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Can i place my anchor text backlinks on English high pr websites? Yes, you can... if those websites are really used by your German audience (i.e.: Mashable). But if you mean "pr websites" something like "press communicates web sites"... than I would say no: Because those are links that usually can generate problems (crappy sites); Because they must be nofollow links (as Google told) because they are not editorial links Because the press communicates will end being published, maybe, in sites your audience is not, hence useless for referral traffic; Because of at least 10 others good reasons I won't list. Moreover, if you want to rank in Google.de, you need links from German websites for simple better geotargeting and for a simple question of logic: Google, in fact will consider that your site is not relevant for the German public if it doesn't have links from German sites.

Do you have a Knowledge Base or FAQ section on your site? I would add content like this in one of those places. If you don't have something like this built in, I would recommend using the category pages. This kind of content is great for user experience. My only hesitation would be that more likely than not, most of the content would be below the fold, and it might not get as much view as it would if it had its own page on your site. Can you split content on your category pages? Maybe show one paragraph above the products and the rest below. Or, if you can add JS to the page, use a script to hide a portion of the content behind a read more button. Ideally, content like this should really have a page all its own. If you can manipulate how content is displayed on the category pages, you should be able to make it work there as well.

Google has stated they are better now at relating subdomain content to the TLD domain, but you're probably still better off using a subfolder. If you do go with a subdomain, make sure to link them in your GA code for better reporting. There are so many languages spoken in Malaysia that this domain issue is really not going to help visitors on your site. If you're going for consistency, you'd need subfolders or subdomains for all supported languages. If you're only using English, then I wouldn't even consider this change. Simply use www.domainname.com.au/malaysia/ to host content relevant to this market until you can get your TLD. This would send the strongest signal to both search engines and site visitors that your content is targeted for Malaysia.

Mostly no on iFrames, or not in a reliable way. Redirect 303 is more uncommon, but similar to a 302. Either one is not the way to permanently send old content to new. Google has a guide on redirection here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93633, and iFrames here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/34445.  Cheers!

From 100 links, 40 pointing categories looks ok for me. Google is against link building practices and follows such practice ( PENGUIN ), so if you want to do link building and not get caught, you need to build a very natural link profile: - Anchors: Do not use the exacly keyword you want to rank as anchor, instead use long sentences including your kw. - Variety: Do not get just "keyword" links, links with url, branch are also important. - Nofollow: It´s very important to include nofollow links in your link profile. - **Footer/sidebar: **Avoid links from footer/sidebar, specially if they are nofollow. - **Variety of domains: **Get your links from different domains. - Avoid links fromk penalized websites: It´s also very important to analyze the domains your site is going to be linked are healthy enough. Fore more complete information, checkout this article: http://moz.com/ugc/category/link-building

Hey Paul! If this is actually just one business, it should only ever have had 1 Google+ Local page. Google+ Local pages are meant to represent physical locations ... not a menu of services. So 1 physical location = 1 Google+ local Page. Unfortunately, if I'm understanding this correctly, Google would consider this situation of multiple pages to be a violation of their guidelines: https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en So, the best thing in this scenario would be to consolidate everything into a single website, build out unique content on the website for each service offered, but have just 1 Google+ Local page and a set of additional citations to support the single physical location. Now, if I've misunderstood and this is actually several different physical locations, please let me know.

Everyone here has some great advice and tips. I tend to disagree with a few of the ideas here. First, I don't think that having links from people that you have built relationships with is a terrible thing. If it is done properly it could probably generate some great referral traffic for you. That is very important. There is no link juice passed if there is no traffic. You absolutely have to make sure that you watch the anchor text, but you also what to do a quick check of their link profile. As the Penguin updates are becoming more evolved, you can be penalized for just being in a bad link neighborhood. I would just run their domain through Open Site Explorer and see if there is anything that makes you nervous. If these are sites that are related to yours, and they have the potential to generate good, engaged traffic, I think you don't have too much to worry about.

Haven't read anything or experimented with using canonical link elements to indicate your preferred domain. You should have server redirects in your Apache/Nginx config file for this and also set the preferred domain in GWT to really take care of that issue. Yes, Google will certainly decide for you if you don't have other indicators on which site you want to rank for select keywords. I suppose you'll need to decide which site to keep, but if you want both then you've got a lot of work ahead of you. Ideally, you should be ranking each product page on each site for unique keywords rather than duplicating efforts and wasting resources on trying to rank the same product page on two different sites for the same keywords. Not sure why anyone would want to do that for any other reason than testing. Anyway, my strong advice is pick a site and then merge the other site into it. If you're using Magento or WooCommerce or some other mainstream e-com platform, this should be rather easy, if not just time consuming. If they are different platforms, then I recommend Magento or a custom solution for best technical SEO features. If you can share more details about your job, I'd be glad to help.

It could, but it's mostly a broken way to go about doing it. Per Google's guide on it: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/181708, "Because of the time Googlebot spends on non-existent pages, your unique URLs may not be discovered as quickly or visited as frequently and your site’s crawl coverage may be impacted (also, you probably don’t want your site to rank well for the search query [File not found])."  So it's best to fix them to either return a custom 404 page, redirect via 301, or correctly land on a page of content without the 404.

Hi There! Chances are, this is going to be an uphill battle; the ability to compete successfully with the likes of Google's own location-based packs of results + organic results featuring individual business websites + powerhouse directories like Yelp is going to depend on the resources you have to put into the development and marketing of the directory. The competition is stiff for anyone entering the directory scene these days, but if you're creating something that doesn't yet exist, the best hope would be in becoming THE authoritative source for the niche. What can you do that will add value users can't get from Google 7-packs or Yelp's reviewers? What kind of content can you create that will earn you a spot amongst these already-established players? These would be the questions I would be asking myself to determine whether I wanted to dive into this new venture.

Thanks again Ryan!

Yes it's most definitely a factor in rankings but as you say, to achieve visual perfection on a budget (using a theme and not coding from scratch) you do end up with a lot of code. I always ensure my sites score as high as possible in speed tests, and the Html, Css, and Java are all properly minified (when possible), and that's about all you can do. If the site scores at least a 90/100 in the page speed test then Google are not going to hold back a site that looks good and has great content because it has a lot of code in the site. Most of all that code is for the browsers to render the site correctly but good Seo is mainly dependant on the content contained within certain tags. I just checked one of my sites, and it has 600 lines of code before my H1 tag, thanks to the revolution slider. But the site still ranks top 3 for many keywords and still achieves a 93/100 on page speed test. All things equal, custom built flat html sites will always rank better than themes php template sites, but it's quite rare that all things are equal. Those 400 lines of code may be holding you back by 1 spot or 5 spots, but it's nothing that some good links or great content can't fix. I understand your point though, as it's a painfully slow process to fix that code.

If Google is showing a 404 error when you click on the search result then technically you should also see a 404 error when visit the URL directly through your address bar. Google does a live fetch of your site from the search results so that won't change the 404 you're getting in a few days time. Yes, you can return a 404 header to only the Googlebot, but this has be done intentionally via htaccess, and I doubt you've done that. If you've been using one of the old date or the numeric permalink structure options, then you'll need to redirect your old permalinks to your new ones. You can try a plugin like 'Simple 301 Redirect' and fix the broken URLs that way if you only have a few of them. If you have a lot of them, which may be the case if you've changed your permalink structure, then you need to find a plugin that'll do the job for you. Good Luck

I was just going to comment on Don's post about your issue but it seems you've cleared it up. As I understand here, you will be keeping your domain name, just building a new site on a new host. Good, good. You're link juice will keep flowing if you keep your current domain, so relax. Since you're starting from scratch, you should consider using a platform or static HTML site that you will have complete control over. Those hosted SaaS website builders are not what you want if you're here on MOZ looking to rank well organically. I've had really great results with Magento (not Magento Go), so I can safely recommend it. Odoo, WordPress, Joomla, and other popular open-source platforms all can get you want you need in terms of technical SEO features, but you'll need plugins and modules that may affect performance. Due diligence will pay off here. Your next step is to do your own site index, noting all the page URLs now and either replicate this structure or set up redirects to avoid a hit in rankings. Since your site seems small and your referring links all point to your homepage, I'd say you might be able to skip this step without a major hit. If you can scrape your current site to save for reference, now is a good time for that. For DNS, I suggest CloudFlare. Read up and you'll see why. Good luck and post back if you have any more questions about this migration. Cheers!

In the past when I've worked on something similar, having the ccTLD was such a strong factor for the types of business each company was doing locally, that it also was key in assisting conversions, and supporting the local marketing teams. That's one consideration. Another way I'd look at it is via translation. Pretty much every site can avoid duplicate content if they are always using their localized translated versions of any material originally written by the .com, save for the overlapping English ones. In that regard it's a consideration of either writing different versions or using rel=canonical to point to the site that you want to rank the most for that particular document, again probably a consideration of the region of the article by customer, client, etc, i.e. if it was an article about a UK client or offering than the rel=canonical should point to the UK hosted site. But I'd still consider taking on hires to help with translation and copy writing as there sounds like there could be quite a bit of it. Going in reverse, you could probably have any English versions hosted on the ccTLDs point back to the .com as canonical. Cheers!

ok thanks for sharing your experience, i appreciate your comments all best dan

First thing: Your sites authority will not decrease because you add an external link (otherwise no one would ever link) Second thing: Exactly how much is passed is a little hard to determine and is not revealed by Moz, someone asked a similar question earlier this month and this has got some great responses and I don't want to duplicate their work http://moz.com/community/q/how-much-domain-authority-is-passed-on-through-a-link-from-a-page-with-low-authority Thanks Andy

It all looks okay from here too. It looks like you could do some more link building (it looks like you have 4 sites linking to you), and definitely try and get some more Google reviews (again, you have only 4--try to get 10), and keep producing quality content for your website (3 tips on taking to your kids about getting braces...or whatever it is you do ;-). You're in a competitive space, in a big market! You're doing well, keep it up.