Welcome to the Q&A Forum

1. CPC and Positioning: Here is some detailed info on qualityscore: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2454010?hl=en it will help raise your add position without raising your price (depending on competitive factors)

2. Linguistic Differences: Noted just wanted to cover all our bases!

4. Conversion Opportunity: Excellent! Consider linking your Adwords and Analytics to run A|B testing on a landing page for your Ad as well!

Yeah it certainly sounds like your campaigns are going to cost more in these regions! In your Google Adwords dashboard on the 9th column to your right, you will see "Avg Pos" this is the average position which the ad appears. Just like Google organic search lower position means less visibility and less clicks by an exponential factor. The first 3 ads display above the organic results and get roughly 60% of the ad clickers, and then 4-10 sit to the right of the organic results and get the other 40% (diminishes quickly). Anything below 10 is seen only if the user goes to the 2nd page or further.

Your average position will be expressed as something 2.7 it's an average of all the times you appeared. This is a good indicator that you may need to increase your bid and your qualityscore.

You can check your QualityScore by hovering over your keyword in the dashboard to see its performance results!

Best of luck!

While there has been extensive debate to the value of 'nofollow' it's best not to get caught up in the nitty-gritty of it all. Here's the mantra I follow when dealing with links:

1. Ask yourself does your reader REALLY need this link. When in doubt, go without! Conserve your link juice as much as possible but put the user first.

2. Is this the right place for the link - remember links placed higher on a page and in mainstream content react differently that footer or sidelinks.

3. Is this an authority site? If yes I won't nofollow it, I encourage Google to know I'm linking to high-end authority. Otherwise, I'll nofollow the site.

Last but not least consider that either nofollow plugs a page leak or it doesn't, but it certainly doesn't penalize you - so wouldn't you rather be safe than sorry and use it anyways?

Hi Andrews,

While the difference between dashes and underscores use to be a big issue a few years back its something that seems to hold minimal merit now. The two can be used rather interchangeably without any major impact. This was phased out around the same time as exact-match-domain value was as far too many people were abusing the long-tail dash page method.

That all kind of depends on what your vertical is, and what you mean by the number one spot.

The News Carousel show up first, when it shows up. That being said it is pulling information in a different manner than the organic results so being #1 organically wouldn't include you in that system automatically. Imagine it like when Youtube results or Google maps results show up in the search. They are an additional search element that is run separately than the organic system.

As far as if these are going to see more clicks - quite naturally they will. Just like Google Rich Snippets profiles see an increase in CTR beyond the normal results listing. People are more apt to click these results for three reasons:

1. You've presented them with additional information which in the long run is what they are trying to access
2. The majority people fall into a visual learning type. When you show them a picture they will pick it over text every time
3. It's new, and people have a natural curiosity with that which is new and will click on it simply to explore.

When you understand the background process that leads to the click decisions these people make it's not a huge leap to think that they'll be plenty click happy on the news carousel!

Very true Miriam,

Also I thought I may add that Google respects syntax - one of the modern debates in relation to your content is all about LSI relations. Google expects to see things like "Golf Clubs in Leeds" and will still rank it for "golf club leeds"!

You don't need the exact phrase zeroed in to rank.

The best way to research this is to use the google keyword tool (https://adwords.google.com/o/Targeting/Explorer?__c=1000000000&__u=1000000000&ideaRequestType=KEYWORD_IDEAS)

Throw your target keyphrase in there and look at the and let it populate ad group ideas (only seen when logged in). What you'll notice is a lot of these adword ideas have the EXACT same monthly traffic, local monthly traffic, difficulty and CPC price - that is because Google treats them as the EXACT same phrase.

Golf clubs leeds
Golf clubs in leeds
leeds golf clubs

They will all likely be treated as interchangeable in Google to some extent and a diversity of them will really help to hammer home your SEO while making it look natural.

I would be VERY careful about any backlink structure between multiple sites you own especially if they are on the same hosting or clearly related to the same company or google verified profile.

If you have a high value backlink going to your three niche sites, all which direct to your main site and that is working for you I would leave it at that. By directly linking to your main site not only do you continue to diminish the page juice of that site but you risk Google seeing this as a purchased link or a link ring due to your related properties.

Remember good long term SEO isn't about tricking Google, it's about working to build a great experience for your users, and establish content authority. Links from one site isn't going to do that, and trying to build your own pyramid of sites isn't going to help you either.

Put the user first, build good content, make your site accessible and useable and get involved in any active communities that your niche has and strengthen your sites internals just as much, if not more than, you worry about links.

Yup wildcard syntax is indeed still valid. However I can only confirm that the big 3 (Google, Yahoo and Bing) actively observe it. Other secondary search engines may not.

In your case you are probably looking for a syntax along the lines of:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /*.pdf$ This would set that any user agent should be blocked from any file name that ends in .pdf (a $ ties it to the end so pdf.txt would not be blocked in this case)

Keep an eye on how you block them. Missing a trailing slash could block a directory rather than a file, or not appending a strict symbol ($) could mean that phrases throughout a directory could be blocked rather than just a filename.

Also keep in mind if you are using URL re-writing this may play into how you need to block things; and you may also want to remember that disallowing access in a robot.txt does NOT prevent search engines from indexing the data, it is up to them if they honor the request. So if it is very important to block the file access from search engines then robots.txt may not be the way to do it.

First, is this content dynamic? Depending on how the user progresses through these choices a search engine may not even see this information.

Second, as long as those aren't the pages you are trying to rank I can't see them actually having that big of an impact (if any) on your overall SEO. There is a difference between having pages that have the same content, and having pages that are duplicate content.

Rel canonical would be another way to save your skin, and making sure that the choices themselves are no-follow links (as long as there is some other method to get to the deeper pages).

Personally for the sake of SEO and user experience (which is far more important) I'd talk to the company about creating a dynamic selection wizard that could be a popup and once the user makes all their choices brings them to the right HTML page.

The HTML pages would be open, crawl-able, structured and sitemapped and the wizard would by a dynamic widget loaded in from a page that was robots disallowed. Helping both the human and spider experience - just my two cents!

Best of luck!

When questions like this pop up I feel its best to reference Rand's intro to SEO slideshare (http://www.slideshare.net/randfish/introduction-to-seo-5003433) specifically slides 40-47 which cover site structure.

Separate sub-domains are often viewed as separate sites so you are now building separate value identities instead of one. If it's important to you to give them all a separate blog rather than a central one with multiple authors, then you can still achieve this by simply giving them separate sub-directories.

Sub-domains will not pass value the same way, and will be focused on different content and not associated with the main site.

Back when we had popular sub-domain hosting services like Lycos this is what seperated sitea.lycos.com from siteb.lycos.com and the same sort of thing would happen to your blogs.

If you want them to self promote and the SEO value and content association of the mainsite to flow down to them (and theirs to flow back up) structure it as www.yoursite.com/blog/author1 for each author and you'll be good to go!

I don't want to post the same answer as I did to your previous question but perhaps there was further clarification that you needed, that I missed!

Put a conditional in the header. Since you are using a wordpress platform you can't go in and manually edit each pages canonical anyway. Using the page if function and a variable you would be able to assign each one it's own rel= from a central head file anyway.

In an ideal situation you'd do each page manually but because of your CMS you need to do a work around

I think this is one of the first times I get to put my degree in Philosophy of Ethics to use here at Moz!

Your SEO company isn't an SEO company at all it's a blackhat chopshop and they are screwing you over.

Yes that duplicate content is devalued, possibly even to the point that it could have a negative impact on your rankings and therefore ultimately your business. Regardless of how far away your business is from the other Google still sees it.

Should you report your SEO company? If you mean to a marketing firm rating site, or the Better Business Bureau, then yes in a heart beat. There 'service' is a gross miss-practice that is harmful to your business and the last thing that you want others to fall prey too.

Should you warn these other businesses? I would - personally I think it's the right thing to do, some of them may have been aware of it and just opted for cheap and dirty content, others may be in the same boat as you where they had no idea this was happening. If the tables were turned I imagine you would want them to do the same for you!

What is the ideal course of action? From an SEO standpoint delete the content on your site that is duplicate. If its on other blogs that linkback to you try and reach out to those webmasters and get the content removed, if you can't get in touch with anyone try the disavow tool - be honest in explaining what happened and try and get as many links removed as possible. Then build up new fresh and unique content to replace the purge.

From a business stand point immediately halt all further services from this company, have a lawyer review any contracts you may have signed to see if they are in breach of contract anywhere or if you take full liabilities. If you are not claimed fully liable they still may be accountable for negligence and negative impact this had on your business (obviously not worth taking them to court over but great leverage to seek a refund). Reach out to the other effected companies and give them a good Samaritan's heads-up; too many people think SEO is a dirty game so be the good guy! Beyond that clean out house of the bad SEO and work at rebuilding the good!

Sorry to hear about your rough experience!

In all honesty people worry far too much about the duplicate content rule. Duplicate content is primarily for content sites and only penalized on a large scale.

In your case not only is the about page one that you likely aren't hoping to get ranked, but it's such a small factor that I doubt it will come into play.

Your inbound marketing strategy is likely to be much more than SEO traffic in fact I'd be willing to bed that a good 60%+ of your traffic is direct and/or social. In such a case as long as users are able to find the information they need on the site (and ultimately convert to bookings keeping the end-client happy and cash flowing) then I wouldn't worry about the "About Us" page.

Remember two things:

1. Put the customer experience first and everything else is gravy.

2. A good business (and good marketing) is a bigger picture than just SEO these days. Focus on what traffic origin makes sense for you and make sure they can access the information they need.

Here's what Matt Cutts had to say on the issue:
http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-duplicate-content-wont-hurt-you-unless-it-is-spammy-167459