Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Yes, however keep in mind that as you remove links you may start to lose ranking. I would recommend removing some, the ones that you can, and start focusing on getting good branded links.

Since you already released these out to the wild, I would analyze which search results pages are bringing in traffic and use that analysis to create new category pages on your site. I would certainly block the search parameter in the Webmaster tools and in robots.txt.. Most internal search results pages have little content value and the engines now look at your site as a whole and if a certain percentage of the site is low quality, the whole site will be penalized.

Hi Bill, I wrote the article you mentioned, so should hopefully be able to help you out! When I wrote that post in March, I managed to get a secondary authorship rich snippet on a video result through what i could only pin down to tagging a G+ profile as the uploader element, in spite of Google saying  that the uploader profile must be on the same domain. http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=80472#1 Since the flurry of updates earlier this year, this doesn't seem to work any more and indeed, It feels like Google are settling on only providing a single rich snippet for a given result - unless there is the added "+1'd by someone in your Google+ profiles". the standard Rel=author box has also been reduced in size and if you receive multiple results from the same site, then you seemingly now only get one result with authorship mark-up and then the remaining links below. The main reason for my original recommendation was the possibility of a second rich snippet, with tha "mini-authorship" display which Google were seemingly offering at the time in conjunction with other snippets. Since this has now seemingly been canned, the recommendation is essentially defunct and so I therefore now Linking video:uploader to a profile on the domain such as http://www.yourdomain.com/blog/author/bill-alderson/ which I imagine will be correct if you're using WP and Yoast's plugin. However, I wouldn't expect adding the uploader element to return anything  specifically for you at the moment, given the way rich snippets currently stand.</video:uploader> I have updated the blog post to match this advice. Having rel=author to each page on your site wont affect the way Google read your sitemap, but it may mean that Google elect to show the non-preferential Rich snippet for your page, dependent on the search results. I have seen instances where this has happened on an ecommerce platform with a plethora of schema markup and Google then return authored results for product pages, rather than the ideal star rich snippets. As long as you have the Page locaton Thumbnail, Title, Description, Content_loc (for .mpg, .mov, .mwv, .mp4 files) or Player_loc for .swf files then Google should have all the info they need to provide rich snippets. Anything above this is ultimately a luxury and if you're relying on automated tools to create the sitemap as you have a large bank of video content - then in honesty, I probably wouldn't worry too much about it. I am yet to find a decent video sitemap generation tool, so am actually currently in the process of building one. The Wistia sitemap generator you mentioned should do the job just fine for you in the meanwhile. Cheers, Phil

I've had similar issues where sites smash it in Google but Bing doesn't give them many rankings at all. Don't stress, the amount of traffic those sites refer compared to Google is a joke. Maybe having Bing / Yahoo rankings look good on your reports, but it looks better when you are actually improving their search traffic via Google.

I used to have lots of #1 - #2 and even #1 - #2 - #3 - (sometimes #4) listings. I still have some - but not as many. Over the past few months Google is still allowing some of these but it is much harder to get two of your pages listed in the top ten positions of the SERPs. You can really stack them up on the second and third page... but Google seems to be forcing more domain diversity in the top ten positions.

Hi, Sorry I should have made it clear that the new domain name on the old website (or rather a copy of it) was to allow it to trade as a stand alone business. What I'm doing is Old Website - Re Branded New Website with all original content replicated and 301 across to keep rankings (1000+ top 3's). We will then add additional categories and products to expand. I am then left with a Magento website that I would like to "start afresh" with from the beginning and build it up as we have done over the last 2 years with the first one. This is where I have 1000+ products and need to know if I have to change the product descriptions just trying to save a lot of work!) even though Google can see I own both domains and host them on my own server.

GET 200 = All good GET 304 = <a id="sec10.3.5">10.3.5</a> 304 Not Modified If the client has performed a conditional GET request and access is allowed, but the document has not been modified, the server SHOULD respond with this status code. The 304 response MUST NOT contain a message-body, and thus is always terminated by the first empty line after the header fields. The response MUST include the following header fields: - Date, unless its omission is required by section 14.18.1 If a clockless origin server obeys these rules, and proxies and clients add their own Date to any response received without one (as already specified by [RFC 2068], section 14.19), caches will operate correctly. - ETag and/or Content-Location, if the header would have been sent in a 200 response to the same request - Expires, Cache-Control, and/or Vary, if the field-value might differ from that sent in any previous response for the same variant If the conditional GET used a strong cache validator (see section 13.3.3), the response SHOULD NOT include other entity-headers. Otherwise (i.e., the conditional GET used a weak validator), the response MUST NOT include other entity-headers; this prevents inconsistencies between cached entity-bodies and updated headers. If a 304 response indicates an entity not currently cached, then the cache MUST disregard the response and repeat the request without the conditional. If a cache uses a received 304 response to update a cache entry, the cache MUST update the entry to reflect any new field values given in the response. Hope I helped, Info http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html Thomas

i have had the same thing happen to some of my sites, google does not garentee to show them, it may be that they dont believe them, or simply that too many people have them.

Hi Autoczar, How is Google doing handling the annex that happened? Are the properly listing competitors who used to be in city B as being in city A as of 2007? This would be my main concern, as Google is sometimes very, very slow about understanding and implementing changes of this kind. I've run into so many scenarios in Local where the business owner is confused about the best way to proceed, given the various rules about address and citation handling, but I want to let you know that this is the first time I've run into your specific situation. I think it would be worth your while to post your question to the Google And Your Business help forum, which is staffed by Google employees as well as a lot of smart Top Contributors. I think your situation is unusual enough to inspire some kind of response, and I'd be really interested to hear what that response would be. Here's the link, in case you don't have it: http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/business I would title the question something like: My City Annexed By Larger City - How To Proceed You will need to be willing to give full details as to what your Google+ Local listing is and what your cities are in order to receive the best response. I hope you can give this a shot and receive some useful advice straight from the horse's mouth on this. If you do, I'd love it if you would update this thread with what you heard. Good luck! Miriam

Well like I said it depends on what keywords you target... So if those keywords are ranking high on BING but not providing good traffic, then it is a waste of time. Until you get top positions in BING, then you cannot know for sure. Here is BING's keyword tool. In the last 6 months the word "Google" was searched in bing 1.3 billion times.

I have been in a similar situation myself and it is a judgement call - I always tend to air on the side of caution. How I look at it with a lot of the paid directories is the fact that they aren't purposefully manipulating search doesn't mean they aren't going to be hit at some point and when they are you don't really want to be associated with it in my opinion. A lot of business directories purely exist on customers paying for entry and advertising and are not therefore overly concerned with their SEO. You could, as I have done, ask to talk to their development team/technical - you could also analyse whether they are using no follows on links and ask for examples of their white label sites. Depends how much time you want to put into it and whether you think it could be truly worth using them if you weren't endangering your SEO work..

Thanks for your input

I've actually seen this question before (I looked but couldn't find the discussion) sorry. What I seen some folks offer as advice is to try and rotate your anchor text if possible. Nobody gave a solid yes or no don't do it, but most cautioned that it seemed risky. My thoughts are to try and use some dynamic anchor text, about the only thing that will be different from site to site is the domain name so.... Website Design of XXX.com By DonFord.com just use php or asp to pull the domain name for the anchor text. Furthermore, it may be prudent to create a page for the client on your site and point the link there. A simple outline of their service, and your service a few images and maybe ask the client for small snippet about the work you did for them. This would prevent kathousand links going to the same page, and still bring in traffic from people who like the site you designed. Most people probably can figure out to hit your logo or something to go to your homepage. The added benefit is it makes it easy to see how much traffic each one of these sites sends your way. My 2 cents, hope it helps.

You wont get notified by Google if you are hit by a Penguin (the beak marks in your shins will tell you instead). Have a look at your link profile, use Opensite Explorer but also check your Google webmasters account. Look at the link profile, not just the variation in anchor text and the number of sites linking to you but also the number of pages. We've seen an account that looked perfectly natural until you see the one directory listing (designed to be from one page) that actually resulted in over 10 000 links from dynamic pages - that is unnatural!

CPC is a function of many things. One of which is the ultimate value of the good/service being offered.  So, the CPC of a keyword relating to a specific medical condition (cancer) may be much higher than something generic (like televisions) even though tv's may have much more competition.

This question is asked over and over again in the SEOmoz Q&A. "Wah! My DA is the best but my site isn't #1. WTF?" This question rarely gets a satisfying answer and when it is answered well the person who asked the question is usually not happy to hear the truth. This is one of the most widely used SEO tools on the internet and people don't know what it means. Since these same questions recur so often and with such passion SEOmoz should address it with a detailed article that is obviously posted where the people who use this tool will clearly find it. That will ensure that a good tool is used properly and so many people are not going around with their panties in a wad.

Found thread at WMW that talks about Google "Brand Jamming" that discusses this big mess. http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4464096.htm Thanks for the reply.

I know rank tracker, but you should have your settings such that they don't count you as being 'logged in' to any service. With Google's SPYW and other social integration bits and pieces, the only steady rankings are the logged-out ones. Being 'logged into facebook' on its own shouldn't mess your rankings even with Rank Tracker.

No worries We release property every week and I do a blog post about each one, probably 2-5 properties each week then smash it out via social media (facebook, twitter, linkedin, etc). This seems to work quite nicely, though I only have to sell it once to be fair. After this, we will also email the property out (with new content from that week), this gives that page a massive boost in traffic, which definitely slows down the process of dropping off the rankings, in my opinion. So perhaps do a weekly email about new products and include some relative content in the email as well (as Matt said, link to the products in the content too!) Doing this I have been steadily climbing up the rankings for my main keyword, last week I went up 15 ranks according to SEOmoz Pro! (It’s been about a month or two since I started doing this). I think my main problem is that the site has a lot of old pages. Also the main pages need a bit of on-page optimization, so this may be something to look at as well J