Welcome to the Q&A Forum

CleverPhD has great tips - and is 100% spot on with regard to establishing a connection first.  I have found its vital to first establish a trust basis - proving through action that I am a respectful human being.

For me it starts out with social media - following someone on Twitter, sharing their content when I genuinely find it valuable, engaging in dialogue politely and not in a forced "doing this for a future link" manner, being helpful...

If I can connect with them at a conference or meetup where we both have a valid reason to be at the same place in person separate from "going there to get a link from that person", it allows the POTENTIAL for in-person real world reinforcement of that genuine connection.

NOTE - I have had people do that with me but then when they heard I was going to be at such-and-such conference, invited me to dinner.  I played along out of respect, and it turned out they were just looking to suck my life-force, it wasn't as genuine as they led on to believe.

Don't be that person.

Hi Amy

Welcome to the world of SEO!  It can be daunting at times, yet the rewards are amazing.  Especially in how great the community is when you reach out.  So I applaud you for doing that!

Okay so - there are several "elements" that make up SEO.  There are on-site elements, and off-site elements.

On-site elements exist at the code level and within the visibly seen content.

One of these elements is the Page Title (located within the < TITLE > tag at the code level, and the contents of which appear when you're looking at a page in a web browser - the very top bar in the web browser will contain the page Title, if one is provided at the code level for that page.

That Title can also appear within the search engine results - however if search engine's systems determine the Title provided is not truly a best match description of what the page is about, those systems will sometimes generate a different one for use in the search results.

A few other elements include (but are by no means limited to):

• Meta Description
• H1 Tags
• Image "alt" attribute (alternate text description for images)

As far as "link juice dilution", that can too often be a shiny object, and if you're following other proper content creation concepts, it's a non-factor as Wiqas says.

So the better focus is do you meet quality/relevance/trust requirements?

• Do the links point to main content that is actually relevant to the content of the blog articles?
• Is there enough content in each article to justify three links, or are the articles too "thin" on unique depth?
• Are the articles valuable to your prospective reader as a stand alone piece of content that informs, educates and or entertains?
• Are you being formulaic in a potential over-optimization way? (same volume of content on each article, sticking with three links every time, overly repeating links to specific destination pages, etc.)

These are the biggest questions that need to be answered because the higher the quality / more diverse the patterns / least over-optimized, the more likely the links will help in general.

Oh - wait I just re-read your question as to not wanting detail pages to link to one another...

If I'm at a sub-category, I would not want, nor need, every individual product/event page in that group to link to each other.  Individual services details pages should cross-link to each other within that service section at that level though, for usability.

Does that make sense? Or did I just confuse you?

LOL Paul - I don't know you as well as I hope to in the future, however you have already through the multiple interactions we've had, proven you're trustworthy, friendly and a good person by nature (your actions have spoken).

So yes, this is a great example of how to build a valid professional relationship.  Because even if you hadn't made that referral, the interactions themselves beyond that have been high quality and "trustworthy".  So I am already inclined to be of help should the situation arise.

Everyone's partially correct.  Alternate attributes are for images only.  Title attributes in anchor tags can be used in links, however if you are performing SEO best practices, using title attributes in anchor tags is a first signal that you are probably spamming the search engines if not used with extreme caution.

Why?  Because the anchor text (the text you wrap the anchor tag around) should suffice to communicate what you're linking to.  Title text in anchors is best left to only be used when you're using them as a place anchor on a page, not as a link.

ForForce is spot on.

Trust is a critical factor.  Instead of artificially manipulating the post date, be sure the "date last updated" is accurately working.

And if you DO make a value-add update to a post, add a sentence to the top of the post like "Update: ________"  and maybe even put "Updated" with the date right in the page Title or meta Description.

Anything else would be playing with fire.

You're dead on accurate in the need for and importance of how "consensus" can help new people get started.  The trick is helping them find enough truly experienced people who have done that testing on a wide enough variety of sites, as well as lots of disclaimers being plainly stated on all such discussions.  It's why I strive to always refer to "in my experience"...

You are correct.

A web site is inevitably going to need to have quality content that not only focuses on the primary phrase(s) you want to rank for but also for a range of topics that are highly related to the overall business offering.

This is important as a User Experience consideration first and foremost. - Not all prospective clients are going to always only be searching for a specific phrase topic. Many will be at different points in the decision process, and many will be looking for related topical information.

By creating very strong "second tier" content, it can help to build authority for the brand as a broad goal.  That, in turn, will boost the site's overall value, and ultimately, that will help the site.  And when that happens, the entire site is lifted up.

My own rule of thumb is to incorporate each of the top two or at most three primary phrases at least once, the top phrase at least twice, in the content - with the content being at least 400 words (or more) - and the more content, the more it needs to then have the partial phrases thrown into the writing.  But there's no set formula for keyword density anymore. too many other factors to consider these days.

If a "vanity" web site is high quality, offers unique content, and that content is relevant to the specific search queries most accurate to the content provided on that site, it's a perfectly valid site.

If a multi-site environment was designed to have one company/business dominate search results for individual search phrases and if any of those sites created for that purpose are not unique enough but artificially designed to trick ranking domination, that's going to be a problem.

So that's the question - how high is the quality? how unique is the content? How helpful is the "vanity" site?

Check out my recent blog post where I share the slide-deck and notes from my presentation at SMX Advanced a couple weeks ago.  I focused on some examples of sites that got hit by Panda and also show ways to combat it.

Essentially if there is almost no unique content compared to other stuff going on for any given page (the ratio of unique content to other elements that repeat across the entire site), that's a big concern.  But there's a lot more.

The reason for the skepticism is the scale of spam out there, and the volume of ways spam efforts attempt to trick search algorithms.  Google, even now, all these years into it, still does a very poor job of trapping some of that noise, and so the index remains polluted.

Of course, just building great content is never enough and won't ever be enough.  So we just need to check the boxes regarding the potential for Google to think "this isn't legitimate".

sites need regularly fresh content and inbound authority building.  So in this scenario, an internal blog would make sense and provide more long-term value than an external blog unless you've got another plan for a high volume of long term content freshness on the main site.

The exact match keyword domain aspect isn't as important as it used to be since Google has slightly devalued exact match domain importance.  Even when it carried more weight, it shouldn't be a primary means for long term success because it causes the illusion that a diverse strategy isn't as important as it in fact really is.

There are a couple possibilities.

First, Google doesn't record and display data when there are very few (in their opinion) searches for a phrase.  Also, they only show data for phrases that their system deem valuable from an AdWords perspective.  Even if some people compete for them, if it's not a lot of competition, or if there's not a lot of actual AdWords clicks on a phrase, the Keyword tool won't display data for count.

Then there's the reality that some businesses compete on phrases regardless of what the Google system shows as "valuable".  I've seen a lot of businesses compete for phrases that are bizarre and useless.

The bottom line is this - the only real way you'll know if it was worth going after those phrases is if you do so and then look back over time.  If you get clicks, it was worth it.

Hi Chris

Yes, the best solution would be 301 redirects.  The key to success is taking the time to properly identify the most related content from site to site, so the 301s are laser targeting the correct content.  In those situations where there is no one-to-one page relationship from a unique topical focus perspective, the next best scenario is pointing each page at the next highest level page in the new structure that best matches it's topical focus.

The primary reason is you want to communicate to search engines not only that "this page has permanently moved", but for long term value, to then communicate "see - even though the page has moved, we've retained the topical focus of that original page".  That ensures the best likelihood that the ranking signals each old page obtained should still be retained, even though you've moved content.

As someone who shot up in the leader board like a rocket over the past few weeks due to Pro Q&A participation, I sure do want a badge!  I'm proud of the recognition I've been getting for providing quality answers, and want people to see that - maybe even click through so they too join in.

Generally speaking, every internal link, and every external link pointing into your site, every social or web mention of one  or the other, will have an impact.  So if, for example, there are 10 links pointing to www.tandemkitchens.com and 8 pointing to tandemkitchens.com, the www version will be given more weight.

Where it gets more complex is how well search engines and evaluation tools do at compensating for ranking signals when both www and non www are indexed or capable of being indexed. Allowing both to be will inevitably lead to imperfect algorithmic evaluations - there's no perfect system that can properly discern that both versions are not meant to be unique (thus causing algorithmically perceived duplicate content conflicts).  And ultimately, that leads to an inaccurate distribution of assigned value.

It's for these reasons that one should be chosen as the standard, 301 redirects created, and every attempt possible then made to have links standardized (the least controllable factor being how others choose to link to you.  Yet with 301 redirects, you at least ensure the most ranking value possible be passed from the non-indexed version even if links point to it.

I'm in agreement with EGOL - where it makes sense from a time and resources perspective, requesting updates to links is the best practice recommendation.  While Banar has a valid point if there are thousands, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of links, those that come from very highly authoritative sites that you can get changed can help send the proper signals to search engines sooner in regard to the need to provide search engines validation that the new URLS deserve the same trust the old URLs held.

This is an important, yet often overlooked factor.  Here's why:

Just because you change URLs, and while the content might appear to match the last version, the fact exists that previous links were generated to the old URL - those that provided those links presumably did so because they trusted the content and/or deemed it valuable.  Since it's possible that content changes  when URLs do, those same people might not want to link to the new page if that content changed.

It's why search engines do not solely rely on their own data or algorithms, and to gain maximum value after a 301, rely on new links being generated directly to the new URL.  Lack of that is a prime cause of the bleeding off of link value in a 301.  It's a minor loss, yet it's a loss nonetheless.

Trenton,

I love this!  To the point where I think I'll use it the next time someone says "we did great SEO - look at how many phrases that site ranks for on the 2nd page of Google"