Welcome to the Q&A Forum

One of best GA course is Annie Cushing: http://www.annielytics.com/annielytics-dashboard-course/ You also can see official GA Academy videos: https://analyticsacademy.withgoogle.com/explorer or their YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/googleanalytics You also can read few books from: Justin Cutroni Avinash Kaushik Brian Clifton Daniel Waisberg Nathan Yau You can learn more from them. Almost all of authors i wrote here share tips and tricks in their blogs or in social media too. It's good to follow them.

my best advice for you is to go through Moz's Beginners guide to SEO and ask questions in QnA if you didn't understand anything and you will get the basics of everything and then you can move ahead step by step. Hope this helps!

Hi Chad! One thing to be aware of  is that Facebook and Google have totally opposite requirements for multi-location businesses. Google wants you to use only the real-world business name on all of the listings. By contrast, Facebook won't let you create more than one listing with the same name on it. In other words, you can't have 5 Facebook Places for Bill's Repair Shop. You have to have Bill's Repair Shop Chicago, Bill's Repair Shop Boston, Bill's Repair Shop Denver, etc. It's kind of a difficult scenario, because then your Facebook Places won't match your Google My Business data (nor your other citations if you go with the real-world business name on them). On the other hand, your competitors are all in the same boat with this one, so the negative impact of it is pretty much moot. Hope this helps!

Hi Christy, Thanks for getting back to me. I do like the sorting functions and the capability to mark things as answered/unanswered are great too. I also really like the gamification with the points. We're working on improving our forum right now, and currently just using a WP one but it's organized in a format that is sorted by boards, as opposed to all the threads in one and filtering after (which I like about Moz's!) Hoping to switch over to something more similar to what you guys have going on. Thanks! Dave

To expand on what Lewis is saying, automated content is pretty much the exact opposite of unique and rich content. There is absolutely no way to achieve good content goals through automating this way, even if automation itself were an option. Duplicate content signals to Google that you're either automating it, stealing it, or simply don't have content worth viewing. It has a huge impact on your rankings, but more importantly, it has a huge impact on your visitors/customers. Think of it this way: would you shop on Amazon if every product description and deeper content section was more or less the same?

Thank you Ruth!

Thank you penguin is what I can see that affected the rankings, so what's the next step? Thank you for your help.

Finally I understand your point, but... Have you measured it? You have some cases where you moved the images to a third-level domain and after re-index you observed a ranking drop? Because I did it once, for an e-commerce, and I didn't observe that. It's just one case, and doesn't mean much, but just searching on google for this topic I can find many who claim to have witnessed an increase in images ranking thanks to the adoption of a cdn. Domain of an image url is for sure a ranking factor, and you probably are right. But I would like others to jump into the discussion and help to clarify. Because I think google images algo is more keen on evaluating other (well known) factors. And it's logic. If you have some html on site.com with one image coming from flickr.com and one coming from worthlessdomain.com, which one would you favour in images SERP? Flickr? Why? Doesn't say anything about the relevancy of that image for that keyword. Of course if you have an html page about flowers on site.com, and you have one image coming from worthlessdomain.com and one image from asitefullofflowersimages.com it may have some relevancy, but is it for the domain authority/trust? Or because all the images of asitefullofflowersimages.com are of flowers, with flowers alt text and so on? I bet the second. Plus, google guidelines suggest to serve images from a cookieless domain to improve performance, of course they mean to improve performance to improve ranking of the page, and in that context they are probably disregarding SEO for images. I don't have the minimum idea if domain authority/trust is such a strong ranking factor for images, and I have the impression you have more experience than me on this subject, but I am still very skeptical.

SEW is under new ownership. I submitted a post a couple of weeks ago for my monthly column and the majority of the links in my post were nofollowed by SEW.  I wrote to the new editor to ask why and they reviewed the links and decided the the one that I had included that linked to my own site did contribute to the conversation well, so they removed the nofollow.  I had also mentioned Alan Bleiweiss in my article and out of courtesy, linked to his site.  (It bugs me when people mention someone and then link to their Twitter profile...if they're good enough to mention, why not give them a link?)  They would not remove the nofollow on that link. I think that publications like Search Engine Watch, Moz and other high quality sites that accept user generated content have to be really careful about how they link out. Personally, if SEW told me that all of my links would now be nofollowed, I'd likely keep publishing there as I do get business as a result of my articles.  But, I am guessing that there are quite a few authors that would stop submitting articles to them. I think this is a case where a few bad apples spoil the lot. I bet you the new editors reviewed some article submissions and saw that people were using SEW as a platform to link out. If SEW got an outbound link penalty that would not be good...so they might have gone a little over to the side of caution in making nofollow decisions.  With that said, it looks like they have now edited the article you quoted to go ahead and allow followed links.  I also checked a few other articles and didn't see any excessive nofollowing so maybe they've loosened up a little.

Great to hear that someone from your company can go! We don't typically allow questions to be deleted. My best suggestion is to go and edit your original post to say that the ticket has been claimed. Thanks!

When you are searching your keywords make sure you are not logged into your Google account that  is linked to your blog/website. Many times Google shows you what you want to see ranking your page much higher when you search but not others. logging out of your Google account will give you a better view of your keywords rank. Google in general can fluctuate search results especially based on the location of the IP address. Google has become location based and will return relevant information based on geographic regions that searches are preformed.

Thanks guys, those are really useful - just what I was looking for. Appreciate the help!

I agree that the easiest way is to build in SEO features to your submissions. Making sure that the title translates into an H1 tag, etc. One of the reasons why YouTube became such a success, pre-Google purchase, was because every time you upload a video to YouTube, you do some SEO work: tagging the video, upload a transcript (if prompted), adding a description, etc. If you make the user interface easy to do this, you'll be ahead. When it comes to complex schema data, I wouldn't worry as much. Most forum/article submissions rely on long tail traffic. Spend time optimizing the best traffic drives or the pieces that get the highest social shares, which might also work great on searches. It's okay to cherry pick the work when you don't have time to do it all.

Hi Paul, Some great advice. In the turn of the New Year when we have more resources we are going to take action following your plan - it is a lot more work but makes perfect sense. Again, thank you for pointing out that I need to remove the robots.txt block so that the page commands can be discovered - I will get onto this straight away. Thank you once again. Lloyd

In addition to DM/IM books, make sure you expand your business knowledge. Knowing how customers tick and how SWOT works rarely goes out of style. My suggestions: Primal Branding Influence (Cialdini) The Lean Startup Lean In (Sandberg) Think & Grow Rich Selling the Invisible (Beckwith) The Slight Edge Excel for SEOs Blue Ocean Strategy (Gladwell) Crossing the Chasm Decoded (Barden) The Innovator's Dilemma Never Eat Alone Psycho Cybernetics Rework (Fried) The Wisdom of Psychopaths

Hi there, One of the most important reasons is: Google Starts Giving A Ranking Boost To Secure HTTPS/SSL Sites Google has announced that going HTTPS — adding a SSL 2048-bit key certificate on your site — will give you a minor ranking boost. Google says this gives websites a small ranking benefit, only counting as a “very lightweight signal” within the overall ranking algorithm. In fact, Google said this carries “less weight than other signals such as high-quality content.” Based on their tests, Google says it has an impact on “fewer than 1% of global queries” but said they “may decide to strengthen” the signal because they want to “encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone safe on the web.” You can find more about The Big List of SEO Tips and Tricks for Using HTTPS on Your Website: http://moz.com/blog/seo-tips-https-ssl

I would use the hreflang tag, I implemented this on a few sites that have multiple local based versions and it works wonders and you do not have to worry about cross domain duplicate content in any way. I have a site in US dollars and one in UK pounds all the content is identical and both have been checked by John Mueller at Google and he has confirmed this is a perfect use for that scenario. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en If however they are all in the same country, then I would use the rel canonical https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en

It depends on the algorithm. Some algorithms are global, some are just for the US or other specific countries. Here in the Philippines, it used to take a year until we get some sort of change from an update. Now, they don't really announce the update. Sometimes we see it the day right after the release, sometimes, it's 3 months behind.

Hi Cole, Yeah well that change in script is in close proximity to what you would normally do with adding event tracking to real interactions on a page and in this case you 'fake' an interaction after 15 or X seconds. I still wouldn't prefer using it this way though as you don't know for sure that the user is actually in the browser window or at all looking at the page, so I would at least check for that with some additional JS but in the end you'll get the same result.