Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Biggest secret that I have is to make great connections to people in the business.  I can't count the number of times I've run into a strange issue and it's great to be able to email someone you've meet with your question and get some expert feedback.  Not to mention sometimes they share their super secret SEO tricks and tips.

Hi BreadMan!

If your goal is to rank #1 for this particular keyword, using the domain name with the exact match you've just bought is the best way to go. Search engines definitely reward this, though you'll also need to do all of the right things from a content, branding, marketing and linking perspective, too. Since they know that exact match domains can be easily exploited, they're sensitive to spam/manipulation, particularly so in new sites. I'd urge you to:

• Build out the new domain - perhaps redirect old content from other sites if you own it and want it associated with this one
• Make the site look great - good design is a signal of quality and detracts from the perception of spam. You want the type of look that can make it into the CSS galleries and awards and earn you some nice links and traffic that way Consider the sites that are featured in places like these: http://www.google.com/search?q=css+gallery
• Get some remarkable content on it - via a blog, an articles section, research you fund/produce/share, viral content, etc. You want to earn those first few hundred links authentically, without resorting to classic "push" link building tactics
• Earn some press - press releases, interviews, mentions on news sites, etc. - these go a long way to building credibility
• Invest in social media - the more Twitter followers, tweets, Facebook fans, shares and likes you have, the better you'll do in the engines (and these signals now count directly, too)

You can redirect the site, but you'll get little to no benefit from the domain name exact match. If you already have a very strong site and you're just seeking to protect the name and maybe use it to redirect for offline branding, that's fine, but it won't be a positive SEO contribution unless there was good content/good links pointing to it previously. Best of luck!

There is no set amount of links that a site needs to be successful. I think you may have that 150 number confused with what we usually consider an acceptable amount of links ON a page. Not links pointing TO a page.

A good strategy might be to submit your site to a few directories a month, spend time working at creating partnerships (that might bring links), while also creating compelling content that people want to link to naturally.

If you're seeking link building ideas, I'd highly recommend reading through our linkbuilding category from the blog. Tons of great ideas there!

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/4

Hi Francesco,

The problem is that .uk.com is not a true TLD, like .uk.com, .com, or .org, it's actually a subdomain of the domain uk.com.  So those 24 million links you are seeing are for the domain uk.com and not your site.  The true TLD for the UK is .co.uk and not .uk.com.  So your website is really just a subdomain of a very big domain.  To get information for your site you will only be able to look at the subdomain information and not the root domain level.

Casey

Hi,

I definitely believe Google that these won't be treated as country-specific domains, and if I were offered a keyword.co versus a keyword.info domain, I'd most certainly go with the .co. I think that it will resonate with people due to being similar to what they're used to seeing. This, of course, has nothing to do with a technical advantage: we'd like to believe that a TLD doesn't mean much from the perspective of a search engine, although you do see .com keyword-rich domains ranking better than other TLDs with the same keyword, in a lot of cases. Again, you don't want to confuse cause and effect: does the .com really help, or are .com domains usually owned by people who put up better websites? Hard to say.

When big companies use a TLD, that certainly lends some credit to it, and I think the domains you've bought are good. I don't think you've wasted your money, especially if they were quite cheap!

I wouldn't spend too much time or money buying every .co. domain under the sun, but I do think they're a better investment than many other TLDs. I don't have any stories of big successes yet, and I'd go as far as to say that the TLD is a bit too new to know what its fate will be. I do, however, doubt it will become as highly spammed and disregarded as the much-maligned .info and .biz.

Hi Eyepaq,

SEOmoz using a CDN to host all of our images, though we set up a DNS change so they can be hosting on a third party server but listed at cdn.seomoz.org.  Doing what you are talking about shouldn't effect any of your "juice" if you are just using it to display your images using the img tag or via css.  You pdfs might be affected since you are using a <a href="">tag which tells Google you are linking to that file.  In the long run you will be much better off than anything you might lose by doing something like this.</a>

<a href="">Casey</a>

Hi - I tested DCMI and hoped it would work many years ago, but it had no impact. I've talked to Googlers/Bing folks and heard them on stage say that they ignore all meta tags other than those specified - http://www.ninebyblue.com/blog/managing-robots-access-to-your-website-2/

In terms of microdata - there are rich snippets that Google now employs - http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=99170 but you'll need to get accepted/reviewed by their editorial staff to be included (and then send it in via your XML Sitemap).

Sorry to say that the engines haven't agreed on any new meta data since rel=canonical (and possibly AJAX crawling protocols), but neither Dublin Core nor anything else like it is in practice to the best of our knowledge.

If you run some tests and find something, please do let us know!

Hi Kicksetc - it's not quick and easy, but you can do some comparisons that will be helpful.

Basically, you'd want to build an Excel chart (or Google Spreadsheets / OpenOffice) that mimics the metrics that might go into local rankings. For example, see this post talking about all the potential ranking factors and how they correlate - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-places-seo-lessons-learned-from-rank-correlation-data

You could extract out those data points and compare them against each other for different queries to get a sense of how competitive/hard it might be to rank in the top results on a local/maps/places search.

Sorry there's nothing quick and simple. We're working in the long term to expand our KW Difficulty tool to perform analyses on local/places results, but it's going to be a while before we get there.

Best of luck!

First, no, SEOmoz does not offer any automatic directory submission tools. We do offer this page as a service to our customers, and you may find it useful: http://www.seomoz.org/directories

Yooda does seem like a nice piece of software, though I can't say that I've used it.

I've also heard decent things about this one:

http://www.fastdirectorysubmitter.com/tutorials/73-fast-directory-submitter-video.html

For the most part I've found automatic submission tools to be pretty frustrating, and almost certainly never worth the money. I'd also be careful not to run wild with directory submissions, as Google could pretty easily detect spikes in backlinks from directories.

I hope that helps!

Hey Donnie,

I've used both CakePHP and WordPress to some degree, in fact SEOmoz's main site is built on CakePHP.  I'd say that for someone with limited coding knowledge, I'd send them to WordPress because of all the plugins.  If you have a good handle on PHP and like creating your own plugins then first up CakePHP.

Hi Farhad,

Feel free to email me casey[at]seomoz.org and I will look into your problem.  Also include the details of your problem and I will find the correct person to address your issues.

Thanks,

Casey Henry
Marketing Ninja
SEOmoz

Hi.

I think there are a few things you can look at that should help with this specific keyword. Please note that anytime you focus on one specific keyword you could be jeopardising traffic from other keywords. Having said that there are a few things I would look at if my focus was only on that keyword.

Firstly, I would look at updating the title tag slightly. You currently have Language Translation Services | Translation Company, UK. It tends to help having your main keyword as the first thing in a title tag. It would be relatively easy and still very natural to re-write the title tag to remove language as the first phrase and start with translation services.

Secondly, and in my opinion more importantly I would look at adding some textual content to the homepage. It is the homepage that is ranking on the 2nd page for the keyword, yet there is very little content mentioning the phrase. It is only mentioned in anchor text or in very sort snippets of text. I would look at writing some content explaining what your translation services offer and what your unique selling point is. You should avoid write the content with your users in mind and not worry at all about the search engines. Doing this you will naturally make use of the keywords required.

With those changes in place I believe you will be in a better position to rank for the keyword however I think you will need to continue building good quality links. If you compare your site with language connect (who I see in 9th) you'll see there is still a way to go based on these metrics.

(I've ignored babelfish in 10th, because they aren't a good comparison, in that they aren't a direct competitor except for in the SERPS).

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/www.pstranslation.co.uk%252F/www.languageconnect.net/a!comparison

The interesting metric in my eyes is the difference in linking root domains, which is thought of as a strong indicator for rankings. One word of warning, from what I see almost all your links are going to your homepage. Its natural for a large percentage of links to point to the homepage however to hardly have any external links to your internal pages could look suspicious.

Good Luck

Personally if I had a choice I would use WordPress every time, since it provides my clients with access to a "backend" where they can edit pages and such if needed.  CakePHP is for hard core people who love to write code and such.

I don't think we have plans to switch to that, though I'm not always in the loop on things like that.

Users who have a certain number of MozPoints don't receive that message since they are most likely trusted to not SPAM their fellow community members. So as EGOL said it's a SPAM protection since most users never send more than a few message a day. If you need to send a large number of PM please contact me and I'd be glad to review you message for you.

Casey

We will be going back to the direct download option by the end of the week. If you need a report before then and didn't get your email, try submitting it again.

Hi Highland,

I would defiantly work on making sure that your product only lives in one category.  The canonical tag is a nice little band-aid but it still fix the root of the problem.  I would suggest you can have it listed in many different categories but it only lives in one category at the product level.  So for instance:

It's displayed here

site/cat1
site/cat2
site/cat3

But it only displays product details at a url like this

site/category/product

I'm not a huge fan of having Google crawl 4 or 5 extra pages per product just to find a canonical tag when you could just spend the extra programming time to make it work correctly.

Casey

Hi - in general, yes, it's best to use something like the rel=canonical tag (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps) or to specifically tag mobile content as such - http://searchengineland.com/dont-penalize-yourself-mobile-sites-are-not-duplicate-content-40380

If it's translated to different languages, you're in the clear - that's considered substantively unique content and not subject to duplicate filtering (at least, 99% of the time).

Happy to help - great to have you in PRO!

First off, I'd just say that internal navigation controls tend to have only a small impact. That's not to say it's not worth doing, just that you shouldn't expect a massive ROI unless your nav structure is truly horrible

That said, nofollow might not be the best choice - here's why: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-says-yes-you-can-still-sculpt-pagerank-no-you-cant-do-it-with-nofollow. You might also want to read - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/an-illustrated-guide-to-matt-cutts-comments-on-crawling-indexation

There are some potential other ways to do this, though:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-consolidation-the-new-pagerank-sculpting

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-faceted-navigation

Basically, my suggestion would be to think about how you could implement some form of consolidation or possibly use less navigation by default (maybe only enable the long drop downs if a user is logged in, or only show them on the specific category pages).

Let me know if you've got follow-ups after checking these out. I'm happy to help further.

Hi Danny,

The Moz.com website/blog are running on PHP/Nginx. As Matthew said, Nginx is much faster and less intensive on the servers for both CPU and memory. Nginx has some great documentation and is really easy to get things to redirect. It's as easy as adding lines like the following to your configuration and your good to go:

rewrite ^/q$ /community/q permanent;
rewrite ^/q/(.*)$ /community/q/$1 permanent;

Making the switch from Apache to Nginx was one of the best things we ever did and I would highly suggest you do the same thing for both static and any dynamic sites you may have. I'll most likely never use Apache again.

Casey

There is no benefit to having it on every page. In talking with our Google rep they stated they just needed on our site/homepage but since sometimes they don't know what they need, it was placed on every page via our CMS. At this point we haven't seen any negative effects from it but we might try placing it only on the homepage to see if that does anything.

Casey