Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks!

Hi Peter It would be helpful to know how you are redirecting these pages (301 etc) and for what reason? Also whether any of your pages are blocked in your robots.txt file - perhaps to prevent duplicate content?

Another good indication is whether or not they link to your competitor. I mostly find directories from looking at competitors' back link profiles. Most of them are industry specific and, assuming they are still maintained, worth the couple of minutes it takes to submit.

By the way, if you need some help with excel and vlookup, check this link outl http://www.distilled.net/excel-for-seo/ These links may help you also; http://www.seomoz.org/blog/an-inside-look-at-competitors-backlinks-with-open-site-explorer http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-profiling-with-open-site-explorer http://www.seomoz.org/blog/weed-out-your-lowest-performing-pages

Hi Tracy, You can use the On-page tool to optimize for any keyword term as long as it is loaded into the keyword list in your campaign. By default the On-page tool offers a report card for every keyword already loaded that it finds relevant to your home page. You can create Report cards for individual pages and keywords by digging a little deeper into the tool. There is an explanation of how to use the tool for specific pages in this recent thread about SEOmoz On-page Tool issues. If you have not specifically selected the URL of that page (as described in the other thread), then the B Report Card you are seeing would be the Grade for that keyword on the Home Page of the site, not for the specific page you have optimized. If this is not the problem and the tool appears to be malfunctioning, then the best thing would be to contact the Help Team using help [at] seomoz.org.Let them know the details of the specific campaign and the issue so they can take a look for you. Hope that helps, Sha

Hi getzen, The primary problem here is that these links are resulting in 404's which can hurt your site. If they are just not terribly relevant, but may produce traffic that is useful to you, then you can create a nice "Oops!" page to give visitors options to go to other pages on your site (we call this our "Bounce Page").  This is preferable to a "catch-all" redirect to your home page when you know that the likelihood of a high bounce rate is a concern, since Bounce is now known to be a ranking factor for major Search Engines. If you are clever with the design of this page you can create ways to keep these non-relevant visitors on the page (rotating banners with funny or clever images, or maybe a video embed could be used). The primary goal is to eliminate the 404 Errors, but to also be mindful of the impact of Bounce. Hope that helps, Sha

Thank you your suggestion seems to have fixed it

The answer is right in your question - "runs a number of whitelabel sites". As mentioned, it is largely due to the original publisher publishing the content first and getting indexed - from there, anytime the google bot stumbles across the same content - it will figure out that it has seen the content before, and attribute the ranking to the original. Something that google themselves covered last year here (although more specifically for news at the time). Duplicate content unfortunately isn't just "not shown" by the search engines (imagine how "clean" the SERPS would be if that were the case!) it's just ranked lower than the original publisher that google is aware of. Occasionally you will get the odd page that will rank from a different domain - but that is usually due to being fresh content, I have seen this myself with my own content being aggregated by a large news site - they might outrank me on occasion for a day on one or two pieces - but my original url comes out on top in the end.

User Generated Content such as comments have been proven to add value to articles. You can capture a lot of long tail phrases. With respect to linking facebook profiles, that is entirely under your control. The plugin should provide you the option to only present the comments without linking to the facebook profiles. If it doesn't, either modify the plugin or find a different one. Some relevant discussion: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/make-facebook-comments-box-indexable-by-search-engines http://raventools.com/blog/facebook-comments/

How your tags are generated are not considered in any form. Your e-commerce solution can automatically generate the tags, or you can manually create them. The content of the tags themselves are what's important, not how they are created.

Page authority and domain authority are worked out using an algorithm based on other metrics including MozRank, MozTrust, number of links, etc. I tend to use domain authority as a good measure for an entire site when finding links and as it's based on more factors than MozRank alone, I personally find it more useful.

Hi Jest, The help team generally doesn't read the Q&A forums, and only comes over here if one of the associates (like myself) flags the question. Sha Menz is correct in that the best way to get ahold of them is sending them an email in cases like this. They are aware of this problem, and are working to get it fixed. Watch the Twitter account for SEOmoz, as they will give updates about the status of this issue.

Hi Is that a page where the homepage shows up instead of the desired page?  I didn't see anything from your domain on the first 1-20 results. But see the screenshots.  That's a highly competitive term.  And then check out your client's domain's backlinks and facebook shares.  Very sparse. That clearly needs a lot of work.  Ryan's right, it does seem you've got your on page SEO down pretty good.  I'd take a look at your backlinking and social sharing metrics now, especially building links to those inner pages you want to rank for. Maybe there's a better example where the homepage shows instead of the menu page?  That was the original question you had, yes? -Dan EgkoYzLyg A82cpNJ6p

Good question! In my opinion, A/B and multivariate tests are a good way to increase bounce rates. Often, adding a few images, adding bullet points, breaking up your text in smaller paragraphs can help decrease bounce rate. What you should keep in mind, though, is that different kind of traffic tends to have different bounce rates. So facebook, twitter, digg, stumbleupon ... normally have quite high bounce rates. The same goes for RSS feeds: if people suscribe to your blog, often they will come to your page just to read the one article, without browsing your site. It can therefore help to include links to other parts of your sites, related blog posts, and with a call to action in your blog post. For reducing bounce rates of Google (or other search engine) organic traffic, you should aim for page titles that relate to the content of the page. When someone clicks on a search result, they will at least have read the title. Now if your h1 is very different from that, chances are, people will leave your site right away, assuming it does not offer what they are looking for. The same goes for PPC. Make sure your ad copy matches the landing page. In order to achieve this, split your keywords in different ad groups, according to the topic. Then tailor the ads towards the keywords and the landing page. PPC also allows you to run a lot of experiments, so take advantage of this and apply what you learn from it to other areas.

Ah...Great news! Glad to help and I hope the new site will do well for you Sha

Do you mean to say that link juice is lost from one page to another page. I thought that when one page links to another page, the pagerank of the original page is preserved, while it flows to second page..

Thanks for the clarification. It sounds like you have created island pages specifically for your campaign. The island pages are contained on your site and link to your site, but you cannot move from your site to the island page unless you either know the URL or enter the proper Google/Bing search. A few things to consider: you can include your island pages as part of your site. If the pages are well written, have good content and otherwise add value to your site, I would recommend including the pages in your site's navigation or otherwise making them accessible. you could have valid reasons to exclude the page from your site. I have a client who has a page designed to address a negative publicity issue. The client does not wish the page to be reachable from his site, but he wants it to appear in SERPs so if a search is specifically designed to locate negative information about his company, that page is found and the story is shared from the company's point of view. If you use a CMS or otherwise offer a site search function, you need to make a business decision whether to exclude this type of island page from site searches. IIf you desire this page to be indexed, it is then critical an updated sitemap is offered to search engines. While a site with solid navigation does not need to submit a sitemap at all, a site with island pages is dependent upon sitemaps if they wish those pages to be indexed. I was wondering if Google (in particular) would punish them for not being a big part of the main site structure. The site isn't punished at all. The pages would not be indexed unless they are either included in a sitemap, receive an internal or external link which a crawler can read, or otherwise is made known to search engines such as social media links. Clearly if the page is included in a PPC campaign the page is known by Google/Bing, but they keep their PPC and Organic searches separate. To the best of my knowledge a page is not indexed based solely on a PPC ad.

Once you've chosen your domain of choice as Tommy as explained by using 301 re-directs. It's probably a good idea to throw the other domain in link building occasionally. For example if you settle with http://www.footballboots.co.uk then your link building should focus around using that URL, but you should also use http://footballboots.co.uk sometimes as it helps to make your link profile look more natural. If you imagine that other people were creating natural links to your site, they're not always going to use the URL you prefer are they?