Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey Chris and Kurt, Please do be aware that we've noindexed the majority of those pages, even around 100 that have unique content on. Our aim is to concentrate the site to a handful of select pages to see if that works first (as it should in theory). We've certainly paid a lot of attention to our content, which isn't a new thing for us. We've included videos of people unlocking the handset where we can - I've created some myself to broaden our reputation on Youtube, which also make their way onto our site. We have instructions for a large number of handsets on the pages, along with unique images and descriptions. I've even worked on numerous other "big" pieces for publication on our news pages, which have got links from the Washington Post, Huffington Post, TUAW, IntoMobile, etc and even phone networks. To manage it all, we noindex the pages with "thin" content and previously blocked Googlebot from going on them in the first place. Having unique content on all pages shouldn't be, and I don't believe is necessary (there are various examples to support that). We've even stuck close to the rules by incorporating noindex like a boss for content we don't think should be included. However, one of the kickers is that I've been reviewing our industry and our competitors, noticing time and time again that a lot of the ranking sites have even less unique content than we do. They stick solidly to a script, never creating a hint of unique content, even posting unlocking videos for unrelated phones on certain pages. Yet, they rank. They focus no attention to robots.txt or noindexing crap content and yet away they go blissfully into the SERPs sunset. These competitors certainly don't have the same links as us or comparably useful content. I'd consider myself pretty knowledgeable at SEO, yet this makes no sense. It's difficult to include all the same information on what we've done in these posts without making them stupidly long but a lot of the "standard" stuff, we've done. We've been working on getting this right for over a year, even tossing aside an extremely powerful previous domain (with some success). If Google were a person, I'd put a bag over their head and see how they like it.

My pleasure, Silkstream. I can understand how what you are doing feels risky, but in fact, you are likely preventing fallout from worse risks in the future. SEO is a process, always evolving, and helping your client change with the times is a good thing to do! Good luck with the work.

I'd say the blogs probably aren't doing anything for you algorithmically and I'm guessing they're not what was sending you the non-repeat traffic.  If you're paying for sitewides that are not nofollowed, you should think seriously about stopping that.  Pay for links on other sites as much as you like but make sure they're nofollowed.

Great stuff Miriam! I'll definitly check it out! sorry for the deley in replying to you.. I must've mist the email.

Hi, Yes, your campaigns will be archived if you stop paying. Then when you want to reactivate your account you can also unarchive your campaigns.

thank you for the responses very helpful!!

I don't think Google would want the negative PR from penalizing people for creating legitimate scholarships. An alternative to creating a scholarship is to curate a list of relevant scholarships in your niche. There are scholarships for almost anything you can think of. Then go to sites that link to scholarships and let them know that you curated a comprehensive list of X scholarships.

Thanks Cyrus. This is a big help.

Hi Herlamba, What you are seeing in your screenshot is an iteration of Google's knowledge graph for a local business. In order to qualify for such a display, your business must meet Google's requirements. These are: You have in-person transactions with customers, either at your place of business (like a restaurant) or at their homes or businesses (like a plumber) You have a physical address that is not shared by any other business and is not a virtual location of any kind. You have a unique local phone number that is not shared by any other business. This should not be a toll free, vanity or call tracking number. If you can say yes to ALL THREE of the above requirements, then you qualify for inclusion in Google's local index. Your first step should be to acquaint yourself thoroughly with the Google Places Quality Guidelines: https://support.google.com/places/answer/107528?hl=en You will then be pursuing local visibility via a variety of methods, including: Developing a strong, crawlable, locally-optimized website Creating a Google+ Local page for your business Building citations for your local business in a variety of local business indexes like Yelp, Best of Web, HotFrog, etc. You can use a free tool like GetListed.org to make this process easiest. Earning reviews on a variety of platforms, including on your Google+ Local page Other forms of marketing including, but not limited to, linkbuilding, Social Media, video marketing, etc. If Local SEO is totally new to you, you might like to read my article on the Rudiments of Local SEO. You will want to study Local Search Ranking Factors 2013 to see a worldwide industry survey that organizes which factors have most influence on Local Rankings. http://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors Once you have built a clear enough cluster of data about your business on the web, Google will be able to index it all and is likely to display a knowledge graph like the one in your screenshot for branded searches for your business, or within the local pack of results.

Be sure you're targeting the person/writer and not the company.

The great guru Seth Godin wrote about this on Saturday: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2013/11/tenacity-is-not-the-same-as-persistence.html Seth wrote: "Persistence is doing something again and again until it works. It sounds like 'pestering' for a reason. "Tenacity is using new data to make new decisions to find new pathways to find new ways to achieve a goal when the old ways didn't work. "Telemarketers are persistent, Nike is tenacious." My $0.02 is that if someone doesn't respond to the first 3-4 phone calls, it's unlikely that you're going to "wear them down" by trying to be persistent.  You're probably just bugging them. Instead, try to find a new way to get their attention and link to your site. If it's a really valuable note, send a package with cookies, and a message tying in your pitch.  Send flowers.  Do something out of the box to get through the clutter... Hope this helps... -- Jeff

Hi Catherine, I looked at your page and it looks like some of your links were called but was not included in your server as well as some other issues. Looks like its getting a 404 from your app cache, sometimes too many errors on a page can come back with 404 errors and still load. Some of the 404's that were listed is: /includes/js/jplugins/jquery.test.js also returns 404 ( did not add to server) /includes/img/menu_blog.png is giving a 404 ( did not add image to server) If you bring up your site in chrome you can right click - inspect elements - refresh - go to network tab. The links with errors will show up in red.

Okay, we'll give it a whirl. Thanks so much for your help!

Davinia is correct In my opinion. There is no reason to not want the image indexed.

Hi Easigrassne, Coming up in Google's local pack of results is dependent upon you having a physical location in the city you're hoping to rank for. If you want to rank in the local results for three cities, you must have a physical location in each. You can then build a landing page on your website for each of your three physical locations and link your three Google+ Local pages to the respective landing pages on your website. If you do not have physical locations in each of the three cities to which customers come to do business, then you must go after organic rankings via developing content surrounding these locations and your services there. If your business is an SAB (service area business) like a landscaping company, a blog is a great platform for publishing this type of content. For example, you could write a post about lawn installation in City A, perennial border landscaping in City B, and pond building in City C. You can continue to showcase your projects on an ongoing basis, devoting a new blog post to each completed project and developing a library of work that can begin ranking in Google's organic results.

OK I just checked it and it is now updated to the correct preview. So it took up to approx 19 hours to change. Although bear in mind I wasn't checking it all the time, could be faster. Also note, if you have started highlighting the old version, when you go back into the saved one it will still have the old preview, so you need to start over again. I can also confirm the preview in the data highlighter is not connected to Google's cache of the page in the index, as the old version of the page is still cached.

Ruben, Woo Commerce for Wordpress is a pretty good solution for a small eCommerce site. If you're going for a bigger site with more robust inventory needs, including integration of a Point of Sale (POS) system you might go for another solution, such as BigCommerce, Volusion, Magento... which will be more expensive but also more scaleable. I think Woo Commerce will work for you based on what you've stated so far.

Hi Matthew! Link building in today's SEO world is about relevancy, trust and authority. The guest posting option is fine (asking blogs if you can write something for them), as long as what you're writing is an original and quality piece of content, and you're reaching out to trustworthy blogs that are, ideally, closely topically relevant to your own site for a link. In a perfect world all your links would be from relevant domains. However, links from irrelevant domains aren't bad - they still pass trust and authority, and having irrelevant links is part of a natural, diverse linking pattern. But if all or the vast majority of your links are from topically irrelevant domains, that becomes a problem. I use Blogger Link Up and My Blog Guest to find prospective blogs to approach, but do your research, make sure you are reaching out to quality sites. Consider creating other content besides articles as well that stand a good chance of getting shared. Videos and ebooks for example. Although having a peek at competitors' link profiles might give you some good ideas, don't just copy everything. Again, you want only quality links - links from relevant trusted websites to your own. So don't try and copy anything that doesn't meet this criteria. You want your links to resemble a natural link building pattern and that gives you the biggest clue as to what is acceptable nowadays - so from a variety of sources, using a variety of linking/anchor text including the URL itself as you'd expect if they were just creating from people sharing your content around, and in a natural context (e.g. part of a review, or a resource link in a genuinely useful comment on a relevant article). Be very careful about deliberately creating links with your exact keywords in the anchor text. For example, if you were targeting the keyword 'car wax' you'd be better off linking to your site with natural variations such as 'here's a great article on car wax' 'here's how to apply car wax' 'the pros and cons of using car wax'. I think anchor text carries a lot less importance nowadays and Google will take more of a signal from the content on the linking page and linking site (but on the other hand, if you create lots of exact-match anchor text links to your site, Google does then pay attention as you risk a penalty). So yes, get natural-looking links from authority websites in your niche and you should see an improvement in your rankings for your target keywords.  Link building aside, focus on creating great content first and foremost, because in time that'll earn you natural links anyway. Your second question - if people start talking about your article and sharing it, yes they will just share a link and that's what you want. You don't want them to share the actual content of the article. There would be loads of duplicate copies of your article all over the web then, and that's not good for SEO! (sorry if I have misunderstood this part). Getting all those social shares is good though, it's sending a signal to Google that your site has something worth sharing, that perhaps it's an authority on your subject. Hope that helps a bit!