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Good timing - one of Australia's biggest sporting stars has just shut down his Twitter account after getting outed for buying followers.

Article here

Quite funny that a fellow sports star outed him! So yes, it does happen.

We recently rewrote all of our meta descriptions and noticed on avg a 20% jump in conversions. Remember - great meta tags and page titles will dramatically increase CTR from SERPs. I recommend you revisit these and see if they are compelling enough for visitors to go to your site.

Focus on:

1. What you offer
2. Why choose your site over others (your competitive advantage)
3. Specific product/site features
4. How to contact you (e.g. if you are trying to get people to call you for a quote - offer your phone number in the meta description perhaps - not applicable for all sites)
5. Meaningful, easy to read language that isn't pumped full of keywords like past years

$500k woah! Really?

David - SEOmoz has a HUGE job on their hands. Sometimes they are late but they are always transparent and honest about this. Let's just be patient and let them do their job.

Don't be afraid to post the URL of your site and their site - it would help us to better understand the situation.

A guy I went to uni with actually owned a website that sold Twitter followers. I think the going rate was about $40 for a few thousand. He did alright business out of it.

Unfortunately, I don't think it's going to stop. People want their follow count to be as high as possible.

I have never purchased followers and never will. The aim of the social media game is to create meaningful relationships (be it with customers, like people in the industry etc). You're not going to get that by buying followers.

Of course there is benefit in ranking for long tail keywords.

However, you have to consider that you are essentially making the FAQ page a landing page. If someone lands on a FAQ page - unless it is very well structured and contains highly relevant information, there's going to be a lot of bounces from that page compared to traditional landing pages on your site.

My advice? Create dedicated landing pages where each target segments of information that you want to rank for. Thus, you'll be creating more relevant pages for each search query. On each of these pages have a clearly definable path for visitors to then proceed through to other areas of your site. You'll get less bounce rate, and visitors will more likely be directed to any subsequent pages on your site (i.e. directed to where you want them to go).

Agree with Ryan. We had a very similar setup previously and we got busted. You're very much at risk.

Consolidate in to one large, authority site. It will work much better in the long run.

Great idea there - thumbs up for you.

We've launched new sites in the past where we've placed a 'holding site' on them for at least a few months prior to launch. My recommendations for this would be to not make it spammy and ensure the first few links are very high authority links (not directories, blog comments etc).

But the idea above is far better than just a plain holding site. Go with that.

$300 for that domain does seem like a good deal.

I've had a client buy a domain in the past for $800, and it certainly wasn't as good as keyword.com for a mere $300!

Good luck getting the domain up and running. I'd try and call them directly if you can - don't give them a chance to not respond via email.

This could be influenced by other factors. Are you logged in to Google, are you visiting the site in private browsing mode etc?

If you've visited the site a few times, Google will take this in to account and push your page higher up the SERPs for searches conducted by you.

Hard to tell if you will keep the ranking without knowing any more information?

Hi,

Those sites are correctly serving a 200 page.

Think of it this way - if you were searching for 'sdagasdgasdgasg' in SEOmoz (as in above URL), this term is not found yet on any page on site. But, it may be contained on a page that is published in the future (highly unlikely for that term I know, but you get what I mean). Hence they serve a 200 page.

In terms of usability, if you were on a site and you searched for something and were presented with a generic 404 page, you'd probably think that something had gone amiss with the search functionality. However, if you were presented with a 200 page with "Sorry, no results found" you would be more likely to assume the search functionality had in fact worked, there was just nothing to return.

Agree with the uni students. We tested/hired a couple from journalism backgrounds. Great writers with a passion for their craft.

I've used textbroker before with good results.

As with any service like this, you get your good and your bad - so start with a smaller project and if they are good, bookmark them and they are usually very keen for more work.

I've had a lot of on-site content written through this site.

Did you have two listings under the same address?

We operate a number of websites from the same physical address and when I tried to put 2 of them on Google Places/Local under the same address they started crossing over and eventually both listings were removed.

Big pain, especially as one of the businesses had a number of very old, very good reviews.

Hi Jane,

It appears that the correct authors are now appearing in the SERPs.

All I did was make sure that each blogger was listed as a contributor and for each post I simply added "Written by Author Name - Author Name Google+". I linked the "Author Name Google +" to the respective G+ account and from the G+ account back to the blog under the 'Contributor To' field.

Anyway, all seems to be working now - just thought I'd reply in case anyone needs help in the future!

Many thanks,
Brad

Hi Alan, See this thread from only April this year: http://www.seomoz.org/q/subdomains-vs-subfolders Rand states: All the testing, research and examples I've seen in the past few years (and even the past few months) strongly suggest that the same principles still hold true. Subdomains SOMETIMES inherit and pass link/trust/quality/ranking metrics between one another Subfolders ALWAYS inherit and pass link/trust/quality/ranking metrics across the same subdomain

Hi Alan, I have not tested myself but I have read numerous articles and they all point to the same thing. Everything I have read from industry leaders such as rand and Matt cutts says sub folder is preferable. I'm just going by what they say. Thanks

Hi,

The best practice amongst SEO professionals is using a subfolder (www.website.com/blog).

Here's a few Q+A threads that might help:

1. http://www.seomoz.org/q/blogs-are-best-when-hosted-on-domain-subdomain-or
2. http://www.seomoz.org/q/setting-up-a-company-blog-subdomain-or-new-url

Here's a couple of other resources on SEOmoz that also point to using the sub folder approach:

1. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites
2. http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/domain

Thanks,

Brad

Hi Joel,

As for these books - I've only read the 2009 edition - http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-SEO-Mastering-Optimization/dp/0596518862. There was an updated version this year - http://www.amazon.com/Art-SEO-Eric-Enge/dp/1449304214/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1339728490&sr=1-1 that I am yet to read but hope to soon.

Thanks