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I'll throw my recommendations in for videos:  One  of the most successful video series ever was the "Will It Blend" series: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_It_Blend%3F (You know a video campaign has gone viral when it has it's own Wikipedia page that documents it.) Hope this helps... Jeff

It's not ideal to have such a massive .htaccess file that it slows down your page load time significantly.  But if you have a lot of inbound links to pass that matter, you'll likely want to keep your SEO value intact and use 301 redirects to handle this properly. My $0.02: Test! Do a page load test with the .htaccess file off / removed, and then do another one where it is on and live.  If there's no significant time difference, you should be okay. We have sites with hundreds or even thousands of lines in the .htaccess file and they run pretty quickly. That said, here's why 404 pages aren't ideal to serve: According to Rand Fishkin's Moz blog writeup, Are 404 Pages Always Bad for SEO? http://moz.com/blog/are-404-pages-always-bad-for-seo "When faced with 404s, my thinking is that unless the page: A) Receives important links to it from external sources (Google Webmaster Tools is great for this) B) Is receiving a substantive quantity of visitor traffic and/or C) Has an obvious URL that visitors/links intended to reach It's OK to let it 404." According to Moz's Redirection SEO Best Practice: http://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection ... you want to use a 301 redirect to indicate that the content has moved permanently. Finally, here's a post that describes how to create a more SEO friendly migration, here's a great info graphic: http://moz.com/blog/achieving-an-seo-friendly-domain-migration-the-infographic Hope this helps! Thanks, -- Jeff

Close... you still have them all grouped into 1 event though. You need to remove the [itemscopeitemtype="http://schema.org/Event"] from the and move it to the level (and repeat for each )

Good call Lesley!

Thanks for the question. Just to add to what the other guys have said, here is a helpful article from Google which explains a bit more about their stance on 404s. In general, you should try to 301 redirect 404 errors to other pages if it makes sense for the user. For example, if a 404 page is an article about belgian beers, you could redirect that to another article about belgian beers so that the user lands on a relevant page. You should definitely try to avoid mass redirecting links to your homepage because Google can treat these as 404s - there is a video here on the topic: http://www.davidsottimano.com/internal-301-homepage-treated-404-google/ If a page 404s and can't be redirected to a relevant page, then it's best to leave it as a 404 and let Google keep crawling it. I also agree with the other guys on creating a custom 404 page which will provide a good user experience if they happen to land on it.

It is not required considering what I see in your site. I think your site is good enough on that front. If you were way above 100-150 in the number of links, it would be something to worry about. As is, it is fine. K

I've used various directory sites such as Zvents with no problems. If you can, try to use a different description on the event site than you do on your own site, this will keep your site from running into duplicate content issues, as well as help the content on the event sites get indexed. Including links is somewhat risky in the post-Penguin world. You should be fine as long as you don't overdo it, but sites like Zvents will syndicate their event listings to dozens of other sites, so you can quickly end up with a bunch of links pointing to your site. If you're worried about Penguin, using the URL as a link is a pretty safe approach. Just don't be spammy about it and go submitting those links to hundreds of sites, they probably don't carry much link value anyway.

If Google would just give us the API of their algorithm, we could have our tools use those factors in the comparison and we'd all have so much more information!

Because they are not correct would be the simple answer. Look at all the red warnings that you are getting from the inspector. It seems that you have errors in your offer, the reviews, and date published. Also you are missing a required field "name" which will cause them not to show.

Both suggestions from Ron and ReferralCandy are good ones. Have a dedicated landing page, promote on all of your owned channels like newsletters and social media profiles, and do your best to promote through your writing onsite and offsite. Beyond that I recommend that you look into paid social channels like LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. You can get reasonable CPCs and highly targeted audience demo/psychographics like job title, region, etc. Very handy if you only want to target CMOs or CIOs, for example.

I just looked at my organic traffic since 2009 (ugh, not the trend you like to see). The biggest drop was in April 2011 (Panda 2.0 (#2)) There was a small drop but immediate recovery in December 2011 (Panda 3.1 (#9)) Another drop in June 2012 (Penquin 1.1 (#2)) Another drop in September 2012 (Don't really know - Panda updates 3.9.1 and 3.9.2) It's been steady/slowly increasing since then. The comment (and other) spam links are in the hundreds or thousands (By my best estimation) What do you think? Obviously, I need more good and less bad, but do you have any advice on what/where to focus?

Nothing can physically remove them but the webmasters that own those websites, so: 1. You need to craft a well organized pitch email that doesn't offend the webmaster, and asks them politely to remove the link. Bank on this taking at least 3 total emails, and in many cases, you might get no response. PM me and I can send you a script or two that has been effective for us. 2. No too can remove those links for you externally. Hope this helps!

Many people complained by the Penguin algorithm effects (myself included). It seems to have attacked Overoptimization of sites, especially with those with the Anchor Text. I have several clients that have a decent link profile but engaged with overoptimization of anchor text and found the rankings tanked almost sitewide. I found this posts very helpful to overturned some Penguin attacks last year: Google Penguin AntiSpam. It also could be some technical bad redirect, but i highly doubt it. The link profile seems pretty clean in hindsight. Was it sitewide dropped, or only in some pages? Regards,

Here is a great article from Miriam Ellis who is one of the moderators on SEOmoz http://www.solaswebdesign.net/wordpress/?p=1403 It will explain a lot of the strategies that Karl has mentioned here in depth. Good response Karl.

Could be an issue with Panda. Could not be. Hard to tell. If the article was published on the authority BEFORE the others you should be ok. Just think of news aggregation websites like Yahoo News and look at how they do it work. Publishing the same article in multiple locations isn't really best practice - whatever that means.

Agreed. usertesting.com is a fantastic value.  I would try only 5 tests to get started and see if it is for you.  The last comment was true.  Sometimes it is frustrating when you watch the video seeing a user not able to find that call to action.  But the fact is, the user is in charge not the designer.  Regardless how you feel about users to your site, they pay the bills and THEY ARE RIGHT.  You have to exercise a bit of humility as a designer.  WELL worth it. I understand they are coming out with a way to test your actual customers with a permission based pop-up where they can earn a coupon for testing. The tests give you great ideas for A/B testing later.  (that's another great tool on google analytics. Good Luck

Phew, that's quite a relief. Well okay, time to get back to work and stop freaking out. Thanks Ian!

Have you verified your site in Bing's webmaster tools and looked to see if there are any messages in there for you?

anchor text will never die as long as Google uses links as a major ranking factor in their algorithm. Think extremely varied long tail anchor texts.

The product page is http://www.cleanedison.com/courses/bpi-building-analyst and the homepage is http://www.cleanedison.com/ I wouldn't say the homepage is "going" for the same keywords as the product page. But like I said, the keywords "BPI Certification" and "BPI training" are the 2nd and 3rd (although distant) anchor texts for the homepage.