there, I believe there is no other way than applying a bit of black hat. Personally I don't do heavy black hat (some I guess you even do unintentionally) as my knowledge in the area is not good enough to risk it and loose out altogether. But as mentioned before, it's annoying to see some keywords crawl up 3 positions, while another one gets the boot with a 25 positions drop. Well, so long...

May I know which keyword you have searched ? Google gives priority to local results in some of queries like pizza, restaurant etc.

Apologies - My linked source was a little outdated but it did indicate it would become more widely adapted

The only time I would expect that is if a marketer is using the Google URL builder and put "Scrabble dictionary"  as the keyword.

Thanks, Miriam. Yes, you are right. I have already asked for help and a budget, but things are moving slowly, even with getting images and video content and it is, of course, frustrating, since I want to improve the results sooner. Basically, I am dealing with old-school people who still don't get online marketing and look at it as a necessary "evil" so my hands are tied. I am making progress at convincing them, although at a turtle-like pace. Thank you again.

I have several clients like this.  i have a client with 5 locations in New York City.  I built one website and setup one Google Places + account.  I then setup, registered and marketed the 5 locations under the one Google Places account.  Setup a Google Places account for the main location and you then have the option to add more locations. I build citations for each individual location and link build for each location.  I even do separate press releases for each location. Basically build one website and market each location/page separately.  You are correct in stating the obvious that you will lose domain authority by developing multiple websites. Hope this helps. Regards, Gary

Woops, so it does. Must have mis-typed when Ctrl+F'ing

Ayaz is again correct here - responsive design lives entirely on the front-end and utilizes CSS3. Essentially, it adjusts/resizes content depending on the viewport/browser, so as screen sizes get smaller, the content layout adjusts accordingly, certain elements disappear completely, etc - but it's the same URL/source code, so there's no need to detect the user agent and redirect to a separate mobile site. Requires no particular server technology or environment, but you may find your content management system, if you're running one, makes it difficult to implement - though most currently-updated CMSs, like WordPress, are starting to integrate it.

I meant anger - just short-hand for "haven't used it on anything live". I've played around with demos etc but haven't used it personally on live projects. I believe they're doing what's called bandit optimization in the statistical literature. Fascinating area of study. I like it from a mathematical perspective - though I prefer declaring a specific winner and then implementing that version rather than always having the split-test software running and serving up variations. It feels tidier, easier to maintain and results in a faster website...

Hi MagicianUK, Very good question. Linda Buquet did an awesome piece on this topic just a couple of months ago. Suggest you read: http://localsearchforum.catalystemarketing.com/local-seo-ranking/849-local-keyword-research-tools-tricks.html Of course, there is not going to be an answer which speaks to every case, but Linda's research is very illuminating. Hope you'll find it helpful!

I always try to improve my designs for the users because i like to do it this way. It poses a more complicated challenge. The performance it's now my top 1 priority (Since mobile traffic came along. Damn 3g you're slow!). Guess i've to spend some time on the link building but i will try to avoid it if i can. Thanks for the info guys

May have been a mistake but the main reason is that the .com was a hybrid mix of html and wordpress and ever since I added the blog as 'part' of the site it only made the Panda issues worse. I was originally hit by Panda 1.0 and have never been able to shake it off. If you look at the wayback machine for the site you will see that it has completely changed.  Then Panda 20 struck and left me holding my tail meaning that 98% of my pages were not even showing up in the serps.  So I was thinking that moving only the wordpress install and then porting over the html pages into wordpress will give it a fresh start. But since I have done that, now nothing is ranking, last week the home page at least appeared in thh top 5 for the brand term. But that has me concerned because the majority of the backlinks are branded or at least the url, so if I can't even rank for my own brand it seems like this whole change killed it completely at this point. You mentioned 6 weeks for one of your changes, perhaps I still need to be patient with it. Now that the site has been ported into wordpress on the .net, perhaps it's best to move that back to .com since the url has a pretty solid MozRank compared to .net. I know doing that will completely screw up the rankability for month or three though. So I really am at a standstill as to how to procede with this project to get back into big G.  Every other traffic source is doing fine, but for some reason as we all know that G traffic just tends to taste better.