Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi there,

The special characters on your website URL is changed because URLs are sent over the Internet using the ASCII character-set. That's why the & is converted to %26.

If you're trying to make your site rank, it is better to just simplify or shorten the URL. This is because search engines have problems indexing sites when the URLs contain special characters.

The special characters below are known to be "search-engine-spider-stoppers":

• ampersand (&)
• dollar sign ($)
• equals sign (=)
• percent sign (%)
• question mark (?)

Hope that helps!

Yes I think its always wise to get other people's opinion about these things.

Google counts that as one link. Matt Cutts explained that well in this video.

So I dont think you have anything to worry about.

Cheers!

Hi there, I think having the exact same alt text on the links is not a problem unless you did received a warning from Google about excessive usage or worst yet, spamming using that alt text.

But just to be on the safe side, I would advise for you to check those 600 links to see if they need to be disavowed. Normally, links that you need to disavow are:

• "Unnatural" backlinks that you created on your own or are purchased. This is especially for those with targeted high-volume keywords in the anchor text.

• Backlinks that are auto generated.

If those 600 links do not fall into any of those categories, then I advise for you not to disavow those links. It would be such a waste if you disavow those links from good sites that link to you because they think your site is good.

AOV

You could use a wildcard operator in your robots.txt to deal with this.

Something like this should work:

Disallow: /subfolder/myforum/pop_profile.asp?mode=display&id=*

See here for more details:

http://sanzon.wordpress.com/2008/04/29/advanced-usage-of-robotstxt-w-querystrings/

BBB is one of those things that most business people have a strong opinion about (either for or against).  From a pure SEO point of view, I consider it a very strong link.  Here's why:

• From a pure SEO link perspective, the directory has a very high DA and MozRank (by far the highest MozRank of any of the directories recommended by SEOmoz)

• the directory is exclusive.  You have to be a business owner to get listed.  This prevents someone from listing 5 or 10 near-spammy sites, which crowd some other directories.

• they are very exclusive about linking out.  It's kind of annoying, but if you don't pay them again next year, you're link will be gone fast!  It ultimately ensures that they are not linking to businesses that are no longer operating.  This increases the overall trust of the directory.

• the average consumer feels warm and fuzzy seeing a BBB banner, and viewing the businesses profile on the BBB website.

I think I paid something like $300 or $400 for it, so maybe the price varies depending on your region and business type?  In any case, I'll continue to renew with the BBB every year.

Name.com, NameCheap.com, Dynadot.com  are all good and have reasonable prices.  I personally use fabulous.com for most of my domains.

As annoying as Godaddy can be, I was happy to see they now offer two-factor authentication as a way of protecting domains.

I think reputation of a registrar can be a factor - mainly if they mess up something in your account, or don't handle renewals properly, causing your site to go offline.

Just curious, is there any reason you did a 410 instead of a 301?  I think most webmasters would setup 301 redirects to the most relevant remaining page for each of the pages that you did remove.  With a 410, you're effectively dropping backlinks that might have existed to any of the pages that you had.

Well, because they are 'orphans', you probably can't find them using a spider tool!  I'd recommend the following process to find your orphan pages:

1.  get a list of all the pages created by your CMS

2.  get the list of all the pages found by Screaming Frog

3.  add the two url lists into Excel and find the URLs in your CMS that are not in the Screaming Frog list.

You could probably use an Excel trick like this one:

http://superuser.com/questions/289650/how-to-compare-two-columns-and-find-differences-in-excel

I've had the best luck with expired domains by 'rehabbing' them.  More or less building out a high quality site related to the topic of the domain.  This is on a whole a 'gray hat' area, so use any of this advice at your own risk:

1.  be careful about analyzing and verifying the backlinks of domains.  DMOZ seems to remove links as soon as a domain goes past the expiration date, so don't count on getting that link.  Other directories like Yahoo Dir don't seem to care.

2.  often times a link looks great because it has lots of backlinks.  But those backlinks could have been domains all owned by the same person, and all expiring at the same time.

3.  I've rebuilt some domains that had completely dropped (so completely past the auction stage), and found them to have traffic shortly thereafter.  I've also rebuilt names that I thought were good, and had a great backlink profile, and never had them rank for anything.  So on a whole it's hard to understand why some domains perform better than others.

It's really going to be a bit complex to get this done right.  But based your example above, it looks like you just want to redirect anything with a query string back to the base url.

There's a discussion specifically about that right here:

http://www.webmasterworld.com/apache/3203401.htm

You could start with this code and refine it from there:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} .
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1? [R=301,L]

Good luck.

Based on their reputation, I would be wary.  They might be trying to sell you a domain name that they don't even own.

You should be able to check the whois record to see who owns the non-hyphenated version of the domain (assuming they don't have whois privacy setup).  If your friend really wants to get the domain, they could try to contact that domain owner directly, rather than replying to a spam email.

Also, for any domain transaction (even small transactions like this), you use escrow, especially if there's reason to suspect fraud from the other party.

There's a service ecop.com that specializes in low value escrow transactions.

Have you seen the URL parameter tool in Google Webmaster Tools?  It's made just to handle these kinds of situations:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1235687

But, there's no reason you can't setup redirects for all of these URLs, but it's probably going to be time consuming to figure out all of the possible URL combinations that you have and where to redirect them to.

Did you verify your business listing?  Google sends you a postcard with a verification code on it.  If you haven't done that yet, it's probably the reason.

http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=145585&topic=1656748&ctx=topic

I guess my question would be why do you have two completely different url paths, returning the same content?  Generally, canonical is used to catch things like, www vs non www, trailing slashes, caps vs no caps in the urls, # signs in urls, etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL_normalization

My guess is that it's probably a bug on the part of the SEOMoz software, and that Google would probably respect your canonical tag here.  Just to be safe, you might block the second url in your Robots.txt file.

It's an interesting idea.  There's a very popular blog in the SEO industry that is 'do follow'.  He is very interactive and the comments there are generally good.

Here are some considerations:

• outside of the SEO industry, how many people really understand the difference of 'do follow' vs 'no follow'.  If you're topic is something niche and very technical, the fact that it's 'do follow' may potentially have 0 impact on the type of person that you really want to have leave feedback.

• be prepared to be a firm moderator for the comments.  I think you'll often find yourself on the fence you'll see a comment with marginal value.  I would try to set the bar higher on which comments you approve.

• Facebook comments might be useful.  Since Facebook comments show up on a users wall, and can generally be viewed by friends who might be in the same industry, it might be a good way of generating more discussions.  We've used Facebook comments for a few sites, and have had very little problem at all with spam comments.  The downside with Facebook comments is that the content is stored on Facebook rather than your own blog (though there are some plugins that attempt to address this by download the comments to the blog).

• The SEOMoz profile system is kind of cool.  Once a user has generated enough 'points' - their profile link becomes followed.  I sometimes wish there was a similar system for blog comments.  Maybe there is?

Hi Titan -

I'm not an SEOMoz employee - so I can only speculate here.

From the blog post on Raven Tools - they made the comment that the reason they decided to stop offering the rank tracker is because they failed an audit for the Google Adwords API.  Google gave them an ultimatum - either stop using scraped data, or lose access to the API.

From what I understand, SEOmoz was recently faced with the same problem, and they chose to drop the access to the Adwords API, instead of giving up access to the scraped data.  This is understandable, since SEOMoz's tools focus exclusively on SEO - while Raven offers a a wide range of services - some SEO, some PPC, some Social Media, etc.

So, I would be surprised if SEOMoz would stop offering the rank tracker.  Though I really have no inside knowledge about this at all.

I think the SEOMoz rank tracker is an internally developed tool.  Raven tools, and a lot of other SEO tools in the industry used a company called Authority Labs.

http://authoritylabs.com/

Rank tracking is the only thing that they do, and from what I've seen, their data is a bit better overall, if you're just looking for rank tracking.  They also do daily monitoring of keywords, which is a bit overkill from my perspective - but could be useful if you're in a very competitive niche.

The link form Stephen to Search Engine Land is a good resource.  I'll just add a few additional thoughts here:

1.  There are several types of domains that you might be picking up - and they are not all equal.  There are 'pre-release' domains which are auctioned off about a month after they've expired.  These are the kind you get from GoDaddy Auctions or Namejet.  If you buy those - the creation date is not actually reset - so a 10 year old domain would still be 10 years old.  During this period of time, the existing owner of the domain could actually re-register the domain as well.

After this, domains go through the 'Redemption Period' and then the 'Pending Delete' period.  These domains will be completely deleted from the registry, and have their creation dates reset.

You're much more likely to get some 'juice' from PreRelease names, than names that have completely dropped from the registry.

2.  That said, if you're still considering this technique, you'd probably want to look very carefully at the backlinks of the site you're buying.  A large portion of the expired domains with backlinks were used for spamming.  It's probably not worth your time to disavow all of the bad links from a domain you've picked up at auction.

3.  Expired domains can be 'rehabbed'.  If you take the time to rebuild the site with valuable content, it will be able to rank for search terms, and build up page rank again.  You'd probably have much less risk in the long run by rehabbing some related domains with good content and linking back to your main site, than using the 301 technique - though I've never done any side by side experiments to say for sure.

Michelle - we were using the API quite a bit for SEO keyword research, but eventually had the account cancelled by Google - probably because we had a relatively minor Adwords spend in relation to our API usage.  In the meantime we ended up using the SEM Rush api.  It's pretty easy to use and they seem to have access to a pretty deep set of keyword data.

I know other people, including SEOMoz have had the same issue:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/loss-of-google-adwords-api

I tried out a few other APIs at the time.  Bings tool seemed to have potential, but it only returned very limited keyword data.  I think I looked at Wordtracker and another one, but they seemed to be quite expensive compared to other options, based on the pricing model they used.

There's nothing wrong with upgrading your site.  In general, I would recommend to update your site, if you have the time to do it right.  Things to watch out for are:

• will every page still have a unique URL?  There are a number of HTML5 based systems which run the entire site on a single URL (look at how Gmail runs for example).  It can be great for an end user experience since the pages appear to load very quickly.  However, such a system would probably make it difficult for all of your pages to be properly indexed.

• assuming you'll have unique URLs - make sure that the new site will use the same URLs as the original site.  If not, plan to put in 301 redirects for all of the existing pages.

• just because you're going HTML5, don't forget the basics.  Use your title tag, H1, H2, etc on the new template.

• after you launch the new site, make sure spiders can still crawl the site properly.  If yes, then you should be all set with your new site.

ahh, I see.  I think there can be cases where it's valuable to pull in a feed.  Perhaps an index of relevant headlines around a topic, or maybe headlines from a users blog posts.  I wouldn't use it as the primary basis of an SEO strategy though.

Also, one tip if you're planning on doing something like this.  It's much better to cache the results of a feed on your server, rather than pulling in a live RSS feed every time a user loads a page.  Given the value that Google places on page speed loading, you would probably have a greater negative impact on page load speed by adding RSS feeds to your site, unless you have a cache system in place.