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I have been tasked with fixing SEO issues through multiple site (been learning since July and loving it). They have multiple blogs for SEO which helps to drive traffic to the main eCommerce site and they planned to keep this strategy going in the future. After the webinar today and seeing that this was considered a link scheme, I analyzed GA and they have not been hit yet on any of the algorithm updates. I know they eventually will get hit and I would like to keep this from happening. Most of the content on the blogs are good and rank very well. Stats across the board are getting better as I have been cleaning out the thin content and making the good ranking content better. Should I just do a "nofollow" on all outbound links so we do not eventually get nailed? Would that solve the issue?

Hi Don covered most of it correctly. Yes if you follow the above you should be ok, don't worry to much about the power of the link, its all about link relevancy, and the only little thing I would add in, don't try and get to many links too quickly, this could be a sign to Google you are trying to spam them. Get them to link over time to you. Also don't tell them which pages to link too or which anchor text, let them pick and choice (sometimes a mention is just as good as a link) this way it looks more natural and don't worry if a few of them say, we're happy to put links but they are nofollow, this again make the process look more natural. Once you have written Jargon guide, I would spend a lot of time outreaching sections of this to relevant people and getting them to mention it. There is software and services out there which are basically directories of journalists names and email addresses, I would highly recommend signing up to these to get the process started. If you can make them a bit light hearted, a bit of fun some of the misconceptions try getting it listed on Buzzfeed (http://moz.com/blog/my-recipe-for-success-how-to-launch-a-successful-blog) while you may not get the perfect link, if its picked up and share you could suddenly have a lot of additional people visiting your website. But you have the basics of SEO, so good luck

Like others have said, DA is just a number and in today's Googles eyes, it's all about relevancy of the page, rather than the page authority. Also a site might have a high DA, but if the link juice doesn't pass down to the page where the link is, DA is irrelevant. how about looking at links in a different way. Instead why not image Google doesn't exist and the only way to get relevant traffic to your site is from other websites talking and sending referral traffic (through a link). You would then only place links where you know you would get decent traffic and sales - think like this and you will get the relevant links and rank nicely. DA and numbers are irreverent then, it's all about relevancy

Google just rolled out Penguin 3 so if you have a dubious backlink profile you will most likely have been affected.  You may want to look at cleaning up your backlink profile to get back on track. More info on the update here: http://searchengineland.com/google-penguin-3-0-worldwide-rollout-still-process-impacting-1-english-queries-206286

Yes, for the time being Youtube will be the prevailing video result. Since this is a recent change, I would imagine some of the information in the Wistia library is a little out of date. They more than likely aren't trying to mislead you. Wistia still makes sense for a number of use cases. Phil Nottingham of Distilled wrote a Moz Post you will find interesting.

I agree with Don.  Google ultimately wants to see that not only are you an authority in your field, you go out of your way to give your visitor as much information as you can by means of linking to further resources.  Although personally I would avoid just dumping in Wikipedia links as they can be viewed as thinly veiled lazy links.

Hello! Index/Follow means that you are allowing search engines to index your pages and follow links through those pages. If you didn't have this tag on the page, search engines would do it anyway. Basically, this meta tag isn't necessarily a bad thing and the search engines would be doing it even if the tag wasn't there. You can use meta robots to do good things for your site, such as stop the crawling of blog archive pages to limit duplicate content. There's tons of resources here on MOZ about the robots file and I would suggest looking into it.  This is a good one: http://moz.com/learn/seo/robotstxt What type of problems is your site having?

Hi Mick, I would recommend that you actually work with the postal authorities in your region to acquire a separate suite number for the business and this should eliminate concerns. Your client legitimately has 2 businesses and should make the effort to set up a proper unique address for both. And, as you've mentioned, a different phone number is essential, of course. You should also be sure you're running unique websites with completely separate content for the 2 businesses. What you're trying to do here is to differentiate for customers and engines, as much as possible, the two companies. On the customer side, you want them to be able to correctly contact and find the two businesses. On the engine side, you want to prevent accidental merging and duplicates by being sure that two businesses are being run as unique entities, if they are unique entities. It is generally not difficult to acquire an official suite number, but who you go to for this depends upon where you live. It is different in different regions. Hope this helps!

Sounds like you're on .NET (or something case-sensitive). The best way to deal with this in my opinion is at the server level, by only allowing lowercase URLs. This is how you would implement this in .NET: <match url="[A-Z]" ignorecase="false"></match> <action type="Redirect" url="{ToLower:{URL}}" appendquerystring="true"></action> Canonical tags are technically an option, but you will have to manually add them each and every time this issue occurs (and stay on top of it as an ongoing action item). It's almost always preferable to have each page accessible from a single URL if at all possible. Automatically adding self-referencing canonicals would probably just exacerbate the problem since they uppercase pages would still be pointing to the uppercase pages, lowercase to lowercase, etc. I would strongly suggest defaulting to lowercase over uppercase URLs to stay consistent with other sites on the internet (also, most linking sites will assume lowercase when linking to your site). The good news is this a fairly common, fixable problem If your site is in fact using .NET, this article is a good starting point (#2 is where I got the above code snippet from).

Isn't the main question: Why do you have duplicate pages, are these essentials - the easiest option would be to remove them. But in terms of whats the best option, here is a great article from Moz: http://moz.com/learn/seo/robotstxt I would read that and decide based on your websites and situation the option best suits you. In my opinion I would suggest:

I agree with Sheena.  A focus on the domain name as a brand is so yesteryear.  And what's worse, having an EMD makes it almost impossible not to have it stand out as brand-like.  These days, when I see them in the search results, I'm skeptical and will often click on something else just to avoid them.  While I may not be typical, there may come a time when such is typical.  In fact, I don't preclude a future where it may be better to move to a brand domain name and 301 the EMD to that . Absolutely focus on the brand and forget the domain. That will be helpful to you in the long run.

If I understand your post correctly you are trying to figure out the best way to optimize your alt tags for different versions of the same image. Alt tags should really focus on the keywords you are targeting on a page. I can give you an example from my site: Product - Generac 6244 20kW Guardian Series Home Standby Generator with Aluminum Enclosure and 200a Transfer Switch (That is a mouthful) Keyword - Generac 6244 URL - apelectric.com/generac-6244-20kw-guardian Title Tag - Generac 6244 | 20kW Guardian Generator | Generac Generators Image Alt Tag - Generac 6244 20kW Guardian Series Generator Meta Description - The Generac 6244 has been our customers go to 20kW home standby generator. This unit is in stock and ready to ship same or next day for FREE. Call us today for more information, 123-456-7891 The image alt tag should reinforce your targeted keyword and include a shorter description than your description. Focusing on putting the most important part of the product first, then a secondary description and perhaps then a size. You don't want to have several of the same alt tags on one product, but sometimes this is unavoidable. I would say break the more specific description up between the numerous pictures. In my example I would do something like this: 1 - Generac 6244 20kW Generator 2 - Generac 6244 Guardian Series 3- Generac 6244 Home Standby Generator. The alt tags are a good place to reinforce your keyterms and let the engines know the whole page is really centered around that specific product. It is also how Google Images display certain pictures, they use the alt tags.

Thank you very much for the time and consideration to answer my questions. I really did appreciate it. Sincerely, Koki

Do you only change it depending on the Canadian location? What do you do for US visitors? Googlebot sees what you give to people in the US. Here is what they see, which is what I see viewing the page from Texas. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:nBPI0a8zKqQJ:www.sja.ca/English/Community-Services/Pages/Therapy%2520Dog%2520Services/default.aspx+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us I assume there is content on this page other than what I am seeing. So duplicate content is not your problem, lack of content is. Google operates on a per country basis, but even knowing that I would still suggest different pages for different regions if the content is really different.

For the record, this is a great answer. OP, you were initially penalised for poor links, and did the right thing in removing said spammy links. However, who's to say that whilst those links were propping you up **before **the penalty and helping you rank, now that those links have disappeared, you've got a very sparse link profile and need to start linkbuilding all over again. Just make sure you build links 'naturally' this time.

Thanks Ray !!

It's not ideal to have such a massive .htaccess file that it slows down your page load time significantly.  But if you have a lot of inbound links to pass that matter, you'll likely want to keep your SEO value intact and use 301 redirects to handle this properly. My $0.02: Test! Do a page load test with the .htaccess file off / removed, and then do another one where it is on and live.  If there's no significant time difference, you should be okay. We have sites with hundreds or even thousands of lines in the .htaccess file and they run pretty quickly. That said, here's why 404 pages aren't ideal to serve: According to Rand Fishkin's Moz blog writeup, Are 404 Pages Always Bad for SEO? http://moz.com/blog/are-404-pages-always-bad-for-seo "When faced with 404s, my thinking is that unless the page: A) Receives important links to it from external sources (Google Webmaster Tools is great for this) B) Is receiving a substantive quantity of visitor traffic and/or C) Has an obvious URL that visitors/links intended to reach It's OK to let it 404." According to Moz's Redirection SEO Best Practice: http://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection ... you want to use a 301 redirect to indicate that the content has moved permanently. Finally, here's a post that describes how to create a more SEO friendly migration, here's a great info graphic: http://moz.com/blog/achieving-an-seo-friendly-domain-migration-the-infographic Hope this helps! Thanks, -- Jeff

Hi there! Thanks for reaching out! My name is Erin, and I'm on the Help Team here at Moz. Sorry to hear you ran into this! This sounds a little wonky! For bio searches there aren't any limits, and for comparison and analyze reports there are limits of 500 reports (per hour, which would be pretty impressive to hit!) if you're a Pro user. If you're still running into this, can you email us at help@moz.com? We just need the following information: the email address associated with your account your Twitter handle the specific types of reports you're trying to run screenshots of the error messages you're seeing We should be able to help you troubleshoot from there! We look forward to seeing your email! Cheers, Erin

Actually not a lot, all these tools parse your HTML and preview you with the page that they load it with. The difference in using the tools is that they'll check the page with a different user agent. So if you do any check on this on your current page it will tell you how the page looks like.