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It's not about a single site of mine in particular - just a discussion thread. I'm curious how often most of the mozzers go about changing their title tags when testing them out. And what best practices they use.

It can be a scary thing to change your homepage title tag to get the best results in the SERP while also maintaining your rankings. You obviously want to be irresistible and clickworthy… so how much time do you give before changing it up to test again?

What do you guys do with your old content/news/articles?

Do you just leave them on your site forever for historical reasons?

It goes without saying that you wouldn't delete an article that has links pointing to it. But if there aren't any links, it doesn't rank and it doesn't receive traffic… do you just scrap it?

How say you?

Update:

I would also like to throw in that I have a client who in 2006/2007 used content from another site. What would you do with that content after this amount of time? Bother with it?

Last week I was looking at a competitors site who has a link scheme going on and I could actually check the links for each anchor text.

This week they don't work at all, do you think they're blocking the rogerbot on their domains? Or is there a problem with open site explorer?

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/anchors?site=www.decks.ca

If you're interested in the background, all the links are to instant-home-biz . com which then redirects decks . ca - it's a tricky technique. Pretty much all of the links are from sketchy sites like:

airpr23.xelr8it.biz/

airpr23.anzaland.net/

airpr23.vacation-4-free.com/airpr23.blogfreeradio.net/airpr23.blogomatik.com/http://www.morcandirect.com/mortgages/resources2.php which I thought Penguin was supposed to catch…

I work for a network of sites that offer up country exclusive content. The content for the US will be different than Canada, Australia, Uk, etc.… but with the same subjects.

Now to make navigation easy we have included in the header of every page a drop down that has links to the other countries, like what most of you do with facebook/twitter buttons. Now every page on every site has the same link, with the same anchor text.

Example:

• Penguins in Canada
• Penguins in Australia
• Penguins in the USA

Because every page of every site has the same links (it's in the header) the "links containing this anchor text" ratio is through the roof in Open Site Explorer. Do you think this would be a reason for penguin penalization?

If you think this would hurt you, what would you suggest? no follow links? Remove the links entirely and create a single page of links? other suggestions?

I work for a network of international websites, the site I work on is for Canada.

Our partners in Australia were hit by penguin hard because they hired a black hat SEO guy and didn't know. He was creating profiles on highly authoritative sites and keyword stuffing them. Now, they've completely dropped off the SERP.

This is where the issue occurs, because we are all international partners we are all linked together on the header of every page so visitors can choose their country. Now, because they were hit hard and we have reciprocal links (not for rankings but for usability) will we be affected? It seems like we have, but I just want some opinions out there.

Also, should we go ahead and stop linking our sites between countries to avoid this mess?

It is pretty much covered in this article by Danny Sullivan.

Excerpt: So use the tag? Sure, if you want to take a chance that by overstuffing it, you’ll cause Bing to think you’re spamming. Be safe, be smart, save your time. Don’t use it.

It's getting really hard filtering through the Penguin articles flying around right now so excuse me if this has been addressed:

I know that Google no longer uses the meta keywords as indicators (VERY old news). But I'm just wondering if they are starting to look at them as a bigger spam indicator since Penguin is looking at over-optimization.

If yes, has anyone read good article indicating so?

The reason I ask is because I have two websites, one is authoritative and the other… not so much. Recently my authoritative website has taken a dip in rankings, a significant dip. The non-authoritative one has increased in rankings… by a lot.

Now, the authoritative website pages that use meta-keywords seem to be the ones that are having issues… so it really has me wondering. Both websites compete with each other and are fairly similar in their offerings.

I should also mention that the meta-keywords were implemented a long time ago… before I took over the account.

Also important to note, I never purchase links and never practice any spammy techniques. I am as white hat as it gets which has me really puzzled as to why one site dropped drastically.

Ah thanks for that Matthew! You gave me exactly what I needed for my email…

Now to wait another two weeks for this web developer. (beyond frustrating)

With Google releasing that instructional on proper pagination I finally hunkered down and put in a site change request.

I wanted the rel="next" and rel="prev" implemented… and it took two weeks for the guy to get it done. Brutal and painful.

When I looked at the source it turned out he put it in the body above the pagination links… which is not what I wanted. I wanted them in the .

Before I respond to get it properly implemented I want a few opinions - is it okay to have the rel="next" in the body? Or is it pretty much mandatory to put it in the head?

(Normally, if I had full control over this site, I would just do it myself in 2 minutes… unfortunately I don't have that luxury with this site)

If it was as easy as that – trust me, it would've been done by now. The company I work for is locked in.

Spec work is terrible and undervalues the industry. I say you get what you pay for. http://www.no-spec.com/

What tool would you recommend to notify you when your site goes down?

I've recently had issues with a bad host - servers go down sporadically.

I've been battling with this regularly… there is no transparency so it's really hard to tell.

I have implemented it and this is what I have found, it's inconsistent. haha. I set up Authorship for all of my co-workers to ensure it was done correctly. All mark up is exactly the same and this is how it panned out:

**1. Myself - Authorship/Picture works: **

• I rarely post articles.
• Picture is a professional headshot.
• The article I posted didn't receive much traffic at all
• Was mostly just a test on myself to make sure it worked.
• Don't have an outstanding amount of Twitter/G+ followers.

2. Co-worker - Authorship/Picture works:

• Wrote an article that has received a lot of traffic.
• Hasn't written many articles - but more than myself.
• Picture is professional headshot.
• Doesn't have an outstanding amount of Twitter/G+ followers - but more than me.

3. My Boss - Authorship/Picture doesn't work:

• Writes articles regularly that receive a lot of traffic and show up consistently in Google News
• Originally picture wasn't professional (we recently changed this to headshot - no diff)
• Has a lot of Twitter followers, not a lot of G+ followers.

3. Contributor - Authorship/Picture doesn't work:

• Writes articles for major Canadian National News website - Financial Post.
• Writes articles regularly that receive a lot of traffic and show up consistently in Google News
• Professional headshot.
• Doesn't have an outstanding amount of Twitter/G+ followers.

All articles are shared equally over Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and email. At first it was the picture that made the difference, but I think I might be wrong on that now? There are probably multiple reasons why it works for some and not for others… like their other Algorithms.

So don't be upset, it's not you – it's them. haha.

I say it's important to have both… I work primarily on Mac but also have a Windows XP PC next to me to ensure the sites run on all platforms.

I do use the Mac more because I prefer the OS and sharing files around the office is easier. As far as SEO it doesn't make a difference.

I agree, this is a toughy. My author snippets show up for queries that involve the domain but not for regular searches.

What do you do if some authors are appearing and others aren't? Even though the snippet testing tool says everything is correct.

Do I have to fill out this form again if I bring on new authors? Or will they automatically start getting indexed as authors?

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/request.py?hl=en&contact_type=rich_snippets_feedback