Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Personally, I would go with the second option:

courses/togaf/foundation-training

Mainly because it looks a lot neater and you don't really need to mention 'togaf' twice in the URL.

Really you should try to keep your URLs as neat and user friendly as possible whilst keeping the relevant keywords. I generally try to keep them as short as possible without sacrificing essential keywords and pay no attention to the advice about keeping the length of your URL to 35 characters because google only displays 35, this is incorrect.

Hope that helps,

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.

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.

Using rel=prev and rel=next will help to avoid duplicate content issues and is entirely separate from your meta tags. If you wish to avoid duplicate meta title errors then you will need to add 'page x' to your titles, similar to what Matt Cutts has done with his blog.

Hope that helps,

Adam.

Hi Julien, I just did a basic check of your backlink profile using opensiteexplorer.org

Hi Julien,

Having looked at the backlink profile for both pages I can already see one problem. Your 'Annecy' page has very few links pointing to it whereas your 'Haute-Savoie' page has considerably more links to it. This is not a major problem in itself, however the problem I can see is with the anchors of these links. The majority of links to your 'Haute-Savoie' page contain the anchor 'haute savoie annecy'. This could be contributing to your 'Haute-Savoie' page outranking your 'Annecy' page. You can combat this by creating more links to your 'Annecy' page.

You could also improve your on-page optimisation for both pages. Again, having looked at your 'Haute-Savoie' page, it is quite well optimised for 'Annecy' rather than 'Haute-Savoie'.

Hope this helps,

Adam.

You can do a 'site:yoururl' search in Google to see if your pages are still indexed. If you feel you may have received a penalty then a full site audit wil be necessary.

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.

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.

Hi Oleksiy,

Just by looking at the source code of your article 'Bing Disavow.....etc.' I could not see the rel=author tag anywhere which might be the problem. In your author bio, try using

<a <span="">href</a><a <span="">="https://plus.google.com/109060296729752176677?rel=author">Google+</a>

instead of using

<a <span="">title</a><a <span="">="My Google +" rel="me nofollow" href="https://plus.google.com/109060296729752176677" target="_blank"></a><a <span="">Google +</a>

That works for my blog. Hope it helps.

Hi Guido,

Firstly I would perhaps look at changing from a subdomain to a subfolder e.g. http://www.zenucchi.it/poltronafraubrescia or http://www.zenucchi.it/poltrona-frau-brescia

There are, of course, certain situations where a subdomain is more appropriate but in your case I believe a subfolder would be more appropriate. You will find that the subfolder will benefit from the added authority of your domain whereas the current subdomain configuration means that you are losing valuable authority here.

I would also advise on having a good mix of brand anchor links as well as commercial i.e. have anchors containing Zenucchi or http://www.zenucchi.it as well as poltrona frau brescia.

Another thing I would look at improving is your on-page optimization. There are quite a few things you could improve so won't go through everything but I notice you don't have the key term 'poltrona frau brescia' in a h1 tag, maybe consider doing this.

Hope this helps.

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.

If you need more than 20,000 pages crawled then I believe you could purchase Enterprise from SEOMoz that costs $4k a month but allows 1 million pages to be crawled per month.

If that is too much then you could consider purchasing a screaming frog licence for £99 which allows you to crawl a large number of pages.

I haven't heard of Voltrank specifically but I would probably advise to stay away from these types of link exchange networks. You can't always guarantee the quality or relevance of the sites that your links will appear on. Also, Google is pretty savvy at identifying these kind of networks. Personally, I would avoid them.

WordPress SEO by Yoast is by far the best SEO plugin I have used for Wordpress. Highly recommend!

http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/

You might want to consider upgrading to Pro Elite. The crawl limit is increased to 20,000 pages.

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.

I would have to disagree with Mat about Flippa. Although you can find some interesting sites for sale on there, prices tend to be rather inflated and perhaps doesn't present the best value for money. Considering you are looking for blogs, I would also suggest that Flippa is not the best option in this case.

However, I would definitely agree with Mat's suggestion about approaching blog owners directly to see if they are interested in selling. You are more likely to find better value for money with this approach as many blog owners won't have an idea how much their blog is worth. They may also be very keen to sell a blog that they no longer have time to update. You will certainly be better off with this approach.

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.

Just to add to this....

I'm not sure why you are so concerned with PA and DA metrics. Whilst useful, you should not be getting to obsessed with influencing these metrics. Surely your overall goal should be to outrank your competitors in search engines rather than beating their PA and DA scores? Of course, with a successfully implemented SEO strategy you should find these will naturally improve along with your rankings.

Concentrate more on your overall SEO strategy rather than trying to improve just your PA and DA.