Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Mike,

I've just done a quick crawl of your site with Screaming Frog and I can already see quite a few issues. I won't bombard you with all of them but I'll list a few things you can start with:

1. Your URLs are a bit messy. There seems to be a pc subfolder somewhere in the site architecture. You may want to remove this folder so that you do not have /pc/ within your URLs.
2. All your pages seem to be contained within a /store/ sub folder. You may wish to change this so that only the store pages are contained within this folder and the rest of your pages are contained within the root. This would remove the unnecessary /store/ from all of the URLs.
3. Your home page goes through a messy chain of three 301 redirects to the eventual page http://www.wheelchairparts.com/store/pc/home.asp I would remove these redirects so that your home page reads http://www.wheelchairparts.com/ - much neater and user/search engine friendly
4. Home page title is too long (>66 characters) and is stuffed with keywords. In fact all the page titles appear stuffed to the brim with keywords. I would change these to be more appealing with your keyword included only once.
5. Some of your meta descriptions are too long (>156 characters). I would consider modifying these too be within the character limit.
6. Consider removing the Meta keywords tag completely. It is unnecessary and you seem to be spamming it anyway.
7. You have several duplicate pages. E.g. http://www.wheelchairparts.com/store/pc/viewCategories.asp and http://www.wheelchairparts.com/store/pc/viewcategories.asp. You will need to fix this issue.

Anyway I think that's probably enough to get going with for now. Hope that helps!

Adam.

It is never a good idea for anyone to copy another site's content. Regardless of the connection between companies, I would always advise on creating unique content for both sites. As you are the original creator of the content, you shouldn't face any penalty but the independent retailer could face duplicate content issues, if they copy the content from your site.

I would certainly advise against the independent retailer copying your content. However, it would probably be more beneficial and suitable to have the retailer link to your site instead.

Hope this helps.

I just setup custom google search engines in Chrome and adapt the search parameters to remove all personalization from searches.

Works for me!

You are right that PR is not 'the be all'. You shouldn't worry too much about it and should really be focussing on other more important factors.

Pagerank (or PR) is really just a mathematical formula, which you can read more about here. In order to get a larger ranking, you essentially need links from pages with higher PR. For example, if you wanted to obtain a PR of 2 you would need 3 links from a PR3 page. You can find various charts around the web that highlight PR requirements.

Having looked at your site in opensiteexplorer.org, it is clear why your PR is not higher. Although you have over 1,500 links, these links are from only 12 different c-classes. This essentially means that you only realistically have 12 different links due to the way Google treats links from the same c-class. Also, as Darin has rightly pointed out, the majority of these links are pretty poor quality with not much PR themselves.

If you are adamant about improving your PR, you will need to obtain links from sites/pages with a higher PR. However, I wouldn't recommend adopting a strategy based on improving pagerank. You would be much better off improving the quality of your site with content that people find useful enough to link to.

Hi Al,

Using hidden text is considered black hat and has been identified as spam by most of the major search engines.

Best practice is to use the alt tag for images. There is no need to have a hidden h1 tag and this could even harm your site if you continue to use hidden text.

Hope that helps,

Adam.

According to sitemaps.org:

Q: <a id="faq_sitemap_location" name="faq_sitemap_location"></a>Where do I place my Sitemap?

It is strongly recommended that you place your Sitemap at the root directory of your HTML server; that is, place it at http://example.com/sitemap.xml.

Although it probably won't cause many SEO issues having your sitemap hosted elsewhere, I would always go with what is strongly recommended. Hope that helps,

Adam.

Streamline is right that you should keep the 301 redirects in place so that any links pointing to the old pages pass value through the redirect to the new pages.

Is there a time frame after which Google does not need a 301 any more? For example if A is 301 redirected to B, does Google know after a while not to serve A any more, and replaces any requests for A with B?

Simply put, no. If you remove the 301 redirect then any requests for page A will return page A and not B.

How about any links that go to A?

These links will now be passing all their value to page A.

Or: Is the only option to have all links that pointed to A point to B and then the 301 can be removed after some time?

If it is possible for you to change all links that point to A, to then point to B, then maybe. However, it is very unlikely you will be able to do this and it will be extremely time consuming.

In short, your best option is to leave the 301 redirects in place as best SEO practice.

'Would you say then that a link with 'Keywords' as the anchor pointing at http://www.keywords.com would be considered a brand signal?'

Not unless the brand/company name is 'Keywords' also. Even then I would be tempted to use any identifying business extension such as Inc, Ltd etc. So as an example,

Business is called 'Electric Fan Services' website is 'http://www.electricfanservices.com' and main keyword phrase is 'electric fan services' I would make sure the majority of anchors are either 'Electric Fan Services' or 'http://www.electricfanservices.com'. If the business was actually 'Electric Fan Services Ltd.' I would probably adjust the anchor text term accordingly.

Adam.

These types of critical acclaim or testimonials are not really considered duplicate content. It is no different from quoting from a book. Google is clever enough to know that this is not duplicate content and if you are still considered about possible duplicate content issues then you could slightly rewrite or shorten testimonials to make them more unique e.g.

"Great wine.......thumbs up from me!"

original testimonial would read "Great wine, really fruity flavour and subtle notes, thumbs up from me!"

It's hard to give a definitive answer to what is a 'really great' bounce rate. I find that bounce rates can vary greatly between industries, website types (blogs, e-commerce etc.) and even between pages.

Brian Clifton gives an indication of bounce rate levels in his book by use of a traffic light system. Less than 25% is considered green (good), 25-50% is amber (average) and above 50% is red (not good). I generally go by this rough guideline. So I guess really great could be considered less than 15% perhaps?

Hope this helps,

Adam.

With regard to your anchor text, the text that is hyperlinked as you put it, you should be using mainly brand terms as opposed to commercial terms. In other words 'http://www.companyname.com' or just 'companyname'.

As for blog commenting, it can still be a useful way to get some links as long as you comment on relevant, highly regarded blogs that don't just allow anyone to post. Meaning that you will need to create a relevant and interesting post that the blog owner will approve. Another thing you should consider is whether the blog tags all links as nofollow. If the link is nofollow then you will not receive any link juice.

Finally, if you are creating a link to a page on your site then it should be relevant to the comment you are making otherwise the blog owner may just reject your comment as spam.

Adam.

You can implement a meta refresh as follows:

This will delay the redirect to domainB.com by 10 seconds. It will pass some link juice but not much. It is not best practice to do this because, as you rightly state, Google does not like this type of redirect (due to spam abuse) and the loss of link juice.

I would suggest you just 301 redirect to new site and run a 'welcome to our new site' page on the new domain for the first few weeks while people adjust. You'd be surprised how quickly people adjust to new sites.

Adam.

Hi Mat,

I monitor most of the SEO blogs via a feed reader and I think perhaps this article posted on the 25th October on Search Engine Watch could be the article you're looking for:

If You're Only Measuring Links, You're Wasting Time by Adria Saracino

Adria is the Head of Outreach at Distilled so could be why you thought it was written on their blog?

Hope that helps,

Adam.

I'm massively in favour of keeping these domains rather than using a 301 redirect. Although you can gain some short term benefits from the link juice passed on with a 301 redirect, you are much better off in the long term by keeping the domain and creating links to your site from the domain. Here's why:

1. If you 301 redirect the domain, no new content will be created on that domain and in all likelihood, no new links will be created for that domain and you may even lose links. Whereas if you keep the domain, you can continue to build new content that attract more links.

2. If the domain is in the same industry and has good rankings in search engines then why not capitalise on that opportunity? Now you can have two sites that rank well generating more sales/conversions for your single business.

That's my thoughts,

Adam.

Hi David,

Yes, there has been a whiteboard Friday for the last couple of weeks. Just check under the SEO Blog.

July 13th - 8 Rules for Exceptional Slide Presentations

July 6th - Leveraging the Power of Slide Decks to Boost your SEO, Social + Content Marketing

June 29th - Getting Started with Guest Posting

Hope that helps,

Adam.

I agree, starting from scratch would be a quicker and easier option. However, by doing this the authority and value that has been built up on the domain will be lost. Ultimately I think it would be better in the long run to clean up the current site.

Hi Cesar,

There is no need to be so worried. You certainly haven't shot yourself in the foot here.

I don't think you quite understand what the 'Content Keywords' section of GWT actually means. It is not a reflection of your rankings for each of these keywords. It is a representation of the most common keywords found across your pages that the Google crawler has found. The significance ranking is just an indication of how often the Google crawler has found each keyword. If your content changes over time then of course the list will also reflect this as the crawler visits your pages.

If you feel there are keywords missing then this could be because Google could not crawl all of your pages and therefore you should check the crawl errors section of your GWT. IT could also be because Google has excluded words that it determines to be boilerplate text or common words.

You can find out more information in the Webmaster Tools help center:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35255

Hope this helps,

Adam.

Google autocomplete and the 'searches related to' field can be manipulated, however it is against Google's TOS to do so. Rishi Lakhani wrote a very interesting article on the subject over a year ago now. In it he shows how he managed to manipulate these results.

Hope that helps.

Just as a side,

have you considered purchasing either andrewsolomon.com or andysolomon.com?

Depending on how valuable the domain is to you it might be worth contacting the owners of the domains to see if they might want to sell. More often than not, people are interested in selling their domain and you may be able to get them for a bargain. A simple check on whois will give you the contact details or if they have a site you may be able to find contact details on there.

If you don't ask, you don't get.

Hi Avi,

I have also used youtube videos on sites without using the scheme.org video markup and they have been showing up in serps as well. There's an interesting article, where this was tested by an SEO who also concluded that you don't need the scheme.org markup for Youtube videos:

http://www.reelseo.com/embedded-youtube-indexed-google/

Considering Google owns Youtube, I guess it's no surprise!

Adam.