Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Awesome, thanks again for your clear directions Dirk!

Hi, Rand did a Whiteboard Friday on this topic (http://moz.com/blog/subdomains-vs-subfolders-rel-canonical) - and also answered a question quite similar as yours (http://moz.com/community/q/moz-s-official-stance-on-subdomain-vs-subfolder-does-it-need-updating) => advice would be not to use subdomains but rather to use subdirectories (which corresponds with the advice Tony gave you) rgds, Dirk

Completely agree with Bob. The only exception where you might consider using nofollow on internal links would be on links for sign in, add to shopping cart,... - although they indicate that it's not really necessary. Quote from webmaster tools on reasons why you could use no follow: (source:https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569?hl=en) Crawl prioritization: Search engine robots can't sign in or register as a member on your forum, so there's no reason to invite Googlebot to follow "register here" or "sign in" links. Using nofollow on these links enables Googlebot to crawl other pages you'd prefer to see in Google's index. However, a solid information architecture — intuitive navigation, user- and search-engine-friendly URLs, and so on — is likely to be a far more productive use of resources than focusing on crawl prioritization via nofollowed links. rgds, Dirk

Landon, 100% would try playing around with http://ubersuggest.org/ I find it useful for finding some of the high traffic searches around the industry, which can be used for blog article topic research. For example if its an SEO blog, just a couple of searches like What is link building? / What is SEO? / What is the best digital marketing software? You will get lots of ideas that users have been searching for. Hope this helps James

Hey Kathy, Indeed this is a common problem amongst webmasters. In addition to Bob's suggestion to add a Title Tag, I'd also suggest powering up your co's Google+ page. A quick check of your G+ page shows: a) There are no posts with links to your website - this is a missed opportunity, both from an indexation and potential customer funnel perspective. b) Your "about" shows your YouTube only, so I'd add a ton more in your co's description, including links to your 7 x main categories (What's Special About Our Vanilla, Beans, Extract, Paste, Powders, Sugars & Books) and why people should buy from you / the value your brand brings (value proposition) I'd also find ways of getting more followers on your G+ biz account from those currently following Patrician Rain's personal G+ page, as she already has 64 followers (and been viewed 11,665 times). While you're at it, I'd verify your G+ biz page too. Google My Business provide a help page that should help. Re your Twitter and FB pages, they seem to be in good order Another suggestion: I'd add a link to your "Bulk Vanilla Beans" page within your blog post page text, as currently it has none at all, yet the text itself does a great job of answering many well-thought-out questions and also because your Bulk Vanilla Beans page has a link to your blog posts in the 2nd paragraph. Last suggestion: on your YouTube page, add links to both your Twitter and Facebook, therefore creating a matrix of links to help users both find and engage with your brand on social media. Hope all this helps, in addition to Bob's excellent resources and suggestions

I agree with Bob, and I want to add that one-word keywords tend to be _extremely_difficult to rank for. Your best bet is to focus your pages on the key phrases that make the most sense based on the topics of those pages. Have you ever read Cyrus Shepard's "Keywords to Concepts: The Lazy Web Marketer's Guide to Smart Keyword Research?" It's a bit on the older side, but is still quite relevant. It might help you wrap your head around some of the intricacies of keyword targeting, and how search engines are learning to understand topics and intent.

Be careful about posting articles for the sake of link building. Domain authority matters, but I've seen a lot of people get off track and work towards getting links - when they could be getting links, customers, and industry awareness. Work instead to find your customer and write things that would be useful to them. For example, if you're trying to sell fitness products and supplements, think about where the customer is found online. I'm sure there are lots of fitness blogs. What about getting in touch with them and doing a sponsored giveaway through their blogs? If you're an expert on the topic, you could also get in touch and see if you could contribute regular content about supplements to help their readers understand which ones to use, why, who should use what, etc.

That is very interesting William, I personally loved Yelp's idea hated the execution. They are now borderline black mailers IMO. I hope others will respond so we can see some actual data. Nice post Miriam!

Thanks for the responses! Very helpful advice.

Yeah, I have to agree that it's pretty unlikely the URL alone is the thing helping them rank. Since you're a Pro subscriber, I'd suggest using the Keyword Difficulty Tool to run a Full SERP Report on that keyword. That might help you work out what's going on. Cyrus Shepard made a video explaining that report that I think could be useful.

Thanks Kathy, yeah is an odd one. Ive seen it happen before with some other sites we have done and its always confused me why it happens. Regards Ade

Also found this article on Yoast.com: Moving your website to HTTPS He says: 'If you’re a web shop or otherwise transactional website you probably already have SSL for your checkout. If so, moving your entire website to https makes a LOT of sense to me, it’s probably actually easier to maintain and makes sure that you’re doing everything to make sure your SSL traffic (and thus the most important section of your site) is as fast as possible.' Moving to HTTPS is something different than 301 redirecting I suppose? Yoast says: _'All of your internal links should start to use https, not just to pages, but for images, JavaScript, CSS, etc. This means going through your theme with a fine comb and cleaning all of those up. Of course you can have your web server redirect http to https (more on that below), but not having to do the redirect is a lot cheaper.' Thanks again! Joost_

Interesting. Downloading the latest links from Webmaster tools pulls down over 800 links where as Open Site Explorer only shows 123?

Thumbs up to Tom. I'd only add that Analytics will tell you much in terms of priorities. From there you can see what percentage of your traffic was/is mobile to begin with and how mobile effects the conversion cycle. Often times the same users begin their research on mobile devices but then move to Desktop or Tablet to purchase. The basic idea being, you can get a solid estimate on your own cost/benefit by running through Analytics. Cheers!

Hello Anirbon, You never want to show Google one thing in the code, and show everyone else something different. That is the very definition of cloaking. Have you looked into using JASON-LD instead of Schema markup? Built Visible has a great article on micro data that includes a section about JSON-LD, which allows you to mark up code in a script instead of wrapping the HTML.

Hi John. You can also exclude by domain within Analytics. See: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2795830

Hi Dave. A workflow checklist should really help with this as well. There are probably a few other items you'll catch by meeting with the others involved and getting everyone on the same page. Cheers!