Welcome to the Q&A Forum

If you decide on hiring a link builder with a low service fee, then make sure that to know all the strategies, tactics or methods that they will employ  to increase the rankings of a client's site. The last thing you want is to have an angry client complaining that the cheap SEO you hired has damaged the site's rankings or incurred penalties due to manipulative tactics.

A cheap link builder can be useful if one does not have a lot of time to execute a plan to get high quality links. It would be better to create a solid plan to increase your client's ranking using great content, natural linking methods, and building an online brand.  Then perhaps one can hire cheap help if you need an extra pair of hands to put the plan into action. Keep tabs on the affordable SEO you hire to ensure that he or she sticks to the plan and does not use any short cuts to earn quality links for your client's site.

A website that is linking to you is not a major problem unless the links are coming from a highly manipulative source. If other people are just building spammy links to you, then one shouldn't worry too much. The links might even help you if there's an editorial or natural reason why they exist.

Contact them if you are really uncomfortable with those links. If they don't respond, then there's no point in worrying too much about it. instead, shift your focus on establishing a real brand on the Internet. Focus on getting great editorial links for your site, making improvements to provide reat user experience, and publishing  valuable content.

Worrying over many links pointing to your site from one particular domain is one of the myths that SEO"s shouldn't be worried about. Check out this White Board Friday post by the CEO and co-founder of SEOmoz  for a more detailed explaination why you shouldn't be too worried about this.

There's nothing you can do as one do not have control over that website. Try to contact the admins and perhaps they can help to take down those links. If not, then there's no need to worry over something you have no control of.

A large number of links pointing to you from one particular site might even help if there's a good, editorial, natural reason why those links should exist.

One might be able to counter those links by earning great editorial links. Have a fantastic site with great user experience and tremendously valuable content.If manage to build real brand on the Internet, then one will gain better protection from spammy links than in vain to contact unresponsive webmasters one by one and getting them to take down links.

In my mind, categories and tags are kind of the same thing.  Some people like to use categories for major groups, and tags for more fine tuned grouping within a larger category.

The main benefit of categories and tags are that they provide easier navigation to your older entries.  If you don't have those, then the old posts can end up buried, 7 or 8 hops from the homepage, and they start to lose their ranking power.

If you go overboard and add lots of categories and tags, you end up creating excess pages on your site, which have very similar content, which tends to water down your ranking power.

I would recommend just sticking with tags, since it seems you're already setup with that.  They work fine as 'categories'.

Also, one 'pro tip', would be to try to look for ways to link your new posts to your old posts.  Like here, you have a post on dota maps - http://www.dota2club.com/dota-6-74c-ai-v2-7-fun-map-download/  - maybe you have older posts on a similar topic?  Adding relevant internal links would definitely give your older posts a boost.

Yes - I can say from experience that this is true.  You'll also feel much more inspired to keep working towards 'coat stand', after you've achieved the mini-success of already ranking for 'cheap coat stand'!

to shift from one language to the others i decided to put a php code that automatically recognizes the browser  language and redirects users from .it  to .com and vice versa, do you think is a good choice?

I'm pretty sure that's not a good idea.  For one, when Googlebot comes to your site, it will probably always get redirected to your .COM domain ( depending on how you have the redirect setup, but I'm sure it doesn't have show itself having Italian browser language) - so your Italian language content would never end up getting indexed.  This is also probably the cause of the 302 redirect I see when I come to your site.

The most pure SEO way of setting this up would be to make two separate sites (two separate virtual hosts on your server), the Italian one, and the English one.  Each time you have new contents, just add it to the appropriate site.

There are lots of debates about the best way to setup multi language sites.  The most common options are either a sub folder, a sub domain, or a separate domain.  Since you've chosen to do a separate domain, you should go ahead and set it up as a unique site, rather than tricky server side redirects, which will confuse those silly search engine spiders!

Lots of companies have setup separate international domains, for example:

http://www.coca-cola.com/en/index.html

http://www.coca-cola.it/

http://www.coca-cola.com.cn/#/home

Sincerely,

Mr SEO Addicted

Guido - the reason the .com version is showing up now, is because you have the .IT version redirecting to the .COM version ( a 302 redirect is in place now ).  As long as you have that, you won't see the .IT version in the search results.

What's your goal here?  You'll have an Italian language (.IT) version of the site, and an English version (.COM)?

I would make a clear project plan for each site first, including creating the content for all of the different sites.  If you really want to go ahead with this plan, I would make unique English language content for the .COM site, and unique Italian language content for the .IT site.

Then, register each site with Google Webmaster Tools, and set the geotargeting option to the specific target country for each site.

If you just want to have a single website - the .IT version - then just use a 301 redirect to point the .COM version to the .IT version.

Let me know if you have any other questions ~

Sincerely,

Mr SEO Addicted

I've seen a lot of cases where people were basically 'asked to leave' by their hosting company, after their service outgrew their 'unlimited' shared hosting plan.  Performance can be another big issue.  If you find the site running slow, that might be an indication that you've outgrown the shared hosting you're on.

It's hard to quantify in terms of numbers of page views, as there are different types of software, and each type of software requires more or less resources.

Additionally, for a blog platform like Wordpress, you could probably try to stretch the limits of shared hosting some more by using one of the good caching plugins that exists, and using a CDN to serve your images.  Using a good caching plugin would reduce the amount of work that a server has to do to serve up your pages.  Doing that would probably keep your shared hosting company off of your page while you're continuing to grow.  A CDN would help to reduce your bandwidth usage and help to serve images faster.

From my previous experiences with shared hosting, most hosts will be more concerned about high CPU usage than high bandwidth usage.  So, if you'd just pick one of the optimizations above, it would probably be smarter to go with the caching option first.

In terms of VPS recommendations, I've been using Rackspace Cloud Sites for a number of years.  The service is actually more expensive than most VPS services you can get.  The great thing about Rackspace is that you can get a sys admin on chat support within about 5 seconds, at any time of the day or night.  While they won't actually do coding or touch your site, they'll help you diagnose problems and make recommendations that are really useful.

I don't see any reason why not to add it to any page that was actually created by a human author.  I'm not sure if it would be appropriate for a automatically generated pages like category or other archive pages for instance.  But with the new way of adding rel=author in the head section of a site, it's much easier to add now than before, and I expect it to be more and more widely used.

Do your best to remove those bad links especially those that you can manually remove. Recent updates do not look kindly to links that appear unnatural or manipulative so removing them would be best in the long run.

In the cases where you don't have control over the sites, which provide the bad links,  then you have no option but to contact the webmaster.  If you get no response, then perhaps one can remove the low-value pages that are being targeted by the bad links. But this might not be viable if the majority of bad links are targeted to your blog's home-page.

One of the last options you might take would be to start over, get a new domain, and move your move your DotA blog. The downside to this is losing the inbound links and off-page ranking factors for your blog. You can rebuild them by aiming for relevant, high-authority links. Focus on quality over quantity so that you'll avoid the problem of having bad links to your site.

Hope this helps.

I agree Ryan and Noah's Dad. In this case, setting up a 301 redirect from the free wordpress.com blog to your main business site is the best option. This way the old blog and your biz site will no longer compete with one another. This would also positively impact the ability of you main business site  to rank well in the search engines due to the stronger relevancy and popularity signal.

There was a fad a few years about doing microsites, where everyone was trying to create as many 'feeder' style sites as possible.  Lately, the trend has reversed, (Penguin / Panda) where the focus is more on creating a single great user experience and a brand associated with it.

In your case, 'personal development' and 'personal development training' could be considered as competitive, just based on the sheer number of ranking pages, and the number of advertisers for the 'training' keyword.

By putting the two blogs as subfolders (or even merging them into a single blog with 2 authors), you can expect to gain backlinks and build up social activity around your site at a much faster rate, compared to running them on separate blogs.

It potentially would be more fun for the blog authors as well, as there should be more readers and potential comments and discussion, and readers who follow one author stick around to join the discussion on the other blog authors posts.

So, I strongly vote for a single site / blog platform.  Of course, you may have to contend with some personal egos, to convince two people to share the same blog, but for SEO and ranking, it will produce much faster results.

It helps a bit to have a custom map with your location pinned on it.  Though there are a lot of other factors considered more important right now.  Have a look at the 2012 local ranking factors report:

http://www.davidmihm.com/local-search-ranking-factors.shtml

It looks like SEOMoz is using their robots.txt file to specify their sitemaps:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=183669

You can probably do something similar:

http://www.seomoz.org/robots.txt

Low cost usually means low quality so one needs to weigh the risk of hiring cheap labor for the content of your blog.  The post-panda environment does not look kindly to low-quality content and Google has incorporated machine learning ensure that it could accurately predict what the humans would judge a low quality site.

You have to find writers that can provide value for your money. Finding a person with good writing skills that is willing to work with your budget can be a challenge.

When dealing with a site that sources writers, one needs to ask questions that would ensure that the writer would provide what you truly need. Make sure that both parties have a clear understanding of the job that needs to be done. One would need to communicate with a prospective writer to see if he or she will be a fit for your needs. Ask for sample articles so that one can judge if a writer's skill is adequate.

Hiring a free-lance writer would probably be cheaper but riskier. Hiring one that works for an outsourcing company can be pricier but there will be measures that would help to ensure quality for the content of your blog.  An outsourcing company would usually have customer service that will resolve any complaints or misunderstandings between a client and a writer.

Too much ads on a page can affect a visitor's experience with your content. The presence of too many adverts may lead them to think that the content was meant solely to sell a product or a service instead of providing helpful information.

I do agree that judging if a content has too much ad is relative. Perhaps you can do a survey and see if people feel that the website is too loaded with ads. I think "Are there excessive adverts on this page?" is one of the questions included in some of the efforts to replicate Google's Panda questionnaire. They were trying to see if high ad ratio was one of the signals being used to determine if a site's content is crappy.

Many of the websites that have been hit by the first Panda update were loaded with adverts so proper attention to the amount of ads on your page may get more links.

You can specify your canonical links. Also known as “preferred links”. For search engines to deal with duplicate content, they have to choose which link they will favor over all others that contain identical page content.

To do this, simply add this tag to specify your preferred version:

Copy that on the section of all non-canonical versions of the page, like the: http://www.exampledomain.co.uk/index.html for example.

This format will give you more control over the URL that will appear on the search results. It also helps to make sure that all properties such as link popularity are consolidated to your preferred version.

Rand wrote a whole post a couple of years ago about when to go domain vs subdomain vs folder.  It covers things pretty well from a technical SEO point of view:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites

When I read your question, it really seems more of a business strategy question, rather than a technical SEO question.  The one consideration is that - would franchisee's take a stronger ownership in their business and their territory if their business was represented by an individual domain name, rather than a sub-folder on a main website.

If you could see people going out and networking, and putting a domain name on a business card, they could probably acquire a lot of local business links in this way (Chamber of Commerce, etc) that would in the long run boost the brand awareness of the main franchise.

Giving each franchisee their own domain name might also help with local rankings, if you can get a domain name that includes both the business function and location in the name (for example PittsburghRugCleaning.com) - since exact match domains still get a boost over other domains that don't.

On the other hand, putting everything as a subfolder or subdirectory would be much less work from a hosting side of things.

Carla - the answer is .... it depends!

There are various different strategies for buying domains, and attempting to use them for SEO purposes.

The best case would be to negotiate privately with the owner of an existing website, and purchasing the domain and all of the contents of the domain from them.  Businesses merge all the time,  This is regular thing, and Google won't punish or look down on anyone for doing this.  It will be clear that the domain changed hands, probably by updates to the name servers, and whois information, but since the website never expired or dropped from the registry, Google would probably assume this was a merger.

Also, if you do this, one of the best strategies for dealing with the domain would be to redirect individual pages to the most analogous page on your site, to take greatest advantage of the merged site.

It's also possible to buy up expired or expiring domains.  There are different stages in the life cycle of domain name expiration where you can buy names.  If you buy them in what's called 'pre-release' status, the domains will be transferred to your own account before the name dropped out of the registry, so it will maintain it's original creation date.  You won't get the content with the domain, but this kind of domain purchase 'might' have some more life to it.

Finally, there are domains that have completely dropped out of the registry.  The links from these won't have much more life to them.

But in general, if you can buy the domain and website content directly from the original owner, it should show up as a business merger (or even as 'rebranding' in your case, since your website is new), and should be a relatively safe tactic.

Kevin - there are a lot of different factors that go into rankings.  In general, it's better to have links from more root domains, rather than a large number of links from a few root domains.  However, you can't disregard the quality of those root domains.  If you only get very low quality root domains linking back to you, while your competitor has a couple of great, high quality links with the right anchor text, they could still hold you off for a while.

Sounds like you're on the right track though.