Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks Simon, agree analyzing site analytics is critical to understanding where and what to improve.

Officially it is said that the CC of a TLD makes no difference for the ranking if you do your SEO homework right... I would agree with that in general BUT inofficially the CC of your domain matters in your case - .re is not comparable to  a .com domain! Take a look at the serach results: there are only a very few examples that a .re is ranking on high position outside it`s dedicated country. If a CCtld spells the name of your project it has no real influence or relevanve for the googlebot... it`s just a nice thing for yourself, marketing and maybe the visitors of your site. You dont need to buy the .com domain but if you can do so, I would always prefer this solution. This is always a question of money and if its worth it for you. My opinion is based on long-term experiences. If you rename your project it`s easy to transfer linkjuice, authority etc. by using a 301 redirection...

Hello Colin, Since it sounds like you're not using any kind of CMS, and are coding an HTML/CSS site yourself, it will be a little more difficult to find an "app" to do this since most publicly available apps/plugins/widgets/modules are created for use in an existing CMS. There are some scripts out there built with JQuery that might work. Just Google "JQuery gallery" or "JQuery lightbox" to get started. If one doesn't have everything you want you should at least be able to get 90% of the way there, and can either tweak the code yourself or hire a developer to get the rest of the way there. This one looks promising: http://fancyapps.com/fancybox/ Also check out: http://www.intelliance.fr/jquery/imagebox/ http://www.pirolab.it/pirobox/ http://www.no-margin-for-errors.com/projects/prettyPhoto-jquery-lightbox-clone/ It may also be possible for you to use one of the CMS-specific plugins with some tweaking. You could try out some of these on a free Wordpress site to test them. When you find the one you want you could try customizing the code yourself, or hiring a developer (having an existing plugin for him to see/use will save you money) to do it for you. Good luck!

Thanks Tom, I had already mentioned to the client that a resource for film and production editors might be the way forward, as his blog posts that are performing best are of this nature already. I don't think they have the budget for much offline advertising, so although your first suggestion is also good, I don't think it would be right for these guys. I'll do some research on other resoucre websites for the industry and then discuss with the client again. Thanks.

Good question BeytzNet and good answer Schwaab. High domain authority comes primarily from quality backlinks and, to some extent social likes and sharing (I think the strength of the social signals will continue to grow more important as time goes on).  So, the question really is, how do you build links and get social shares with a site that has no text on the site? First, you don't need text for people to have something they think is compelling and worth sharing a linking to.  There are plenty of other forms of content that people link to. Beyond that, there are really 3 ways to build links to a site: Create content that is valuable to people and post it on your site.  You can get social shares by posting things on other sites (Facebook, Google+, etc.), but that usually doesn't lead to links to your site.  As noted above, the content posted to your site doesn't have to be text based. Do an awesome job doing whatever you website/company does.  As an extreme example, Apple doesn't need to put out any content to get links at this point.  People link to them because they like the Apple products.  When they release a new iphone, even if they just put a product product page for it on their site and they would get tens of thousands, if not millions of links.  This works for smaller companies, too, though usually on a smaller scale.  Just do a great job, offer great products, etc. and people will link to you. Do link building strategies.  Most of these, if not all, are now against Google and Bing's guidelines, so these are pretty much all black hat now.  But black hat can work...at least for a while.  Personally, I recommend people stick with options 1 and 2 above because I think the risk is too great with the linking schemes.  However, I mention this because, when investigating how other sites are ranking well, this is always a possibility.

#1 As it is more descriptive. However keep in mind what Google doesn't want according to Matt Cutts, he says keep it short and sweet: “If you have got a three, four or five words in your URL, that can be perfectly normal. As it gets a little longer, then it starts to look a little worse. Now, our algorithms typically will just weight those words less and just not give you as much credit. “The thing to be aware of is, ask yourself: ‘How does this look to a regular user?’ – because if, at any time, somebody comes to your page or, maybe, a competitor does a search and finds 15 words all strung together like variants of the same word, then that does look like spam, and they often will send a spam report. Then somebody will go” and check that out.

Sure, good response. It is a waste of time as well with Yelp as if the reviewers are not trusted Yelp reviewers then the review will be at best ignored and at worst suspicious.

Brad, Questions around this seem to be prevalent lately so I am assuming more and more are realizing there may be value in the G+ piece. As to your question, First I will suggest you read this great post by Cyrus Shepard that certainly got some circulation. Pay attention to the Update at the end as it explains a bit re why it may be true. Next, for your brands the first question is around the type of businesses they are. If they are a service area businesses you need to make sure you keep the brand pages (Google Plus) and the local unmerged. Read this from Mike Blumenthal.  I do not know that driving the traffic from the local 'places' pages to the G+ will help you as much as getting reviews on the Places will or potentially, having content on G+ that drives traffic to the locations. By the sites having individual G+ buttons, those +1s will help that site/page IMO. (OK, over time, etc.) Hope this at leasts adds a bit of information for you. Best Robert

Yes, I've been through this too. My gut feeling here is to focus on your audience and think about how they will consume and share this information. For example, how can you make it easy for Dave to walk into his boss and tell his boss exactly why he should hire you! There's absolutely no reason why you can't put the case-study on-line to allow people to read, or at least scan through the document on-line. AND allow them to download the PDF so that it's easy for them to print, read off-line or share around their team/colleagues. Having the content on a web page also gives you more opportunities to engage your audience (social sharing, even comments etc) Where PDFs can really come into their own is where you have complicated graphs, drawings that you just can't scale well to fit on a screen, provide enough context and stay legible! Oh, and make sure that you've got links in your case-study PDF documents to take you to relevant/useful pages on your website. If you do decide to go down the PDF only route - please do your visitors a favour and provide a really good extract so that they know what they're going to get. I've downloaded too many case-studies that turned out to be rubbish, irrelevant or just blatant marketing bumpf! (Thinking about your audience first can also change the way your approach case-studies and whitepapers!)

http://www.google.com/intl/en/+/policy/content.html is the list of terms and conditions for Google+. I have heard of a Nevada brothel that also had their G+ account suspended. Could be a content violation, but I don't know, since I've never seen the G+ page.

I actually have the exact same problem with Distilled :(. Sadly - there doesn't seem to be a way to fix it at the moment, for reasons I genuinely cannot comprehend. I'm assuming the YouTube teams and the G+ teams basically aren't talking to each other at the moment, because - surely you should be able to merge accounts once G+ and YouTube became integrated. Alas...If I hear anything, I'll let you know - but right now I've got the same problem. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news!

The kind of content I'm talking about would go on the company blog, primarily, and the rest on quality publishers' sites within your theme via outreach.

Is there any particular reason why you wouldn't use the keyword by itself on the product page?

First, Google doesn't do this for an entire site, at any given time, so it's best you take the time to work on client sites/pages and optimize the TITLES and DESCRIPTION you want to use. If Google uses /or changes anything for pages you have written descriptions, titles or page content, they won't advise you either. Google's updates of these page titles, is very common when they feel the title they use for the SERP index to be more useful or accurate of the page's content. Watch for very long titles, as they are more prone to being identified by them, and rewritten Yes, it can be quite frustrating, but it's not a total loss when working on sites. Even if Google does change something, you can still make changes to the client site pages that might have been rewritten by Google, and hope that your new updated page info is taken over the Google TITLE rewrite.. This was a good post on BLOG. SEOmofo had a really good posting as well about this very topic. Barry had a small but good to the point post on Google Title Rewrites at SE Round Table too Hope some of this helps point you in the right direction! Cheers,

Yeah, I'd focus in on marketing efforts and local citations. Nothing looks out of place, just seems like a new site with little pointing to it. Good luck!

It depends what you want to achieve! You will never get 8 but you can really play with match types sometimes broad with right negatives can be cheaper than exact. test it! Get tight ad groups, research misspells and close variations and uncheck in settings close variations targeting. Work on your ad copy! test and refine. Improve page load times. Hope it helps! Igor

Hi David, Google currently does not support linking a single brand page to multiple local pages. There is no ETA for when they will support this, unfortunately. Google is just saying, 'hold tight'. For more on this, here is a thread from the Google and Your Business Forum: http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/business/fehWAQftZUI Hope this helps!

PRWeb have advised that all their links are "no-follow" with effect from when google made this announcement. And i believe Matt Cutts clarified in a video recently that good press releases have value, as it will get your message out there and potentially picked up by bloggers and press agencies, what you wont get anymore, is any google juice!

Hi Matt, Unless I'm misunderstanding you, that sounds like a pretty successful implementation to me - it makes total sense to me that Google would temporarily de-index your site if it was returning a 503; after all, there was nowhere for a user to go. The fact that you've been able to gain back your rankings afterward means that Google understood what was going on and didn't ding you for having a "broken" site, which is what the goal of this process should be. Perhaps I'm not understanding your goals? If you want the holding/home page to stay indexed, then yes, a 200 response code is what that page should be returning - Google tries not to send traffic to pages consistently returning a 503. In your original question it sounded like you wanted to let Google know that the site was down for maintenance, but would return, in which case a 503 is really your best bet.

Pinterest is a nice SEO tool for sure. I've found that by listing new products and articles, you do gain new links from Pinterest while also capturing the attention of potential customers. It's a different audience than Google+ or Twitter, and a very active audience similar to that of Facebook. It seems to reach a slightly older crowd.