Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Also, Google Webmaster Tools will allow you to see exactly what links and anchor text Google is picking up for your new domain.

For the first time since signing up for a professional SEOmoz account, I didn’t take the opportunity to post a private question to the SEOmoz staff this month.  This was for no reason other than me being unable to think of anything that was both relevant and easily answerable.

Realising that I'd wasted the opportunity to pick the brains of some of the finest minds in the industry got me wondering how other people used their monthly questions and what kind of questions elicited particularly good responses.

I realise that questions such as ‘tell me everything I need to do to this site to make it #1’ are clearly not going to be privately and comprehensively covered under the terms of a $99 a month membership.  In the same breath however I also don’t want to be stuck asking questions which can easily be asked to the wider forum such as ‘Do I want to use a domain or subdomain for this?’

Purely in the interest of getting the most out of a SEOmoz subscription, I was wondering what was the deepest, most intricate or open ended SEO question you guys have asked and gained a particularly useful response from.  What styles of question have you asked which have resulted in the feeling that the $99 monthly fee was worth it just for that one answer?

As long as the site is relevant and isn't spammy then I wouldn't worry too much about the PageRank; even if the link does you no good it certainly won't do you any harm.

To be honest, reciprocal linking is dead now so I wouldn't recommend obtaining links from any directories that require you to link back to them. Not only does Google consider reciprocal linking to be worthless anyway but you could potentially land yourself in hot water when the directory invariably gets devalued by Google and you’re actively linking to them.

Links pages used to be all the rage back in the late 1990’s but I don’t think they have their place anymore.

Hope this helps.

Hi,
I'll keep this really short and sweet... I'm just intrigued more than anything.

With the exception of user testing has anybody ever had a good experience with Fiverr? Obviously I'm not  contemplating SEO services for $5 but I'm just curious as to whether anybody has found any services that were genuinely useful in a day to day capacity?

Since Google seem to be placing a real emphasis on ranking websites based on the quality of the content, I would be tempted to consider article spinning as a bad thing.

Even if Google didn't penalise you immediately for it I doubt you'd be adding to the end user experience and so ultimately it could potentially bite you in the backside.  A focus on creating high quality, unique content is always going to be white hat.

I believe there is indeed talk of Google factoring in nofollow links from reputable sources (Wikipedia for example) however I'm almost certain that blog comments won't be included within this.

Hi there,

Are you able to temporarily disable the 'Who we are' sidebar widget and confirm that the content of the page reappears without scrolling? Troubleshooting could then be targeted specifically towards this widget.

Of course, if my hunch is wrong and it's not the sidebar widget just disable and re-enable widgets one by one until you find the culprit  

Good luck!

I think the question specifically related to whether the company that was being written about should link to the article in question.  The logic behind the question was that if they do this then a reciprocal linking arrangement has essentially been established.

I would suggest that trying to get as many people to link to the article as possible would be a good strategy but not to link to the article from the domain that is being written about.  Just my two cents, mind.

Cheers all for your feedback.

Umar, please don't worry, I wouldn't touch links or traffic generated by the likes of Fiverr with a ten foot barge pole! 

I'm yet to try this out for myself however 'Office Hours' in Google+ hangouts seems to be one of the most direct routes to talk to a member of the Google Webmaster Central team:

https://sites.google.com/site/webmasterhelpforum/en/office-hours

Any feedback on whether you found this resource helpful or not would be appreciated as I keep meaning to give Office Hours a go but haven't yet got around to it.

There are quite a few easy to follow guides on how to move a Wordpress installation online; one such example is http://blog.triphp.com/how-to/how-to-move-wordpress-to-a-new-server-or-host.html

Once done then just 301 redirect all old pages from the subdomain to the new subfolder.

We recently moved a Wordpress installation from a subdomain to a subfolder (albeit it was on the same server) and it went without a hitch - typically speaking, Wordpress is a simple beast to move.

Yeah, the author in particular looks as spammy as a well known Monty Python sketch.

Thanks for your help.

Just recently we discovered a nice way was to run a competition and then mention that you'll be announcing the winners on Twitter, Facebook and Google+.  The competition isn't over yet but I'm hopeful that most the followers that we've accumulated will stick around if we state that first notification of any future competitions will be done via our social networking profiles.

I don't think the prize necessarily has to be elaborate, just enough to get some engagement.

Hi, 
I'll keep this one short and sweet!

We've noticed just recently that a number of competitors are bidding on our company name, clearly with the intention of being listed above our organic result. I'm certain that Google used to allow us to bid on our own company name for a negligible amount but now it looks like we're going to have to chase £1 odd per click to  obtain customers who are actively searching for us.

Can anything be done about this or is it now nature of the beast that we're going to have to have a price war on bidding on our own company name?

Thanks for your help!

Chris

I posted this on the duplicate thread that seems to be running but thought I'd post it here as well  

To be honest, reciprocal linking is dead now so I wouldn't recommend obtaining links from any directories that require you to link back to them. Not only does Google consider reciprocal linking to be worthless anyway but you could potentially land yourself in hot water when the directory invariably gets devalued by Google and you’re actively linking to them.

Links pages used to be all the rage back in the late 1990’s but I don’t think they have their place anymore.

Hope this helps.

We've just installed the server side script 'XML Sitemaps' on our eCommerce site.

The script gives us the option of (easily) creating an image sitemap but I'm debating whether there is any reason for us to do so. We sell printer cartridges and so all the images will be pretty dry (brand name printer cartridge in front of a box being a favourite). I can't see any potential customers to search for an image as a route in to the site and Google appears to be picking up our images on it's own accord so wonder if we'll just be crawling the site and submitting this information for no real reason.

From a quality perspective would Google give us any kind of kudos for providing an Image Sitemap? Would it potentially increase their crawl frequency or, indeed, reduce the load on our servers as they wouldn't have to crawl for all the images themselves?
I can't stress how little of a hardship it will be to create one of these automatically daily but am wondering if, like Meta Keywords, there is any benefit to doing so?

Everything is fine here however that happened with us a couple of weeks ago.

I left it a day and when I came back all was well again  

Hi all,

Our category Meta Title Tags are a little woeful and so I'm in the process of rewriting them.

Let's say you have a product for sale.... some inkjet cartridges for a Canon BJ10V printer for example. In an effort to keep things concise I was thinking that for this category I should have the meta title set simply as:

'Canon BJ10V Inkjet Cartridges' and perhaps our company name after this text (and a pipe delimiter)

This takes us just under 50 characters which is ideal but doesn't include any real keyword variation and will result in the company name being duplicated at the tail of the title tag on 6,000 odd pages.

A large number of my competitors have title tags along the lines of:

'Canon BJ10V Cheap Inkjet Cartridges for Canon BJ-10V Ink Printers'

I understand the reasoning behind this but does the variation of keywords compensate for the fact that the title looks spammy (to both humans and Search Engines).

What would you do? Keep it clean and concise or stuff the title full of keywords. In the event of the former would you include the company name in each title in the knowledge they would be well under 50 characters without?

Thanks for your help.

If you have a way of getting a link from Wikipedia, even if it takes some effort then I would definitely take it.

Even if we assume Google completely ignores the nofollow and we take SEO out of the equation entirely then it could be worth it for the potential visitors you could get as a direct result of the link.