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I'd highly recommend the campaign manager with SEOMoz. It takes a few days to crawl everything, but you can very easily identify some low hanging fruit really quickly.

It makes you look really good!

It will direct the link juice from the redirected URL to your page, as long as you use a 301 (permanently moved) redirect. This will pass 90-99% of link juice from the linking URL.

To squeeze out everything you can get (pardon the pun) ideally you want a direct link, but a redirect will pass most of your juice along in the case you would have to get people to change hundreds / thousands of links.

Ditto - I sell on Amazon too, but use my own site to sell as well. Amazon opens up a whole new market that I wouldn't otherwise have, so I deal with their fees, but you have to have multiple distribution points.

Going back to what i said earlier. Be sure you read all of the terms and conditions of using their Webstore. I love Amazon, but they have tricky lawyers just like anyone else

Very cool. I'll check this out. Definitely can use some presentation skills!

I agree with all of this.

However on top of just educating them about the value of SEO, I want at least some of them to know the ins and outs, such as how changing the Title of a page can completely change your rank in the SERPs (had an old boss that changed nearly every Title tag on our website in the CMS not knowing what it was that just killed our rankings.

I do think that showing them the value of SEO might help them start thinking about how SEO plays into things before making decisions however.

Thanks for the suggestion.

Use open site explorer to find all of the incoming links to your site. It's one of my favorite tools of the SEOMoz toolbox

You'll have to set the filter to Show "All" links from "External Pages Only" to "All Pages on the Root Domain"

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/

You can export a report or just go through page by page and identify the URLs in question.

Hoping someone can answer these questions. We've got some AJAX coding on our site too and I'm concerned it's going to cause a lot of indexing problems.

The obvious answer is to see if you can find another way to build your site where it will be viewable, but often times (and in my case too) that isn't possible from a development standpoint.

You don't have control over the domain, so you're not going to be able to do any domain pointing. You'll inherit the juice from the links you get from that subdomain only, but you're not going to get anything from the main tumblr domain. You're also not going to capitalize on all of the incoming links to your blog if you host it on tumblr, since it's not actually on your site.

You'd be far better off hosting your blog in a subfolder on your own domian. This way you have total control over it and your domain gets all of the link juice when someone links to one of your articles. It will also count as a hit to your website, not tumblr.

I could go on with other reasons, but I don't want to go too far out of the scope of your question.

I highly doubt search engines offer any kind of favoritism based on your host. If so, it would be an extremely small factor.

Where you would see an indirect benefit is with your user experience. Using a trusted, tried, and true checkout provider with a proven excellent level of user experience like Amazon will have inherent SEO benefits such as returning visitors, higher engagement, cross selling with your other items, higher revenue, etc.

Since you're using it on your domain you're not going to inherit any of their domain authority.

The drawbacks in my eyes would be the lack of complete customization and ownership that you have over the webstore. It's your stuff, but it's Amazon's service. You are bound by their rules. I'm not familiar enough with the platform to know if they have any SEO functionality built into the webstore such as custom URL rewriting and canonicalization tools, but I would imagine you are going to be limited to doing some of this type of advanced SEO stuff if you cannot access the web controls.

If anyone knows a definitive answer to this please chime in.

It looks ilke your developers are setting up canonicals too. I didn't go too far into your site, but I would recommend doing an SEO audit to make sure things like redirects, canonicalizations, robots, and following / nofollowing are being handled properly on other pages of your site as well.

And I agree - Good catch Steven. Source code FTW.

Thanks guys for the replies. We're still in the process of setting up all of our web tracking as well. Like I said there are only a few younger generation folks here with the capabilities and understanding of web technologies to be effective at things like this. My plan is to develop those talents within all of us.

As far as everyone else goes - we've even got some late Gen X and dare I say it - baby boomers - developing content for the web. It's pretty scary the things they put out sometimes. From an SEO standpoint, I'm definitely finding that I really have to deeply explain things. I've even on a number of occasions had to explain what the acronym SEO itself means - yikes!

I suppose there is a good side to this situation because we are currently building a new site. They brought me on about 6 months too late in my opinion, and there is a lot of catching up to do, but even since I've been here I have fixed many SEO nightmares we were heading towards, and am finding more all the time. It's going to be night and day to what it was before.

Good suggestion about educating people - whoever said that. I think I am going to try to convince HR to let me hold basic SEO classes for those folks involved in web development and marketing. I could never in a million years teach them everything they need to know, but I think I can at least get it in their minds enough that they can at least be thinking about how SEO factors into things they do before they do them.

Any additional thoughts and comments are appreciated!

Hey Mozzers,

I'm currently faced with a situation that I believe is probably quite common in the SEO industry. I'd like to get the input of the SEOMoz community to see how others have handled this situation and how I can use that to help my company and of course myself in this process

Here's the dealio.

I recently obtained a position at a fairly large company ($500 million annually) with the task of being our Lead SEO, which I am loving, but am finding one thing to be a big hurdle to our success.

Essentially no one here has any pre-existing knowledge about what SEO and inbound marketing are. There are a few younger folks who understand some of it, and a few of those who I work with on a daily basis are starting to get it, but I fear that many of the folks on our webteam and even higher up do not understand the value of SEO, the implications of certain things the webteam does to our website, and moreso the value of me being here as the sole SEO expert.

I'm wondering if anyone else out there has been in a similar situation and how I might be able to effectively instill a culture of SEO within my company to get people to think about SEO before they do things.

My first goal is to ensure people think about SEO before making changes to our site. My second goal is for them to see the power of proper SEO, thus proving how valuable I am to the company.

Thoughts anyone?

Does anyone else have anything to add to this? I figured it wasn't a big deal. Just wanted to check. Am I missing anything before we go ahead and implement this feature into our site?

On a short term basis, I suppose it's possible if your site is down while your domain propogates to the new host, but on a long term basis this shouldn't be an issue, especially if your site performance is improved due to the change.

If your new host is known to have poor performance or is at risk of frequent outages it could negatively affect your SEO. Page load times do factor into your rankings.

Did your friend give you any kind of specific reasoning why he/she believes that changing your webhost will negatively affect your SEO?

The question to ask even if a slight drop in rankings may occur is - Why are you thinking about changing hosts in the first place, and will the small chance of a potential drop in rankings trump your reasoning for switching hosts?

I don't think you have anything to worry about, but if you do, think of the long term positive effects, not the short term (potential) negative effects.

Hey guys,

We're in the middle of designing our core navigation for our new site, which will feature a blog. I want to make sure the blog is linked to from the main navigation to pass all of the link juice to it, but since it isn't the core feature of the site we want people to view, I don't want it to take attention away from other things.

Due to this I am thinking about giving it a main navigation link that opens in a new window. It would still be reachable from every page on the site, but it would allow users to view the blog in a new window rather than leaving the main site.

The blog will still be on the same domain in a domain.com/blog subfolder.

My question is... is this good practice? Will this pass the necessary link juice from our root domain to our blog, or will opening it in a new window detract from the value of the link?

Any other comments / issues with designing the navigation like this that I'm not thinking of would be appreciated!

Thanks

Tried a couple of times and these pages aren't loading for me in a couple of different browsers. Not sure if you've changed something since the posting of this question, but if you're still subscribed to this thread you may want to look into this.

As someone said already I would just like to reinforce that rel=canonical only has to be used on the target page, however since these pages you're referencing aren't exactly the same you DON'T want to use a 301 redirect. Your rel=canonical tag will simply signal the search engines to pass all ranking to your main page, which is actually a better implementation than using 301, albeit it won't make a huge difference on a small scale.

If this is a Wordpress blog, which I can't really tell if it is or not since the pages aren't loading, you may want to try the WP canonical plugin. It will semi-automate all of your canonical tags so you're not having to modify code all the time.

Keep in mind here that just because you use a 301 redirect to point to your new page you won't lose the opportunity for your new page to rank. A 301 redirect will pass 95% of the link juice from the redirected page, which is great. Your new page will most likely rank once it starts getting links to it through people finding it through the old redirect and your site getting re-crawled.

301s are a great tool to keep in your SEO utility belt. Don't rely on them, but always use them when you need to move something.

If we look at a site like a human would, which is what search engines are evolving to do, then always matching exactly your Title and H1 tags is going to be pretty silly in my opinion.

Good practice is to use a few targeted keywords in the Title tag that describe your page well and the content within up to 70 characters. Of course not all pages will use the full 70 characters. That might cause stuffing penalties.

For H1 you might match some of what you list in the Title, but not exactly. You're going to have commas, pipe characters, other kinds of descriptions, brands, etc. Matching all of this would be crazy and would make a site appear very spammy.

Since the search engines are striving to be more and more human every day a good long term strategy is to build sites for humans first, and search engines a close second.

We'll be using IIS, but I suppose it works the same way. It's my hope to get this done with one small change and not have to update an entire database of thousands of pages.

Can that not be done?

Makes sense.

Let me make sure I understand.

So, basically on that parameter page in the I need to have my programmers code the rel=canonical to pass in the URL of the page in the form of "www.exampledomain.com/productpage" - and that will take care of pointing all of the duplicate content generated by those query strings back to each individual product page, and will also ensure each product page is still indexed with its full SEO value?