Welcome to the Q&A Forum
Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.
As far as I know Google doesn't use their Gmail spam filtering to affect web search results - that'd be way too easy to game and mess up your competitor's results.
Likewise there is no evidence of penalized domains from affecting Gmail either.
They're too separate mediums and they're two very different types of spam. So no overlap to speak of!
Hey Omid,
I've taken a good look through various websites built with Adobe Muse. These were ones featured in "Site of the Day" on the Adobe website, and so I imagine are considered the best of the best.
I'm not impressed by the quality of the code. Perhaps the most worrying thing for me is that things that are clearly semantically headers are being rendered in
tags.
Additionally there doesn't seem to be any alt text applied to any images on sites I've found running Muse.
They also seem to rely on a large number of HTTP requests and many resource seem to be poorly compressed.
Without knowing too much about the tool, everything I mentioned could be down to individual designers - but the trend is there.
I wouldn't rank their markup too highly, and there's some pretty unoptimised elements on those sites. I think that if your site does well on SERPs with those sites it's probably in spite of your markup.
Hey there,
I wouldn't worry too much about this. I think Google would be smart enough to know that in the context of your website this is valuable content.
However, be sure to back this up with good unique content throughout your website. Perhaps for each currency conversion page you could have a passage of text such as...
"The US dollar has traditionally been stronger than the GBP, however in recent years we have seen that this difference is contracting. Perhaps one of the reasons for this is blah blah blah blah."
That would be a nice lead in to an article about that rate, which in turn may reduce bounce rate too (as I imagine a big proportion of people hit your site for their currency, then bounce off?)
I wouldn't rely on them, but if they make sense in the context of how you're using them on Soundcloud then I don't see any problem with it.
For example, you may say something like...
"This was taken from our latest recording session at the world famous Abbey Road in London. We've written on our blog [link] about our experiences of recording where the Beatles once did!"
Always be thinking in terms of "if I have a link to my site here, is it going to help anybody but me?" If the answer is no - then it's not helping you either.
Hi Michael,
Once users find a tattoo on your site that they like, what would be the next thing?
Perhaps they would like to know the inspiration behind the artwork, or how long it took to produce? How many sessions did it take to get to how it is now? What did the customer think of it? If they had it now, would they change anything about it?
Without knowing too much about it, I would say there's probably a great amount of useful content you can provide your users and it'll go further into converting them than just a picture.
Hope that helps!
Hey there.
Here's the biggest tip I can give you: stop thinking about what will please Google and start thinking about what will please your users. Make them happy, and Google will follow.
A useful exercise is to have a whiteboard next to you, and every time somebody asks you a question about a product, category, brand or similar add a tally mark next to that. Whenever you get a chance to write some new content start with the one with the most tally marks. It's the one your customers want to find content for the most!
Often this content is best placed in the product description themselves (I've written about the frustrations I have where shops ignore this kind of detail at) but could also be static pages or blog posts.
Be in touch with your customers - best trick in the book.
Absolutely! You can do a blanket "301 any page with .html at the end to the same page without it" rule with .htaccess to save you time and energy once you've done your renaming process.
This neat little bit of code (found at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5730092/how-to-remove-html-from-url) should do the trick nicely.
<code>RewriteEngineOnRewriteCond%{REQUEST_FILENAME}!-f RewriteCond%{REQUEST_FILENAME}!-d RewriteRule^(.*)\.html$ /$1 [L,R=301]</code>
Hi John,
Subdomains are technically different websites, I don't see why Google would give your main website the benefits of the SEO gained from the sub-site.
With that said, having it on its own URL is preferable purely from a click-through perspective. Users are much more likely to visit and spend time on a site that's clearly its own over one that seems like a 'bolt on' to someone elses.
I hope that helps!
Yeah I think there'll be little-to-no difference. Always put users ahead of Google and you'll come out on top.
Perhaps you could try 5 categories in one convention, 5 in another, measure the click-throughs and then roll forward with the one that works best for you?
Really interesting. Would you be able to share with us the URLs of your site and the forums it's at?
Edit: I found this video at in which Matt Cutts suggests that they don't use it as a signal, although it is a few years old now.
Hi Miguel,
Probably not! You'd be better off keeping them all on the same level on the domain, but perhaps your URLs could be tidied up to be more like...
A sub-domain is basically a new website, you may as well have one site to optimise for than having a bunch of smaller sites struggling. Strong together - weak apart.
Hi there Durand,
I'm not quite sure of the logic here. Is there any reason you're wanting to move domain names?
As a general rule of thumb, I wouldn't suggest splitting up parts of your site across different domain names. Related pages are stronger together, weaker apart.
Hey Juan,
On the old domain have this in your .htaccess file
RewriteEngine OnRedirectMatch 301 (.*) http://www.domain.es/$1
Then you may want a separate HTACCESS rule to forward all traffic without www. to use it
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]
I hope that helps, but I have a feeling I may have missed the point of the question. Let me know if I did.
Hi Jonnygeeuk,
Very good point. There's no real way for you to conquer this as far as I can see, I've not had a chance to take advantage of the new merchant stuff yet though.
This may break the rules... but could you add a watermark to your product pictures with a strap "Free UK Delivery" going across it?
Hi Joshua,
Stay calm! Nothing to worry about here. Google ignores (that may not be true 100% of the time, but let's say that it is...) nofollow links - that's the point of them!
You wont gain from them - but neither will you be punished.
On OpenSiteExplorer I can't see any real data there, so I can't look any deeper than that.
Hope that helps! 
Hi Brian,
Great question. It's not one that I can answer with hard facts or stats, but I can do so anecdotally.
A few years ago "Pages from the UK" was prominent on the UK's Google homepage. Nowadays, you have to conduct a search across "The Web", then go to "Search Tools", then go to "The Web" and change that to say "Pages from the UK".
It is buried incredibly deep down, which suggests to me one of two things (perhaps both):-
I hope that helps!
Hi there, quite a few questions here, but I think they all come back round to the same point.
The point being that Google does execute basic Javascript on websites. In particular, if you're using a method like this then Google will execute it:
document.write('Go to this awesome service');
There's a good write-up all about how Google executes javascript on SEOMoz that I urge you to read for more detail.
With that considered, then the answer is that that link on each site would benefit you and you are in effect forcing people to give you a backlink.
I'm not so sure this is a dreadful thing though, you're providing a free service and the link is relevant to the context in which it's being used (presumably).
I guess the thing you need to ask yourself is whether people from 'bad neighbourhoods' are likely to use your code? If they are, you may wish to do a nofollow tag here and rely on other methods to build links.
Hope that helps!
I think you've correctly identified a couple of things here. Firstly that you shouldn't be running multiple domains for the same website, and secondly that US customers are unlikely to click on a .ca domain for a local branch.
I think the .com domain would be best for you here. You might want somebody to back me up on this, but I believe if you 301 redirect .ca to the new .com address appropriately the good SEO juices from the .ca domain will be transferred to .com. I don't think this is an overnight thing, but I imagine that as soon as Google realised ".ca now lives at .com" they'll work out the rest quite quickly.
If the US and Candidan websites aren't the same then consider having the different regions as subfolders on your .com domain - for example yourclient.com/us/ and yourclient.com/ca/
Google does index PDF files quite well, and from my experience Powerpoint does a good job of generating PDFS. I don't expect you'll see any problems here.
But how about this... if you uploaded your powerpoint to a service like SlideShare you will probably provide a better experience to many users, you can have an additional social elements and gain one or two decent links from SlideShare. Worth some thought?
Bad idea in my book. It sounds like you're trying to cheat Google instead of win it properly, that never works out in the long-term.