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I doubt that they have a huge effect on your rankings. However it would be something worth testing. As far as I'm aware I don't think anyone has tested this fully, although I may be wrong.

I guess if several thousand people all recommend a site within their links section in g+, it could be seen as an indicator of authority by Google and may have an impact on rankings but I couldn't say for sure.

In terms of your link building strategy, I would probably focus on more conventional methods.

Of course I should also add, if you really want G Site Crawler, you could run a virtual windows on your Mac and carry on using it that way. I run windows on my mac using VMware Fusion:

VMware Fusion

I would say this depends on a few factors really.

1. How big/well known is the client? If they are relatively well known or a big player in the market then I would be less inclined to start again with a new domain. Especially if they have built up a brand that is recognizable, you would lose that value by switching domains.

2. How old is the current domain and how much authority does it have? Again, I would be less inclined to switch if they have a well aged domain with authority.

If there is value in keeping the existing domain then I would focus on cleaning up their backlink profile. It may take a bit of time and persistence on your part but the rewards will be worth it.

I have had a question from a retailer asking if they can take all our content i.e. blog articles, product pages etc, what is best practice here in getting SEO value out of this?

Well firstly, there is no SEO benefit to either party here unless the retailer provides a link to your site. This can actually cause damage to the retailer's site with regards to duplicate content issues. Forget about canonical tags here, they are not designed to avoid duplicate content issues when copying someone else's content.

My advice would be to advise the retailer to create their own unique content rather than copying your content. They can provide links to product pages on your site but they should try to create unique descriptions for the products rather than copying your content.

With regard to other retailers copying your content, they do so at their own risk as Google could decide to penalise these sites (assuming they haven't already done so). It is best practice to create unique content rather than copying other people's content.

Hope this helps.

Hi Josh.

There isn't really much benefit to the site with low DA in terms of link value. However, if the guest poster is particularly knowledgeable on the topic they are writing about, you would expect them to link to sites with high DA. In other words, it could be taken as a sign that the poster knows the topic well if they are linking to other authority sites on the topic.

Hope that helps,

Adam.

As far as I can tell, there does seem to be a few issues.

First, I'm not quite sure why you are specifying canonical urls. They are used to specify a preferred version of a set of similar pages. The pages you have put canonical links on do not have similar pages.

Second, your implementation of the canonical link is incorrect. You should put the link in the section of the non-canonical versions of the page. However, seeing as you do not seem to have similar pages, you should not be including the canonical link anyway.

Hope this helps.

Personally I don't see any problem with you identifying your business as Dublin based. You are clearly close enough to the city to service it so I don't see a problem here.

You often see businesses citing their location as London or as having a London office which is technically not in London but in one of the neighbouring counties such as Surrey, Middlesex, Essex or Kent. As long as you are close enough to the main city then I see no problem in claiming your location as that main city. Others may disagree but that's what I think and in practice, many businesses already do this.

I'm sure you have many more links that OSE doesn't show. However, this is beside the point. Like I said previously, PR is a mathematical formula that depends on the PR of your linking pages. You may have many thousands of links but if they are all from pages with a PR of 0 or -1, then your PR will not improve. It's not just about the volume of links but the PR of those linking pages and the number of outbound links on those pages.

It is not unusual to see a drop in PR. Google has evolved over the years and the way it treats links has also evolved. It is likely that a number of the links you had when your site had a PR of 1 were treated differently by Google after an algo update and were therefore devalued.

Ultimately, you shouldn't be chasing PR and definitely you shouldn't be building links with the aim of increasing your PR. Focus instead on getting your site to rank well for the key terms that drive traffic to your site.

Hi Clicksjim,

As long as you don't see a rel="no follow" attached to the link then it should be followed by search engines, therefore passing value.

As an extra minor detail, you might also want to check that the page hasn't been blocked by robots.txt

Hope that helps,

Adam.

You are correct that link juice will pass through your site as long as your site architecture is correctly setup. However, you can not rely completely on this alone. What you have been doing with social media is good and will help but think about trying to get your tweets retweeted by others, and your facebook posts shared by others. This will also help.

More importantly, you should be creating good quality articles that attract links from others. If your articles contain really interesting content and you have enough exposure through social media, then you should naturally attract links.

Adam.

Hi Dan,

What I believe you are looking at is a feature that's included with Facebook pages called Facebook offers.

http://www.facebook.com/help/offers

You can easily create these type of offers and post them on your Facebook page. You should be able to find the offer button from the sharing tool at the top of your page's timeline.

Although the offer costs nothing to create, you should probably run a sponsored ad in conjunction with the offer to increase the offer's exposure.

Adam.

We would really need more information to answer this such as what position in Bing and Yahoo is the site? What keywords you are targeting? Has your site dropped in rankings or always positioned low?

There could be a number of reasons why you are not ranking well. Without more info it would be hard to give a better answer.

Have you performed a crawl test? That might give you a clearer idea of what's going on.

There was a penguin data refresh on 25th/26th May which had minor algorithmic changes. This could be a possible cause, if the dates match.

Check your webmaster tools to see if you've had any messages from Google. A penalty could have caused such a drop. Carefully review all of your backlinks and your content to see if there are any issues there such as duplicate content or spammy links.

Adam.

Hi Ilya,

Are you sure you haven't disabled your public profile by accident? I ask because even when I search linkedin ilya elbert, I don't see your linkedin profile. - Ignore that, just checked again without personalized search and I can see your profile on the bottom of the page.

I can't say that I've ever heard of anyone having their linkedin profile penalized in google search before. Sounds a bit strange to me.

Adam.

There is no penalty for having a large number of internal links and yes every single link on the page (not just the ones within the article) are being counted.

The general guideline is to have no more than 100 internal links per page. This is because the more links you have on a page, the less link juice will pass through these links. It is important to note that the 100 links is only a rough guideline and for some sites it may not be possible to have less than this. Of course, if you can reduce the number of links on the page then it would be good but to reiterate, you will not get a penalty for this.

Adam.

That looks like a very unnatural link profile to me. I assume you are talking about commercial term anchors when you mention 'targeted keywords'? If so then you would certainly need to build a much larger proportion of brand anchors for your links.

There is no magic number when talking about percentages of commercial to brand anchors. It varies between countries and industries. However, I can certainly say that only 15% brand anchors is way too low. To find the best ratio may take a bit of experimentation.

Adam.

Try this:

RedirectMatch 301 ^/content/.*$ http://www.mysite.com

I think that should work. Let me know if you have any problems.

Adam.

It is possible to evaluate a site and suggest areas that may have caused it suffer with the penguin update. However you should be very careful about which firm you choose as many not so reputable sites are cropping up offering such services. If you want to use an seo firm then I suggest you take a look at the SEOmoz recommended companies.

To be honest you probably don't need someone to tell you what's wrong, with a bit of reading and self analysis you will be able to find what has happened and more than likely it will be down to your backlinks.. Your money may be better spent hiring s reputable SEO to help fix the problems rather than tell you what the problems are.

Adam.

This is not a major issue as long as you include the rel="next" and rel="prev" for the paginated content.

You can read more about this at Google here:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/video-about-pagination-with-relnext-and.html

Adam.