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Hi Jesse, aHrefs does an awesome job visualizing their anchor text reports, I agree. We're working on updating how we visualize data in Open Site Explorer in our long term plans. Lots of cool things in all of our products. That said, the quality of the data in the OSE anchor text report is damn fine

In short, the answer is.... It is impossible to accurately say why Google changed the rankings. Anybody who says that they can do this is full of BS.  There are hundreds of variables.

I am having this problem as well. My photo was showing up in all the articles that I write, then one day a month ago they stopped despite not changing anything. I'm thinking Google changed the threshold on how many followers someone has to have to show up in search results. They must be using it as a qualifier to determine if the author is an authority on the subject.

Hi Brett, Having more unique content above the fold is very important.  As Irving mentioned, it is important from a content to ad ration.  When visitors visit your site, they want to see the contents right away instead of scrolling down a few ads before seeing the content.  Being able to see the contents right way is good user experience and Google likes that.  Google rolled out an algorithm for content above fold. http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2216227/Google-Updates-Above-the-Fold-Page-Layout-Algorithm Hope this article from search engine watch will answer your question. Enjoy!

In WordPress, if you have categories of dogs, budgies and cats, the category pages that WordPress generates for you will be www.yoursite.com/category/cats www.yoursite.com/category/dogs www.yoursite.com/category/budgies So the word category appears in each URL diluting the keywords.  Yoast allows you to remove the "category" part of this altogether, if you want to. I don't think there are any disadvantages to it other than when you look at a page URL you'll have a hard time telling if it is a category page or not. The advantage is that you page doesn't look generated to the naked eye - the word category in the URL is giveaway.  If you go to the trouble of inserting some relevant unique info at the top of each category page this will look even better, both to humans and search engines.  You also make the URL a little more relevant. You can instead specify a word to replace category and tag in the URL which is another route. So rather than category you can specify some niche word where appropriate.

Brett, another resource to consider would be a Local U session, either Local U or Local U Advanced.  Local U is organized by Mike Blumenthal and David Mihm and it includes the expertise of faculty like Aaron Weiche, Matt McGee, Ed Reese, Mike Ramsey, Mary Bowling, and others.  The Local U half-day sessions are scheduled around the country and Local U Advanced is next scheduled as a workshop following SMX Advanced in Seattle, June 13.  If you're interested in attending Local U Advanced in Seattle, early bird rates expire on Saturday.  There's more information about the curriculum at LocalU.org.  I've attended two Local U sessions and Local U Advanced in the last year and it's transformed what I can do for my clients -- I recommend it!  Good Luck! Paul

The citation finder tool at Whitespark (mentioned in one of my other comments) can also be really useful, Brett. One way you can use it is to check out the citations your local competitors have, so you can recognise and go after relevant citation sites that you may not have thought of. www.whitespark.ca/local-citation-finder/ Well worth a paid account for a couple of months at least. (No affiliation - just a great tool. And Canadian Note that as a Pro member here, there's even a perk for that: www.seomoz.org/pro-perks. Paul

excellent resource. thanks Matt

thanks Francisco. I suspected that I did not have control over this but wanted a second input. Also, the plugin referenced is great but it interferes with the caching my host already does so I cannot use it

thanks Gareth. That was the problem Brett

There is a marginal advantage to smaller CSS files, in terms of page speed.  I believe that Google's PageSpeed and Yahoo!'s ySlow both recommend that you're using a 'minify' tool on both your CSS and JavaScript in fact.  But again, the improvement is more often than not extremely minimal compared to other performance enhancements like Varnish. WordPress updates the default theme only when you do an upgrade.  So if the CSS file is attached to the default theme, yes.  Otherwise, no.

Probably better to post a link to your CSS file so someone can see what you are talking about.

Nope Neither YSlow nor PageSpeed are able to differentiate third-party content from your own hosted content in their reports. So they're giving optimisation recommendations you can't possibly implement because you don't control those external servers/code. Just ignore recommendation on any URLs you don't control. The one exception to this is when the report mentions external JavaScript that could be moved to footers, or could be asynchronous. In those cases, do try to follow the recommendations where possible. Remember, these are automated reports based on a standard set of rules. You must interpret them using common sense for your own specific site and circumstances - they're not gospel. Paul

thanks Klarke

It's an old proprietary filter used to try to fix rendering in older Internet Explorer browsers (IE 6 and earlier) that didn't properly support transparency in .png images. Its use is harmful for page optimisation because it blocks rendering for the rest of the page while it is processing for each element. Since most of us no longer worry about supporting IE 6 and older in our site designs, it's not worth using at the expense of all our modern browser users. Paul

I know Hi checked out your plug-in it does not look like the best solution for total security and all honesty you can't get that from a simple plug-in you need to have a hardend server you might want to look into http://websynthesis.com/ http://wpengine.com/ https://Page.ly http://zippykid.com http://firehost.com Every one of them of is a far better job protecting your information the one plug and can and I'll have a server-side secure built in http://sucuri.net/ My 2 cents Tom

Hi Brett, Poorly written CSS selectors do not have much, if any, impact on site speed. I've never seen an issue where bad CSS changed the load of a page I was working on. That said, writing clean CSS can be helpful in a lot of other areas, including code maintainability. There is a good article on this that you might find interesting: http://css-tricks.com/efficiently-rendering-css/ I hope that helps. Matthew

Hi Brett, The reasoning behind combining CSS files is to reduce the number of files that need to be requested when the page is loaded. If you load one CSS file instead of five CSS files, your page should load somewhat faster. This is especially true when dealing with larger CSS files (for example, five large CSS files combined to one really large CSS file will usually make the site load faster). I'd recommend combining CSS files if you can. Depending on what system you are working with, and how much control you have over the code, you may not be able to. What reasons were given to not combine files? Matthew

Brett, Your question is "How do they affect SEO?" Simply put, they can sometimes increase the speed with which a site loads, but there are caveats. Seeing all your questions around site speed, I would suggest trying this link to Yahoo (comes from YSlow) So, if the site is too slow, beyond user experience issues (which to me are the bigger issues usually around a slow site) you can cost yourself in PPC and, IMO if UX issues are significant, SEO ranking. Hope this helps,

The trick with sitespeed testing, Brett, is that you need to approximate as closely as possible the experience a real user will have. By far the best tool for this in my experience is webpagetest.org. It uses actual browser rendering for it's test, not a synthetic imitation. it also allows a couple of other critical customizations: select which browser you want to test your site with (you'll be surprised at the differences! Use you Google Analytics to tell you which browser majority of your visitors use) Select what sort of connection speed to test from (eg slower DSL which will also mimic phone users or faster cable connection) select a specific city to test from (this will have major effect - e.g. you should test from the San Jose location which is much more realistic for your Comox location than an east coast or southern US test would be) run a mobile-specific test shows both first load and repeat visit (particularly tests caching effectiveness) provides a waterfall view so you can exactly which elements may be causing issues The app also provides full Google Page Speed results/recommendations and a number of other trouble-shooting tools. GTMetrix provides a number of these, but doesn't have the same flexibility/customization available, I've found. (Though it is using a Vancouver-based server for your test from here (Alberta) which is useful.) Note that you will get different results each time though, if you're using a real-life tool. That's due to differences in network load and latency and even different load on your server each time tested. Finally, below is a screenshot demonstrating why you absolutely need to use a real-life test, not just synthetic Page Speed or YSlow scores - the site has a beautiful synthetic score yet a disastrous load time (due to server issues) Paul rDQjD.jpg