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If you feel i am wasting my  time  putting articles on free sites then please do tell me Yes.  If they sites where anybody can post any article then, yes, you are wasting your time. However, if you are a fantastic knitter (plus a fantastic writer) and the most authoritative and picky websites about knitting will post one of your articles - and even pay you for it.  Then you are not wasting your time... but even in that situation I would not be giving my articles away. ....but, that's just me talking and 85% or more of the people out there will be giving you different advice.  So, the answer to this question is not how many people are saying something, the answer really is what strategy should you should be listening to.

thank you for this.

One additional note Diane. I am confident your web server itself is working properly and the issue is the site optimization. I performed a test of loading your site on the Alerta link I provided in the initial reply and most locations load your site in 10+ seconds. When I repeat the same test with your robots.txt URL (http://www.in2town.co.uk/robots.txt) the maximum load time is HongKong which is less then 1 second. Your site does not have a 404 page so I used the emptiest page I could find for an additional test (http://www.in2town.co.uk/Discount-Shopping). That page's worst loading time in the US and UK was still under 6 seconds. While that's not good, it is much better then your home page loading time. This again indicates your issues are related to optimization of your site.

Hi Diane, any news on this? if this helped them please mark this as answered

Yes, wise.  Go for it.

Hi Diane. As I understand it, your site is currently focused on the UK and you have a .co.uk domain. You have acquired the .com domain and wish your site to address an international audience. My suggestion would be to make the change as follows: migrate your existing site to the .com domain. Either the default domain will be UK English, or you would create a folder for the UK.Your new URLs would look like www.intown.com/uk, www.intown.com/es, www.intown.com/fr. Each of these directories would represent a targeted country for which you have localized content. ensure your content for each area is truly localized. First, be sure to use the right dialect of the language. For example, Spanish for Spain is not the same as Spanish for Mexico, There is a significant difference. Next, be sure to use the right monetary units and systems of measurements for the chosen country. Also use the proper meta language tag. Each of these actions is designed to clearly inform your users and Google the content is directed for a specific country. using Google WMT set your geographic target for each country. For example, the /es section would be for Spain. Assuming you performed the other steps correctly this step shouldn't be necessary, but I recommend it because it is easy to do and helps ensure the site is properly directed in case other steps are missed you can use geo-targeting but I suggest only using it on your home page. Offer images of the flags of various countries to allow visitors to select their preferred country. Place this images in a prominent position at the top of your site. while you are working on this migration, keep the new site blocked with robots.txt. Once the new site is up and running, you will need to make the switch. Place a 301 redirect from the old .co.uk domain to the new .com domain. Ensure the 301 is working properly and then (very important) remove the robots.txt block of the .com site. The .com site will now be your new site. It will take about 30 days for the site URLs to be updated in Google SERPs. As a final step, any time you migrate your site you want to ensure all links under your control, both internal and external, point to the new URL. Any signatures, social pages, etc. should all be updated. There will be a minor loss of link juice due to the move which should be easily offset by the new traffic you will receive once you target other countries. As you earn links from the new countries, be sure to obtain them on that country's page rather then the root home page. For example, links from France should ideally go to your /fr home page or one of the French internal pages. Congratulations on obtaining the .com and good luck.

This is EXACTLY why I see your work as such an invaluable part of the SEOmoz Q&A Keri. You rock!

Hey Mate, Ranking in other NON usa search engines is generally easier yes even google because they are not in need of as much spam control (us stupid americans at work). My suggestion is just build quality links and provide valuable content on the site and your rankings will go up. What term are you trying to rank for if I may ask?

Hi Diane. The Head Metrics site offers A/B Testing. I'll go ahead and explain how A/B Testing works, and I apologize if you already know this information. First let me share this is generally a good tool which webmasters can use to improve their site. It is designed to duplicate a page of your site and allow you to make a modification to that page such as change colors, an image, move content or blocks around, etc. Next, you determine what makes a visit successful on your site. In other words, what is the goal you are trying to achieve? Some examples are to have a visitor fill out a form or add a product to the shopping cart. Once you have decided upon your layout change and the conversion goal, the final step is to begin testing. Roughly half the visitors to your site would see Page A (the original page) while the other half would see Page B (the altered page). You can then determine which page converts better. Based on the results, you can either decide to permanently implement the changes, or to try something else. It is a very effective means of testing. Could this software be used to scrape a page from your site? I am sure it could, but there are an infinite number of scraping tools and this would not be the most efficient method.

Thanks for that. I have just altered the page now and will see how it goes and then alter more of the page at the end of this week

This morning google has visited my site. Many thanks for everyone's help. I know it was a huge gamble re-doing my site but i thought in the long run it would be worth it

Run Forrest Run!

Hi no there is only me who deals with the site. I have put copyright notice on the site but i will read about authorship accorss the site.

ok cheers

What about using the allintext: query, so that your keywords appear in the text of the page? More information at http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators.html#allintext

great thanks, will have a look now

Thanks for that. This guy is very slippery and it is bad news that he is allowed to get away with stuff. Our legal team have said that because we have no proper proof  of him attacking our site although they and we know what he is doing, we cannot take him to court. We are trying to see if we can take him to court for false alligations to our hosting company because he gave his name to them. But with other companies he has been using different names. This is costing us thousands of pounds and it seems we are getting no nearer to stopping him or sorting it out. We had to change the content on our site because he was copying it and then passing it on as his own and sending it to people who have sites that represent him, so our rankings dropped and while the legal team were sorting it out we took the choice to re write a lot of the content. There needs to be more guidelines in place to stop all this, but there is some good news as the guy who is trying to off load franchises is getting a bad reputation. We got into a forum that is just meant for his franchisee people and we got in by just registering and found he was calling our company and making recommendations on how to stop us from getting customers and when our legal team made him aware of this, he went mad and said it was wrong of us to be on his forum and he quickly put a lock on it. It would be nice if this was an honest world

thank you for that.

My first suggestion would be to review the installation instructions. It sounds like a step was missed. If the issue remains, try contacting the extension's author via their support forums: http://anything-digital.com/forum/developer/sh404sef/ If you try both steps and still cannot see the control panel, you can e-mail me information for your site and I can take a look: ryan@vitopian.com

there is an article site that i came across and i was going to put an article on it but stopped myself because i did not understand the trackbacks. it allows you to put the article on the site and then at the bottom is ask you if you would like to put a track back, i did not understand what it was asking me so i did not write the article. Should i have let it blank or should i have put the site down that i want to promote