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This Whiteborad Friday blog post might be able to help. This clip helped us to cope and understand the post-panda environment. Combine the video with the data showing the falling rankings as proof that traditional SEO methods that get low quality links are no longer effective. Showing them other articles and videos on the changes since panda/penguin might also help to change their perspective.

They may be finding it hard to change methods and tactics because it has worked well for them in the past. Convincing them that their techniques are no longer viable can be quite difficult as they probably still believe that old methods are still the best. Perhaps if you compile a lot of articles or videos from top SEO experts, then perhaps they  would come around an decide to change gears with their SEO campaign.

Hope this helps.

Putting a blog or other content on your website that is marketing focused to complement the content that is primarily meant for your business or customers is a good idea. This type of content allows one to drive new traffic, to get links in, or  to get social shares.

It would be good to keep  it on the same domain and to use subfolders. Like footballgames.com/blog or footballgames.com/articles.

But you do have to avoid stuff that might make your blog appear manipulative for SEO purposes. Try to link  across intelligently from your blog to your business content and vise versa. Don't have anchor text rich links on  every page of your blog linking over to the business pages. Optimize the blog to be helpful to visitors not just for the benefit of the crawler. A blog should try to entertain, educate, and build  trust with your audience so that one can improving the site's browse rate and get people to look at more pages.

Hope this helps.

Was the domain previously redirected to photobooklaos?  Both the Google info:photobookworldwide.com and cache:photobookworldwide.com are showing up as photobooklaos.com, which happens if a domain was redirected.

As a first step, I'd setup Google Webmaster Tools for the site.  Telling Google about your site might help to reset that.  Additionally, you can use the fetch as Googlebot tool there, to see if there are still any redirects happening that might confuse Googlebot.

Yup - it should help.  If you have influence over the domain, try to make sure that the page will get linked to from another page on the domain that has page authority already.  There could be a danger that the page you get a link on is not naturally crawlable on that domain, and thus wouldn't naturally picked up as spiders crawl that domain.  You could also try linking to it from an external source to make sure the link would pick up page authority eventually.

Yup - removing those will save you the trouble of duplicate content - since Google by default is crawling those as different URLs.  By default, if you have comments enabled, there's a link at the bottom of posts with that parameter in the url (the same as the blog post url - see here ---> http://noahsdad.com/treadmill-training-progress/?replytocom=22729#respond ).

Noah is cute!

Right - as far as I know, you're supposed to put end URLs into a sitemap, not urls which 301 redirect.  Cross domain canonical is still kind of new, but I would treat them as a 301 redirect and not include them in a sitemap.

Now, if you're curious, SEO Moz did a whiteboard Friday where they talked about this same exact issue (cross domain canonical), and as an experiment, re-posted a blog article from another blogger on SEO Moz.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/cross-domain-canonical-the-new-301-whiteboard-friday

http://www.seomoz.org/blog-sitemap.xml

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-story-of-seomoz

The blog is still included in the blog sitemap.  I think it probably won't 'hurt' to keep those pages in the sitemap, since a lot of sitemaps automatically generated CMS tools won't have been updated to deal with this yet.

I was working on a website on cell phone reviews several months ago and had the chance to view a number of mobile phone review videos on YouTube and other video sharing sites. The most effective videos involved showing how the product works such as the display, the camera, or the software. Some would also directly compare a phone with a rival to show its advantages. Unbiased reviews, would also touch upon the weaknesses of a particular device.

The advantage of a video review over a written one is the fact that it can visually display how a product functions. It also shows that you are truthfully reviewing a product since one can be clearly seen handling the device on video.

Now, I'm not sure how this would work with your product seeing as you've mentioned that they weigh hundreds of pounds and  doesn't need to be super involved. But if you could somehow take advantage of the video to show how your product works then I think it would be more effective than just a still shots with a voice overlay or  using a whiteboard.

I find Google Analytics very useful for understanding traffic and conversion KPIs, for Adwords analysis, and management reporting. I took a liking to it when I started out because it so easy to set up and one can collect visitor data in a matter of minutes.

However, I do not use it exclusively because I'm not comfortable with relying on just Google. It's a reliable service but I do remember an issue that caused reports with data from April 2011 to return 0 visits. Some of my friends are also not at peace with Google having access to their site data. Using another site data tool alongside GA also allows one to verify the data need ed for reporting.

Article Submission was a good tactic years ago but I think that the recent Google updates have limited their effect on getting good rankings. That doesn't mean that it can't work. Some folks are still doing it and have observed that article submission works sometimes for a few months. This tactic sometimes work in the short-term but an algorithm change can wipe your rankings achieved through submitting an article to a bunch of article directories, article portals, article resource sites, etc... Then, there's the issue of duplicate content  and the submission sites can essentially cannibalize the traffic that you could have earned.

Google is getting smarter about content analysis so the classic or traditional forms of article submission are fast becoming old hat. We should now focus on real authentic alternatives that can get readership and trust over to our site.

In recent months, I have been focusing on guest blogging as a way to help build up my company's brand, earn recognition, and perhaps get some quality great links back to my sites. The time i used to spend on traditional forms of article submission are now being redirected into doing something authentic.

What I'd recommend are:

1.  you could set your author and tag pages to be 'noindex,follow' - so search engines will still visit them, and follow the links through to the posts, but not actually index the potentially duplicate content on those pages

2.  make sure that your category pages are just showing excerpts of your posts, instead of the actual full post.

3.  determine your canonical url structure and stick with it

There's a really good blog post that covers this topic actually:

http://www.kidnapcustomers.com/how-to-make-a-website/wordpress-seo-duplicate-content-noindex-nofollow/

(Moz staff edit: see my answer below for resources that currently work -Dan)

Also - the Wordpress SEO plugin by Yoast is really good for helping to deal with these kinds of issues.

I really don't see too much value in article marketing at this point.  If you made a really high quality article, why would you want to waste it, by posting it into a place where no one would ever read it!

I consider guest blogging to be a stronger strategy overall.  It takes some more work from you up front, but in the long run, it will pay bigger dividends.

Search out a list of 20 to 30 blogs that write good articles in your industry.  Reach out to them (either a contact form, or Twitter, or LinkedIn ,etc), and see if they accept guest blog submissions.

If they do, send them your article for review.

If it gets posted, you'll have a link from a respectable site, that people actually read, and will send you some traffic over time as well.  It can be a good way to make connections with people that have similar interests as well.

It sounds like your competitor is quite strong, to have that many links, and it may be regarded as a hub in your industry, if it already is working together with a lot of your competitors. The previous answer was right - you need to take a look at the links of the competitor, and see if it has a strong link profile (vs tons of automated link spam).

If you consider the site to be respected in your industry, I would probably invest the effort to get listed on their site.

In the long run, as a local competitor, you should be able to beat out a national competitor, through a combination of:

• building a stronger, more interesting landing page and content

• building more links to that landing page (both branded and keyword links as appropriate)

It may be a problem with the location setting for your website.  Is your keyword really specific for the UK?  ... such that people from other areas in the world would not search for it?  If the local and global keyword search volumes are the same, it could indicate that all of the traffic for that keyword is coming from the UK, and that's where you're currently not ranking.

If that's indeed the case, you should try to increase the number of local search ranking signals, which could include:

• setting the target country in webmaster tools

• getting links from other .co.uk domains

• including an address and phone number on the site from .co.uk

• move the hosting to somewhere in the UK

There are lots of other hints you can give to Google about the geotargeting of your site.  Probably the first 3 would be a good start.

Sounds like you have a pretty good control on who those pages are linking to.  Typically larger e-commerce stores won't add footer links to their service providers in the footers, and I know a lot of web design agencies that add the link into the template without even asking the client if it's OK or not.

Since an outbound link in the homepage would sap some of the link juice of the site, I would suggest putting it under the control of the e-commerce store owner, whether or not to include those footer links, and whether or to make them rel=nofollow.

The typical way of doing this is to setup a subdomain, specifically for the content that is going to be served from a CDN, and then use a CNAME to map the ugly CDN url to the clean subdomain that you setup.  I've only done this with Rackspace and AWS.  If you want a good description of how this is done on AWS, see this link:

http://www.labnol.org/internet/setup-content-delivery-network-with-amazon-s3-cloudfront/5446/

Apparently, cloudflare has a way to map your website url to the CDN, as long as you're hosting with a cloud server system that they support.  I haven't tried this before, but it might actually be a cleaner way of doing this, if you're hosting setup supports it.

http://blog.cloudflare.com/zone-apex-naked-domain-root-domain-cname-supp

It sounds like this would be a big win for your client, as they get a large percentage of traffic from image traffic.  Using a CDN service is going to improve the speed of loading images and reduce their bandwidth bill, and mapping the CNAME should give their domain the credit for being the source of the image.

My thoughts:

Maybe one of their campaign, like videos, went viral. For that amount of new links, it has to be a link or content or video that is shared, syndicated or reposted, a lot of times.

My other thought would be using automated software and buying links. (Though I'm not saying your competitor did those).

You could check your competitors' site using tools like Raven Tools or Website Analyzer or Link Detective, to see where those new links are coming from. That will help you figure out if those are "natural" links.

As long as you trust the site, and think you're linking to a valuable page on the web, there's nothing wrong with leaving them as 'follow'.

Hi Brett -

Are you talking about a self-hosted Wordpress blog or a site hosted at Wordpress.com?  Generally, I leave the entire site as regular 'follow' HTML links, except for the comments section.

Generally speaking, good content and community should encourage a robust discussion.  If people are just coming along commenting on a blog because they hope to get a link back to their site out of it, their comments often can feel more forced, and generally are going to add less value.

Also, there are software applications employed by the blackhat community that can send massive amounts of spam comments in a very short period of time.  Opening up comments as do follow makes you more targeted by such software programs.

Of course, there are software tools designed to fight comment spam, such as Akismet, which can make things much easier.

On my own blog, I've gone to using Facebook for comments.  It saves users the trouble of having to login or create an account on my own site, and plus it does a pretty good job of dealing with the whole spam comments problem.

Sure - no problem.  I would optimize the pages for the main keyword, that has the most exact match search volume for it.  Put that keyword in your page H1 tag, the page title tag, as well as your meta tags.

In the body, even if you can't work the exact phrase in, you can try to put the keywords in close proximity, which seems to help.  Overall, I would optimize for user experience first, and I definitely would not advise keyword stuffing.

One 'pro tip' is that you can rank for a lot of these keyword variations, based just on the anchor text you use for your links to the page.  So, if you're building links, and having other sites link to those pages, or even on your internal links across your own site, work in different variations of those keywords.

Misspelling SEO is not so big as it was before.  Generally, Google shows the corrected version of what a user searched for, unless the spelling was too bad for it to make any sense of.

It depends on how you view this acquired website.  I would generally consider either 1 or 3 from the options above.

If the site is a service that has a strong brand following and customers / visitors, you may just want to let it live it's own life.  A site like that can continue to build links naturally over time, further improving the value of the site.

So, if you let the site live it's own life, I would definitely use it to link to your other main organization website.  Perhaps put a news alert box on the homepage, disclosing the relationship between the two companies, and linking over to it with a brand text link.  Then find some internal pages on related topics, and cross link those with a rich anchor text link.

On the other hand, if the site doens't have much of a following, it might just be easier to 301 redirect it over to the main site.  You'll not have to worry about the maintenance of the old website, and you'll get the added benefit of the visitors from the old site and whatever link juice gets transferred over.

I generally don't like idea 2 so much, because it could be confusing to users, that some pages redirect to a completely different site.  Also, I'm under the impression that a 301 redirect has slightly less value that a link does.  If someone else has some insight on this, it would be great to hear it.