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Google + Bing + Yahoo + Ask = over 98% of search engine traffic in the US. What the other search engines do is irrelevant in my opinion. I am not aware of any search engine which uses meta keywords. As far as search engines changing their minds, it is entirely possible but highly unlikely. Meta keywords go directly against everything Google has worked towards...showing the same content to the public as to the search engine. The public does not see the meta keywords tag. This is a very minor detail, and you can go either way. Since you brought the topic up, I will stand by my original recommendation that this unnecessary code be removed from the site.

Hey Bill I like to start with this standard setup (image/chart from my wordpress post on moz); Pages, Posts, Categories - Index Tags, Dated Archives, Subpages, Author Archives - noindex You can check out the full post - I will be updating the Yoast Screenshots very soon! -Dan

Your terminology of "one-way" and link "exchange" would seem to be in conflict. Since it seems that you're not really talking about one-way, but actual link exchanges, I'd echo what searchpl says: be really careful. In my opinion, the risk is far greater than the potential reward, and you'd be better off acquiring true one-way links.

I'll take a stab. You can use a 301 redirect to enforce your canonical URL. In this case, it may be that site decided that /home.aspx is the canonical and wanted to be sure any links out there go to it. This is a strong signal to the search engine that if it has both www.domain.com and www.domain.com/home.aspx indexed, the /home is the URL for the juice. Now, that assumes this was done on purpose and not just some silly mistake. I've seen sites with 4 URLs for the main page: www.domain.com www.domain.com/home.aspx domain.com domain.com/home.aspx You can read up on Google, but one way to fix this problem is to redirect 3 of the 4 to the canonical URL.

thank you

Thanks for the answer David. I already use most of these tools I thought that there might be a hidden gem somewhere that I hadn’t found yet ; )

Howdy Wouter, Matt Cutts says some url shorteners do infact pass some value. I know Linkedin isn't using a shortener, but I suspect Google treats those similarly (from Linkedin). That said, Google knows Linkedin well, so they probably assign values to their links in a specific way, regardless of how Linkedin marks them up. That's my hunch and of course, I could be wrong. But with high profile social sites such as facebook, twitter, linkedin, etc... Google knows best about how to treat their massive amounts of outbound links. Just a thought. Does this help Wouter?

Contrary to Theo I'd say: A. Positive Pretty sure Google has been following js open links for many years now. I'd be reasonably confident of saying even if you did something tricky like href="javascript:CleverFunction('http://example.com')" and CleverFunction was designed to add nofollow/ open in new window, that Google would still be able to follow it from the url within the href. You could quite easily set up a test for a page that only has a link like this pointing to it and see if it gets indexed. The only thing I might not be totally sure of is if it passes juice, but I think as of mid 2009 it does (as I'm sure Google no longer endorsed js links as a method for preserving link juice).

Yes the other sites in SERP are not very competitive , do not have access to semrush logs any more

Both www.cardealer.net and www.car-dealer.com will lose type-in traffic to www.cardealer.com. I would find another domain that is a .com without a hyphen. After you have put a lot of work into the site you don't want your traffic going to the competitor.

Perhaps it was cached in your browser?

Brant, I agree with John and would even take it a step further; Create landing pages with your desired phrase in the text, alt tag behind the image AND Link to newly created internal pages with phrases 2 OR 3 (not both on each page) to create a further, in-depth, trail for Google to rank you for.

I have Google reporting different capitalization as duplicates, so now I ensure all pages have a with the lowercase version of the page. This ensures Google does not split the juice between, what it thinks are two different pages. It is a spin off from when Fresh-fish.hmtl could refer to a different page to fres-fish.html etc. so, the two terms being accepted as different keywords is just mimicing how Google handles these terms. Check Google Webmaster tools to ensure no pages are being reported as duplicates, or let Roger do his weekly scan and check the results.

I block my Terms of Use and Privacy pages with robots.txt. I use a tool on my site which ads any search terms a user entered in to a search engine to reach the page. "Users found this page by searching for..." and then the box will fill up with search terms if the page is selected from SERPs. I noticed my Terms and Privacy pages were getting hits. I don't want those pages competing with the rest of my site content in Google. If you allow those pages to be indexed, you run the risk of those pages appearing instead of a more relevant page. This can cause searchers to skip over your result, or click on the result and bounce off your site.

With OSE you're going to get truncated data if a given domain has more than 25 links from it. It does this to show better diversity with its results. I don't know if there is any way around it. If there is, someone please tell me I always find that if I set it to - Show "All" links from "External Pages Only" to "All Pages on the Root Domain" then I can get some pretty good data. I think this would work for what you need it for. Maybe you could use the SEOMoz API to gather the data you need.

Yep, bowler hats for sure!

We have lot's of clients with in home businesses. We either list the home address, and then in the places account request that it is not shown, or we encourage an executive office location if in fact they will use it as a place to do business. Having real contact information is not just important to Google , its important to their customers. Our company has been using executive offices for 10 years.  They are a great cost savings, and give us a nice environment to meet clients or hold meetings. Most executive or virtually offices also give you an option of renting an individual office on a short term basis, which we have used many times. Millions of businesses are home based. Google doesn't care if your address is residential or commercial, I think they care that it's listed.  Your client must have an address for  contact for customers that includes email, phone and address on their site.  They should also have it registered with the correct government agencies (the address )  and any valuable business associations in town, like a Better business bureau or Chamber.