Welcome to the Q&A Forum

You could tell which company? And what keywords would like to optimize the off-page?

Agreed.  When I see a KW.com I trust it much more than buy-green-widgets-at-cheap-prices.com.  

If you're wondering if you get any SEO benefit from this, I would say the benefits are going to be indirect in the form of more traffic to your pages eventually causing your rankings to climb, etc, but I don't think you're going to see any direct benefit such as ranking higher for those keywords on your own site.

I will gladly offer a few tips on your site, but first I will make a couple observations. It sounds like you are just getting started with SEO so I would strongly suggest reading the beginner's guide to SEO from start to finish. Even if you are experienced with SEO it can be a great refresher. For your site and business, determine your niche. What makes your site different from the thousands of other sites which sell clothing? Use your niche to determine your keywords. Unless you have a massive budget, you will not be able to compete nationally with other websites, but you can do well with longtail keywords. The below is a list of a few items I would change with your site. Others may feel differently so please be clear these are my opinions: The meta description for your product pages should be unique. The page I examined had the same description as your home page. If you have more information about your company, expand your About Us page. Information such as an address, pictures and profiles of key employees, etc. give consumers confidence in your site. Consider adding badges from companies like TRUSTe, Verisign, McAfee and the BBB. These badges offer shoppers a measure of comfort and confidence in your site. I didn't go through your checkout but if you do not offer Google Checkout, then add it. It's Google's search engine you wish to rank in, and adding their checkout makes your results stand out. remove your meta keywords tag. It offers no benefit. I looked at a blog page: http://www.nvclothing.com/blog. The images at the top are not linked. What if I like what I see and wish to buy it? By linking the image you allow your viewers to be impulsive. Otherwise your visitor needs to want the product enough to search your site. I couldn't find a Home button. Once I leave the home page, how do I get back? Sure I can type in the URL or use the Back button, but I would recommend adding a Home link somewhere. There were numerous good things I noticed. Your pages have unique Title tags, you offer social sharing buttons right next to your products, and have alt tags on your images. Good luck.

Hi Dru! We were experiencing a bug where the URLs for duplicate content weren't being displayed, but the good news is that this has been fixed! You should now be able to see the URLs in your campaign.

There are two aspects to the issue: 1. Resolve the cause of the problem. Crawl your site, locate any links to alternate URLs and change the links on your site to use the correct version of the URL. 2. Add a 301 redirect from /bad-url to /good-url. This will ensure any link juice to the bad urls is retained, along with providing a good user experience.

When I suggested combining the two articles, what I meant was to sit down with both articles and merge them into one article. This wouldn't be a simple copy and paste the two articles together. Instead you would logically merge the content, excluding any duplicate information. When you are finished, review the article and then ask others to do so as well. Each article offers a lot of content. To help you better target key terms you can split the final article up into two articles. I know this sounds confusing so I will clarify. Lets say you have Article A and Article B. Each article covers the same topic and contains about 1500 words. Upon reviewing both articles you realize about 1000 words are the same. The goal would then to merge the 500 unique words into the first article and make a single 2000 word article. Once that process is complete, you can then set out on your original goal of targeting more key words. To do that, you can break your 2000 word article into two (or more) articles, each targeting a couple phrases.

I agree with Cody but would like to ask if you can offer a specific example. It always is helpful to look at the exact result.

Thanks. Our Tech team says we have to keep the /ca folder for now due to some legacy dependency within the CMS and its URL structure, a pretty massive effort to fix. However, I agree we should NOT be using a 302 temp redirect, big no-no. I'll work with making that a 301 ASAP, thanks for bringing to my attention. Contrary to what I said earlier, I just learned that the travelocity.ca domain has not been verified in GWT yet therefore we haven't told Google to explicitly target Canada (.ca) users. Once we get the geotargeting set to Canada for travelocity.ca, I think this will be fixed. I'll update this thread as soon as I know the outcome.

Thanks for getting back to me, I'll try using a couple of tools to see what results I get. Thanks, Sophy

I agree that having a video sitemap is a good idea. I'd also recommend that you take the opportunity now (when just implementing videos, which you'll presumably continue) to implement some HTML5 markup on those videos. Let the search engines know who and what the videos are about, and maximize your benefits.

Hi Shirle, Could you provide more information on the error? I'm assuming that this is appearing when you look at a Crawl Diagnostic Summary? If so, is it an ERROR, WARNING or NOTICE? Clicking down through the error messages and then on an example of the error usually provides you with a short summary of the nature of the problem. i suspect may not be a technical issue i.e. something being 'broken' rather an issue related to the links generated by the trackback... Trackback (taken from Wordpress site) "Trackback helps you to notify another author that you wrote something related to what he had written on his blog, even if you don't have an explicit link to his article. This improves the chances of the other author sitting up and noticing that you gave him credit for something, or that you improved upon something he wrote, or something similar. With pingback and trackback, blogs are interconnected. Think of them as the equivalents of acknowledgements and references at the end of an academic paper, or a chapter in a textbook." Here is another clear summary of what a trackback is: http://www.optiniche.com/blog/117/wordpress-trackback-tutorial/ A trackback isn't bad for SEO if it generates a link to a genuine article on an above board site. However, spammers will try and exploit this to generate additional inbound links to their spammy site and of course you don't want to tarnish your own sites reputation by linking to spammy sites. If someone links to your blog post and you allow a trackback, by publishing it, you are giving a link back to that particular site. Google doesn’t reward excessive link exchanges and may lead to a site being penalised for this practice. You can of course turn off trackbacks in Wordpress if you can't see any benefit to them (or don't need them).

Cyklop Studio is correct. Definitely the second option. 301 your pages, change all links, then crawl your site so you can find any links you missed. Imagine for a moment you moved to a new home. You go to the post office and forward your mail to the new home (i.e. a 301). Would you still keep asking everyone to send your mail to your old home (i.e. keep the old links)? No. You would update everyone you can, then as you notice forwarded mail you can contact those people or businesses you missed and alert them to your new address.

Hi Ryan, If the target audience are in the USA, then it seems like the sensible thing to do. Good luck Regards, Gordon

Hi Derek, Sorry for reviving a very old thread but I was wondering how did it go with this project? Thanks Ricardo

Wouldn't life be great if Google Places just had a customer service department?  I think we would all be willing to pay a service fee, just to get someone on the line. That said.  I agree with Aaron. Before you do, we are seeing problems with residential addresses,  when the places account www is the same as the others.  (Like a franchise main site).  So you may want to look at- Make sure the address and phone is unique. Make sure every locations address and phone number is on the URL used in places, and clearly marked.  Home page and contact page are important. You may want to have individual unique pages for each location if you don't. Add the location city or ID into the name.  Example.  Paul's Shoe Box Aurora Extreme measures may include developing a individual site for the locations with a unique URL. Good luck!

Yoast's plugin for Wordpress is excellent! (and I agree that custom Wordpress theme frameworks should allow SEO modification to be taken over by a dedicated SEO plugin such as Yoast's -  if one is activated) Personally however I think the SEO/SEF banter is a game of semantics - If you think of Search Engine Friendly URLS for example - these can be generated using Yoast's Wordpress SEO tool - so SEF and SEO are pretty much one and the same when it all boils down to it. One of the things that every SEO worth their salt will do is recommend working toward making the project site Search Engine Friendly by promoting proper use of Schema and other SEF elements as part of their SEO strategy.