Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Wow, I hadn't seen the link:mydomain search query in a while.

First of all, I woulnd't bother with that search--it's not anywhere close to accurate and it doens't indicate anything that's very useful to you.  Links to your site from other domain may well be counting for or against you and you should start with the opensiteexplorer.org tool to get a better idea of you back links.  However, that tool my not even show you all of them-especially if they are on really low quality pages on really low quality domains.  You may also check majesticseo.com and ahrefs.com as alternative sources.

If you do have a bunch of unnatural back links, now might be a good time to start working to get them removed.

Algorithmically, there could be a benefit to having a link open a new browser window in that by leaving your page open while a visitor follows a link to another page, it may positively influence engagement signals (time on page, for example) google may use for ranking (as far as I know though, there's no data on that, though).

Here's what's been said by a few others:

Hubspot**: **If you're linking to an outside site, you want to give credit to them and drive traffic their way, but not at the expense of your own time-on-site. Opening a link in a new browser window, as opposed to the window they are currently in (your website!) makes it less likely that a user will permanently abandon your website for the one you linked to.

Anne Smarty:  There is the fundamental law of the Internet ethics that says that you let the visitor decide how he wants to open the links.

Michael Martinez: Open External Links in the Same Browser Tab or Window....There can be few Website behaviors that are more user-unfriendly than this.

Vitaly Friedman: Should Links Open New Windows? No, they shouldn't

Ruban

Guest posting on blogs can be worthwhile if done with the proper knowledge, time and research--meaning that it is not a shortcut  to building good links.  Yes there are sites like myblogguest that work to broker the introduction of writers and publisher and it is possible to use them to "build links" but believe me, the SEO knowledge, time, and research that you're going to have to put in to it is more than what you're thinking it's going to be.

The reason for that is the technique is so overrun with low quality content being offered and accepted by low quality sites that finding a gem and knowing that you've found one takes a lot of digging and a good amount of knowledge to understand what makes a good guest post opportunity.

If you're just starting out on your blog and on your SEO knowledge and you move full speed into the guest posting strategy, you're likely going to populate your back link profile with low quality quality links and not really be aware of it.  Currently, you've got about 14 domains linking to your site and a fair percentage of those already aren't of substantial quality. A few guest posts probably aren't going to hurt you but unless you can choose the best opportunities, they're not likely to help much, either.

Rand did an interesting post on his blog hypothesizing If the first 500 links that point to your site aren’t authentically earned, you’re screwed that's worth a read--and the comments.

Another good one is Eric Enge's interview with Matt Cutts goes which touches on the issue of guest posts: http://www.stonetemple.com/link-building-is-not-illegal-or-bad/

SSaltman,

If you're speaking specifically populating the keyword meta tag, you don't have to worry about it.

http://www.seomoz.org/q/meta-keywords-should-we-use-them-or-not

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/keywords-meta-tag-in-web-search/

I'll tell you, I have to wonder why a company with such a major problem is requesting that a "newbie" fix it for them. Nothing against you, Ramon, but my first thought is that they're hoping to get someone to spend a bunch of time on it for cheap, which could have been what got them in trouble in the first place.

If they're coming to you for advice and they know you're new to SEO, be up front with them and say your best  advise is that they move all the content (minus any low quality outbound links) to a new domain and start over. I wouldn't even redirect the old site to the new one.  Unless they're going to pay you well for all the time your going to take learning everything you need to learn to make a serious effort at solving a difficult problem such as this, cut to the chase and see what they say.

If they go for  that, then you can spend your time fixing the problems you know you can fix and help them build a better link profile.  That's my two cents.

You've got a few issues with this client:

1. They are telling you how to do SEO. If I felt I had to defend what should be put in the description tag, I'd leave a client in a heartbeat. I mean, what are they hiring an SEO for?  Why not just dictate their wished to their web designer and save a few bucks?

2. They are telling you to do the wrong things.  Almost 4 years ago, Matt Cutt let us know that Google doesn't use the meta keyword tag any longer (except, now for Google News) and Bing uses it to help identify spammers (like your client?).

3. 50 cities?  Why stop there?  Why not drop in all 50 states--and each of their major cities? If they don't all fit in the description, you could put them up in the title tag! The client doesn't understand algorithmic search or the value of your guidance and that make for an uncomfortable work relationship.

If the client wants to serve fifty cities, they should first begin to engage customers in fifty cities.  The client shouldn't count on Google to introduce him/her to those markets. The client introduces himself/herself there, begins engaging clients with content through social channels and then Google reflects that engagement that in their search results.

If the client actually has offices with physical addresses that can recieve mail in those 50 cities and phone numbers that can answer a phone call in those 50 cities then the client needs to invest in local search marketing to assist with their visibility in the local results.

Sorry about that.

While setting rock-solid client expectations may be difficult for the experienced SEO and  the rookie alike, a client coming to you at just 45 days into a project looks like the expectations were more far more on the loosey-goosey side than anything close to solid. That tends to be a rookie mistake.

Also, someone holding out promise that the client is going to get any ROI whatsoever from "submitting to free directories, social bookmarking sites and also writing and submitting articles to free article websites. Since I only use free and non-paid websites" and then asking his peers to back him up on that could be seen as a rookie mistake--either that or the mistake of someone who has been away from the practice of SEO for a good many years.

Jonathan,

An asset is an unspecified or undefined something of value.  Stock may be an asset, a house may bean asset, real estate may be an asset, good looks may be an asset.  On the other hand, an infographic is something that is well-defined.  You know that they are something that is graphical in nature, is used on a webpage, may have SEO value, delivers a message or information, is of value (if it is helping to bring in more traffic or is spreading a brand message).

So, a (good) infographic may be an asset but an asset may be any of a wide number of things someone considers valuable.

To line your new site up with the existing baseline of the old site, I'd be looking more at your stats than at the keyword tool.  Go to your analytics and look to see which keywords were bringing you in the most traffic for each landing page and focus on those.

Hi,

Rogerbot does adhere to your robots.txt file as mentioned here under the section heading How come rogerbot isn’t crawling all of my pages?

Rexjoec,

It is considered duplicate content and the same holds true for www and non-www.  You can 301 forward the non-www to www and use rel=canonical to avoid the duplicate content issue with between http and https.

Words only provide relevance to the search term, they don't provide authority or trust. Generally, removing errors ensures  that relevance is recognized by Google and that the authority and trust from external sources can be spread correctly to pages on the domain.

It may be time to regroup and develop a greater understanding of authority and trust, as applied to links and as applied to social networking and engagement.

I recommend starting with Moz's Beginner's Guide to SEO. I think that will help you get a grip on the when and why of the tools.

Any drops in traffic during those times?  How many times has it disappeared? If you made substantial changes to the pages that were showing up in the results (content, navigation, programming), that could possibly cause such a thing.

The two get aggregated or the most restrictive gets used so in this case, you'd get

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/03/using-robots-meta-tag.html

Lawrence,

The short answer is they can help but don't build a strategy around them.

Here are few things worth reading on it.

• Are You Wasting Budget With Online Press Release Distribution?
• Google's Matt Cutts Says Press Releases Don't Haave SEO Value, Or Do They?
• The Test Using a Press Release to Make Matt Cutts Blog Rand For A Bogus Keyword

Steve, As long as no other resources are are linking to your images, you could use the noimageindex directive as such:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/79892?hl=en

Quality content is good but it's not enough by itself.  Here's the "formula":

• Define and understand the wants and needs of the target audience(s). (marketing)
• Research and interact with your audience(s) and learn what blogs and social profiles influence them. (social media)
• Research and establish relationships with audience influencers to understand their goals   (PR)
• Create content that achieves the goals of the influencers and that the audience will consume, endorse and share. (content creation)
• Implement authorship and understand what makes a link valuable (SEO)
• Reach out to influencers to publish your content

Rinse and repeat.

Changing your IP address shouldn't really do anything to your search results as long as your're staying with the same host and you're not moving onto an IP address that's plagued with spam sites.

Here are a couple of otherthreads dealing with that:

http://moz.com/community/q/how-much-will-changing-ip-addresses-impact-seo

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/google_webmaster_help-indexing/P5z_Oc-XUiI

Mag,

It seems that functionality is still in the works, or on the drawing table, or being looked into, or at least has been asked about many times, but is not yet available.

I believe at this time, your best bet is to 1. Submit a feature request 2. Recreate the campaign in your new account.