Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Agree we use Google Docs - its great for sharing with team members, if you put a due date column and then do a simple formula it can calculate how many days are left, a great way of keeping things on track.

that is great - at least you havent done any Black hat.

page 3 isn't too bad, but why do you have to wait for these people to find you. Why don't you take your content to these other blogs, new sites and show it off to them.

If it is good ( and I am assuming it is) they will naturally want to link to you, quote you in their articles.

This will then boost the articles page authority and also your domain authority meaning future posts rank higher, but even then - don't stop the out reach. Don't wait for people to find you - go out and shout about your great article.

If your waiting for people to naturally find your article and link to it, you will be waiting ages and it may never happen. The moment may have past, however go to news sites, tech blogs and share them your article and knowledge.

I would have to agree with SEO 5 team and get them changed, why take the risks of a ticking time bomb that could hit you at any time and without knowing your actually site potential destroy your listing.

I would go about the call slightly differently I would go about it in the sense of how by not doing this google could penalise his site and destroy his rankings and visibility. He is more likely to help and change his site, if he thinks he has got something to lose, which technically he has.

So explain to him, that Google are penalise site which take paid links and put "nofollow" on them.

It might hurt your rankings in the short term - but at least your then not worried about every update Google does.

If your playing by the rules, then you will actually come to enjoy Google updates as your competition suffers and you improve.

Hi

I would recommend reading this before you do anything: http://www.koozai.com/blog/search-marketing/deleted-900-blog-posts-happened-next/

I want to do the same - but its a risk to search visibility.

I guess a combination of both, I always find phone is more personal and has a better success rate, but takes a lot longer and requires more work.

I would suggest try both methods and keep trying, you will get a lot more no's then yeses, but keep going. If it was easy everyone would do it.

I don't personally do the work, I just manage a team to do the outreach, so the actual work involved I am not too knowledgeable, but from speaking with them this morning, a combination of the two and don't give up.

It does get easier - the more your known, but to get known you have to spend time contacting these websites and getting rejected.

I cant answer the about CCL certificate, but web hosting can potentially affect google rankings in the sense of load time.

If your hosting is on poor servers, throtle band width Google does take this into account when ranking websites, as slow websites lead to poor user experience and they want happy user experience.

Website load time is a higher ranking factor on mobile websites, so the slower to load has the potential to rank lower.

http://www.quicksprout.com/2012/12/10/how-load-time-affects-google-rankings/

There are many things you can do on the page to improve load time (and there are many articles out there), but hosting can play a part.

So in answer to your question a good hosting company can help improve your rankings. CCL certificate I don't know enough about to give you an answer - so I am hoping somebody else can answer that part for you.

Hi

I am in the process of launching a new version of my site and I know I need to get my current SEO Agency to check and test certain aspects of the site so that I don't lose any rankings.

The problem is I am unsure of everything to ask them and I was wondering if someone could help me out.

I don't want to have missed something basic and therefore want to give them a checklist to confirm they are happy before go live.

Any help appreciated

Hi

If your users are clicking on the links then yes keep them, but make them no follow, however if they are not driving traffic to your other sites and don't add any real value I would recommend removing them.

However this article is very similar to a question that was asked last year and instead of duplicating everything that was said here I thought I would just post so that you can read the comments http://moz.com/community/q/are-sitewide-links-bad-for-seo (we know Google doesn't like duplicate content)

This all depends when the page with the link on it gets crawled and by who.

Would recommend using Google Alerts, these are a good way of spotting new mentions / links to your site.

Would also recommend watching White board friday from two weeks ago about using Email alerts for SEO http://moz.com/blog/8-ways-to-use-email-alerts-to-boost-seo-whiteboard-friday

But it does all depend on when the Page is crawled.

I would defiantly say its something to do with Panda

Your drop as seen on the graph, is your search visibility and while its not a great indication on its own, it still pretty useful. Your drop in % terms in the same as Ebay's.

http://imgur.com/8XojR8P

Generally speaking people are saying Ebays drop is down to poor quality content, so if David is right about Matt Cutts saying its not affecting product descriptions I would take a look at your blog and add more content (however that does all seem unique).

I will still work on the product descriptions and making them more useful for the user, plus you win twice, higher ranking and more customer converting and they are getting the advice they need without leaving your site

The recently discovered is just that, recently discovered by Moz, its nothing to do with the date the article / link was published.

I use three bits of software, Talkwalker, Opensite explorer and Google Alerts. And if I am honest the only one I care about is Google Alerts as its Google rankings I monitor so the sooner google pick up the link the better.

In terms of time length, I am still getting alerts for links posted years ago on poor links, but get alerts within the day for links of places like Virgin.com so it all depends on when the crawler manages to crawl the page.

Have you checked the page with the link on is crawable. Can the bots find the page. If they can't find the page, it will never get indexed and you will never benefit from the link. So if its been 4 weeks check to see if the page has been indexed / can it be indexed.

If you send me the link I will do some analysis for you.

it is around 20% of the world sites are run using Wordpress (as George says), from simple blogs like you mention to some of the worlds biggest sites.

Wordpress does have its very good features some great plugins like Yoast, which helps to improve your site from an google presepective - changing meta deta, titles etc.

I do use wordpress for my sites for one reason only - I can't code and wouldn't know where to start.

If you are a competent coder and by the sounds of it you are - I would stay away from WP, for all its great benefits and there are loads, its still an out of the box solution that is trying to meet everybodys needs so is not brilliant and while you can do some wonderful themes etc in wordpress you are still working within their framework.

Starting from scratch (if you have the skills and the time) is always a much better solution. So much more can be done

There are many factors which could influence it, but someone actually asked Matt Cutts the same question, so while I am good at SEO I might as well let him answer your question

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STpCM-3K3KY

Some of the key things are:

• Domain age, does influence rankings, you basically have to start again when you start a new domain

There are also some very good answers on these similar questions:

http://moz.com/community/q/seo-s-done-301s-in-place-old-site-still-outranks-new-site-what-to-do

http://moz.com/community/q/outranking-a-crappy-outdated-site-with-domain-age-keywords-in-url

Would the business owner be willing to do a 301 from the old site to the new site - this is the best thing I can suggest, but it will take time for the new site to rank and appearing the SERPs where the old site currently ranks.

None of the software I use can't

Moz, will tell you where you have ranked historically, but this is after you have started monitoring it.

Searchmetrics - tells you where you was the previous week

There will be some software out there, and I would love to know find some, but the ones I currently pay for don't

firstly that is not quite true. If something is shared on twitter it will not automatically rank in Google, as Google won't use Twitter as a signal, as Twitter can cut off their service at any point (http://www.brafton.com/news/qa-with-matt-cutts-at-ses-san-francisco-social-reputability-for-seo-traffic-cannibalization-and-the-promise-of-transparency-from-google)

Posting on G+ might be different as it will tell google about the new page, however so long as your page is in the sitemap and Google can crawl your site, this is still the best way to initially get a page to rank.

Improving a page rank is a different question to getting a page rank.

Search metrics among other great sites reveal correlations that sites that rank well have (http://www.searchmetrics.com/en/knowledge-base/ranking-factors/) but this isn't a check list and just because you do them all, doesn't mean you will rank highly. Moz has one too http://moz.com/search-ranking-factors

Both of them state that pages that have more +1s tend to rank better, and while this might be the case, they usually also have great content, high DA, large user base etc

Search engine land did a great article on social ranking factors (http://searchengineland.com/what-social-signals-do-google-bing-really-count-55389 - bit old but still relevant).

So in answer to your question - does posting a link on twitter help it rank - Nope and does it improve rankings, probably not.

Hi

I would have to agree with Ken - what do you want people to see when searching. If you don't help Google out and offer a meta description (not that they will use this), but without they will pull some text from the page which they think is "useful".

I would always recommend putting a meta description, even if you don't spend time optimising each page, a basic description about the page will help CTR to your site.

Don't bother with meta keywords, have Google have confirmed they don't use these any more so these would be a waste of time.

Thanks

Andy

I have a google alerts for 'brand name' and set it to email every time the 'brand name' appears on the web.

Its then when Google finds a new mention of my 'brand name' anywhere on the web it triggers an alert to me.

It doesn't send me historical mentions on the brand, but it does send me an email every time the brand is mentioned. I sometimes get really old articles but it just means Google have just found the article.

If its on the bigger, more popular sites I can get alerts within minutes / hours of the article going live, sometimes its a few weeks later and the longest I've had is a few years.

So the alerts are triggered every time Google find a new mention of the 'search term' you have requested. They don't send historical mentions about the brand.

Hi

I would hate to leave SEO and then have to come back. I struggle keeping up to date and I spend all day looking after SEO.

You should probably read: http://moz.com/learn/seo/internal-link its a great article on internal linking.

Whether you should have them as "nofollow" this is upto you, but I would suggest leaving them as follow, but if you have all internal links as nofollow, then any DA your home page gets, the "link juice" (and I do hate that word) wouldn't be passed to the rest of your site, so the other pages would struggle to rank, as they don't have any PA.

Outbound links is different: if someone has paid for a link, then defiantly yes. If you are linking naturally and actually would recommend the article then yes leave it as follow.

I hope this is helpful and good look in getting back into the world of SEO.

Thanks

Andy

Google made a big announcement last week about Google news: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-in-the-news-19259.html

The news section is not just coming from a human news approved sites, so how you get listed in here I don't know if you still have to go through the old method or whether Google will now just rank you if you are relevant. If anyone knows if you still need to apply be great to know the answer.

Hi

Firstly Affilaite links usually don't help towards SEO as they go through the affiliate company i.e. Awin, so the link juice actually is passed to awin, not yourself.

Once a product has sold out on our site, we 301 to the category page as this is the best user experience, while they can't get the exact product they are after at least they are still landing on a relevant section of the site - I've seen some examples where companies 301 to the homepage, but this isn't a good user experience.

Time periods for the 301s is a bit hard to say, I would track and see if they haven't had anybody click on the old link for 6 months to remove the 301 - but thats my opinion. Some would argue longer and I have spoken to others who say three months. What ever time period you do chose, keep an eye on 404 errors and if a decent number of these keep popping up, keep extending your 301 window.

Thanks

Andy