Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I'm going to respectfully disagree with the answers already given.  I ignore these links and do not disavow them.  Every site has them. The point of the disavow file is to tell Google not to count links that you have personally made for SEO purposes.  You didn't make these links and I don't believe that Google wants you to disavow them.  There's no harm in doing so but personally I ignore them.

The guys all have some great thoughts here. One more thought: If a promotion or product is usually short-lived but comes back intermittently (e.g. once a year, twice a year, etc.), the URL can be kept live. A good example is rental real estate in a big city - the properties will come back on the market, but the URLs need to show visitors that the apartment is not available at the moment. RIghtmove (real estate in the UK) does this with rentals it knows will come back on the market, e.g. http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-to-rent/property-21907128.html They re-use the pages when the property is live again - I've seen them do it with both flats I lived in, and they rank remarkably well. Questionable usability if a page ranks and is actually unavailable, but effective. Clearly this is only relevant if you will re-use / open these short-term promotions in the future.

After some testing, we found WPEngine to be the best solution for Wordpress site speed. They are a hosting company that specializes in Wordpress and they use a lot of caching and CDNs without you needing to set anything up or worry if things are working properly. I'm sure similar results can be duplicated by  building out your own caching and CDN, this is just another option for you.

Hi Phil, Thanks for the reply. The quote (i've since sourced) comes from Forrester (http://blogs.forrester.com/interactive_marketing/2009/01/the-easiest-way.html) but in checking, even IF there was any truth to it back then (2009), there doesn't seem to be any now. Regardless, your insights on video are helpful, and along with the info of SERP Turkey, I've got a bit more direction to go in. Thanks again.

Hi, You're able to track a maximum of 250 keywords in your Moz Pro account. What you could do is add the 181 keywords to a project and then add your competitors to the project so you can see their progress against yours. I'm not sure if that's what you're looking for but that's the best you could do on such a basis in your Moz account. Otherwise I would look into other tools.

Hey Chris, I agree with William. You should always take a peek at the relevant keyword research tools to see what vocabulary people are using to discuss your topic, but don't worry too much about having a post title that mirrors those phrases exactly. Even if the phrase is long tail, Google's keyword tool is just an estimation so there may be more people searching for a given term than you think. Check out UberSuggest and also look at keyword trends in Social Media using Bottlenose's Sonar tool. Those may give you more of an indication of what keywords people are using. Definitely don't go haywire on shoehorning keywords into titles and headings, but do be sure what keywords that a given post owns so that you can go back through your site and link to those new posts from old posts with the relevant keywords. -Mike

Go to WMT for whatever dev site you want to remove from the index. Use the URL removal tool, but in the box just enter /, nothing else. This will remove the entire site.

You asked a good question, Ruben. Glad to help.

Just a quick question, the client in question, in their wisdom, decided to put the US website live without telling me and our UK rankings have dropped significantly, do you think the tag will start to fix this?

Thanks Chris, that article was very helpful! Cleared a lot of things up.

To avoid duplicate content you need to use the rel=”alternate” href=”x” tag. You dont have to buy a domain, here are several ways you can organise your website. ccTLDs - [example.ie] Pros Clear geotargeting Server location irrelevant Easy separation of sites Cons Expensive (and may have limited availability) Requires more infrastructure Strict ccTLD requirements (sometimes) ****Subdomains with gTLDS [de.example.com] Pros Easy to set up Can use Webmaster Tools geotargeting Allows different server locations Easy separation of sites Cons Users might not recognize geotargeting from the URL alone (is “de” the language or country?) Subdirectories with gTLDs [example.com/de/] Pros Easy to set up Can use Webmaster Tools geotargeting Low maintenance (same host) Cons Users might not recognize geotargeting from the URL alone Single server location Separation of sites harder URL parameters [site.com?loc=de] Pros Not recommended. Cons URL-based segmentation difficult Users might not recognize geotargeting from the URL alone Geotargeting in Webmaster Tools is not possible You can have even the same content for example, if you have a version for the UK and another for the US the content will be very similar. Hope this helps watch?v=8ce9jv91beQ

There is honestly no need to worry about having "no keywords" in a post. Google is much more sophisticated than that - and besides, a post like: "today I went out on a 16 mile bike ride over the chilterns using my Garmin 705, After the first 8 miles I used my hydropak and then continued on up the 3 mile incline which was helped by the quickshift speedwheel, I find that with all riding my ipod helps me and when I finally reached mile point I stopped and refilled the hydropak. " ... includes a whole lot of keywords relevant to cycling, location, accessories, etc. The internet and Google's index would be a very small place if it discredited websites with small entries or entries without keyword-rich text, as well. I can't imagine a world in which these would hurt you in the slightest.

Tags are basically lists of posts with a common theme - some sites automatically create tags, but commonly bloggers would add these into the CMS. Ideally, tags are kind of an extension of "categories" and often are similar to these in the way they are presented, but while posts appear on one or two categories, tagged posts can appear on many tag pages. As such tag pages could result in a lot of duplicate content on a blog, and for many years now I and others have been advocating noindexing tag pages (good SEO plugins would do this for you) and to no follow links to tags - which sounds like the type of implementation you have. Unless you are 100% sure that your tagged pages dont create too much duplicate content, I would leave them nofollowed, as I have seen them do more harm than good.

Hi, I wanted virtual pageviews not to use as a goal itself, but as a step within a goal funnel. That necessitates virtual pageviews. I also think there are some instances - such as this, where a modal of more than half a screen loads up - that its fair to call it a 'pageview'. Horses for courses! Thanks for your response though. In the end I found a way to do it that involved a combination of tags. I've detailed it here on my blog: http://www.betweenthefold.co.uk/2014/05/14/tracking-virtual-pageviews-lightboxesmodals-via-google-tag-manager/ Thanks again for your input!

Hi Stefania! Yes, you have correctly installed the code snippet for Google Authorship across your site using a footer widget, and linked to your blog from your personal Google+ profile. You can keep this setup as long as this remains a one-author blog. Google Webmaster Tools has a structured data testing tool that is very useful for determining if Authorship is working for any page. It shows that Authorship is working for your first blog post, and gives you a nice preview of what the search result will look like if Google decides to show your author photo with it - see http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?q=http%3A%2F%2Fjijil.pasadena2shop.com%2F. Remember that correctly setting up Google Authorship does not guarantee that your author photo will show in search results. Focusing on creating high-quality content on both your blog and Google+, and becoming an authority on the topics you write about, however, will increase your chances of standing out in search results with Google Authorship. Please let me know if you have any questions, and best of luck with your new blog! Christy

Those URLs will be seen as different, but the real question is will the content on those URLs be viewed as different, or do you need a canonical tag.

Hi Sara, Following up on this one - has there been a real drop in rankings that you have verified?