Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Ah, when you said ad units, I assumed you mean AdSense. In terms of non G ads, I run 4 per page with no issues. You could probably stretch this to 6 though.

Some things to check: If your search results are being indexed is there only one URL per keyword combination? Avoid showing the same content on multiple URLs - or restrict the SE bots to just one of them per keyword. e.g. check you don't have a structure like this: domain.name/search/location=xyz domain.name/search/location=xyz&keyword=abc domain.name/location/keyword The same applies to the detail pages of your real estate listings.  I.e. don't let the SEs see content on all of these URLs: domain.name/location/listing_id domain.name/keyword/listing_id domain.name/listing_id domain.name/listing_slug Rather than making duplicate content noindex I would prefer to redirect it to a common URL if possible. To reduce duplicate content issues with client material, add extra info to the pages.  E.g. some things to try are: adding region/suburb info to search results pages pre-parse listings and extract key info on features/facilities/etc., then display that key info in a features box or something so that both the HTML and content differs a lot from client sites.

Google will never look down on whatever.com as your anchor text. Nor will they ever have a problem with your page title being used as the anchor text. The two bigger items to be concerned about here are: 1: where are you placing this anchor text. In other words are you putting this link on a trusted domain with high page authority? Or are you placing links on problem sites. 2: what keyword(s) are you focusing on for that specific page - i.e. if you are trying to rank highly for "two month old widgets" but your page title is "six month old widgets from whatever.com" then it doesn't do much good to use your page title as anchor text.

Hey again NickEubanks, 1. checking up on my stats again for my site. its age is 59 days old and has not been registered before. 2. crawl stats are high of 137, average of 61, low of 10. That includes every data point since it is so young(less than 90 days old). 3. seomoz campaign says that I have 78 pages crawled though i dont think all of them should get indexed as pages seemed to get indexed within minutes usually. 59 are indexed. 57 were indexed today and I wrote a post as well as made a new navigation page to keep organized and then it went to 59 within minutes. I don't think tag pages with a single post get indexed or something since some tags do seem to get indexed and also have multiple posts. 4. total links: 1628 from 538 domains. Domain homepage PA of 40 with a DA of 33. Dmozrank 5.3. my page for the keyword i plan to rank first for is PA 38, 67 links from 14 domains. The site ranking in first position is much younger (2 year old site) than the other 6 beating me as I am in position 8. these 6 have 5 with between 60 to 80 DA and one of the worse ranking site on the serps with a DA 46 though it was beating a DA 62. Each also ranges from have very little to quite a lot of links. first i'll share the first position stats as it is related to your main focus. PA 14 DA74, 71 links from 4 domains. all the other 6 are over 10 years old. after my site is a 6 year old site which i am now beating. hope you enjoy this juicy info. so in about 2 months i got to DA33 to answer your original question. This has been fun.

Our site uses the "+" and is has never hurt our rankings - we've held many #1 positions in Google.  If I had to start the site all over again I'd use the dash instead but if you have pages that have been around for a while I wouldn't worry about it.

Also check out these posts from Search Engine Roundtable. There have been reports from the past few months about Google not listening to what you write for your title tag. http://www.seroundtable.com/google-title-tag-13704.html http://www.seroundtable.com/google-title-selection-12989.html

Welcome to moz land! The best place to get started is the Beginner's Guide to SEO. Chapter 7 specifically deals with link building. There are also a couple fantastic articles you should look at: http://www.seomoz.org/article/the-professional-guide-to-link-building-2011 http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-building-101-the-almost-complete-link-guide

usually they don't have links from the same places so if you get all the links they have and more you have beaten them hands down, and then after that well I guess google is your friend

Hi Mulith Ya, from a little town called Gansbaai, an hour outside of Cape Town. Yourself? It depends, dont approach a website that offers to sell links, rather find a good website and do some form of value exchange (I recommend targeted recipricol linking). Anyway, though this might interest you. Have a look at all of these sites. All have exactly same webiste structure/brand, just different domians, and all the domians are strengthened through exact match anchor text (bought!!) (This is similar to the scenario), http://www.safari.co.za/http://www.krugerpark.co.za/http://www.siyabona.co.za/http://www.backpackers.za.net and there are many more of these. This is no good and by all means! (I was shocked when I stumbled upon this on the web the other day, the unfortunate thing is they rank for very competitive terms and all their links are bought, or strategically exchanged (although Google picks this up, the anchor text still helps significantly), pity Google cant pick this kind of link buying up yet. Cheers

Thanks. It's a finance site and they've decided to make the entire visible site on https, not just specific pages. The http URL redirects to the https version.

Haha thanks for the example Ryan. OK, I think I should let my web developer know, he seems to put it on all of his sites (he knows his stuff so maybe it's an old habit he's never bothered to research). Your example prompted me to find the following page: http://www.seoconsultants.com/clueless/seo/tips/meta/ Quite a good read IMO.

I think if you are having 10 links to external sites on the one site if they are all related companies it should not be that bad. I would aim to have internal links on the main website first, and then externals coming second but. Other areas such as varied anchors and dup content you seem to be on top of already But in the end of the day the more links on page you have the less value internal pages will have.

Hi Keri, Thanks for the suggested solution. The enarion solution works for my regular URL's but then causes me issues with some of the more complicated javascript/ajax functionality on the site. No idea why, (bit over my head to be honest) but my developer suggested that it wasnt a good idea to it anyway (again ,for reasons I dont fully understand!)

Ahh ok sry misunderstood the question (my bad): If you have a page (the one linked to with an anchor text) and this page contains do-follow links then some of the "value" (for the search phrase in question) will flow to the other pages. But! (there's always a but since only a small percentage of the value will flow, the value of the other pages are most likely to little to show up in any search result, since other pages will probably out weigh it in the SERP's. In other words: Yes anchor text flows just like link-juice

Here are my recommendations 1.) Look at some local brands performing well in the searches in your country 2.) Check whether they achieve their rankings through good SEo practices (run the domain in opensiteexplorer) and analyse their top links 2.) Find out who the SEo companies are who are doing work for them 3.) Approach these SEO companies for quotes (and if they are to expensive, ask them to recommend another company) I totally agree with your time constraint (alot of people have this). However, I would strongly suggest you take the once-off time to understand as much about SEO as possible (roughly 10-20 hours), so you can properly understand and question the SEO processes a company will implement for you. Hope this helps. Cheers & Good Luck