Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Dealing with your points in order

This website is dead? - Not if you look into the stats over the increased number of people signing up for the Pro service.

SEO is dead? - I must hear that at least once a fortnight but have been hearing it for 4 years and its still here, I'm getting paid by a global company to work in-house on their sites as well as working freelance for local businesses and have got results via SEO so can't agree with you on this one.

If you only have one keyword in the top 50 then you probably haven't done everything possible. Could it be that you don't really know what you are doing so your results aren't matching expectations? Sorry if that seems harsh but signing up to SEO Moz pro doesn't make you an instant expert.

Regarding the new Q&A system - I like it, I can still ask a private question to one of the experts or I can put a question out there for the collective minds of a few SEO's to provide answers. Often in SEO there is more than one way and more than one answer so its interesting to get a range of opinions. I also get to help others with their SEO issues which is something I enjoy doing.

It sounds like you are annoyed as you spent ages writing 500 articles and got nowhere and haven't realised that this probably isn't the best strategy. You say you have spent thousands of dollars but for that you could have employed a decent SEO consultant to help you.

You sound annoyed that Rand is making lots of money....sounds like jealousy to me. If he is then well done to him. He and his colleagues provide lots of interesting actionable insight that have helped a number of SEO's help their clients. Should they give both this and the software aware for free?

If even one person is swayed by your rant I will be surprised especially when they see that you call yourself BigJohnson.

Hi Dunamis

In my role as an in-house SEO I have found that the Diagnostic tool is great as it updates me to any change in the number of issues with a site which can be an indicator of a problem or that someone is making amendements to the site but not taking account of best practices (for example adding a number of pages with no meta description, duplicate title tags etc) even though they have been explained what the best practices are.

In terms of link building it not only allows me to examine and monitor the links to ths sites I look after (using Open site explorer) but also their competitors where I can get ideas on the type of links etc that the site I am looking after should be going after (and which ones they shouldn't). Other link tools allow me to find sites that link to multiple competitors of my site but not my site. This is a good way of finding places where the site or business should perhaps be mentioned not just where it should receive a link from.

The keyword analysis and keyword difficulty tools are useful for seeing how SEOMoz rates your efforts for a particular page and also finding out how difficult the challenge to be number 1 is going to be for your selected keyphrases.

The Q&A also has some excellent responders including people like Alan Bleiweiss who has been supplying some very detailed, actionable and helpful responses. If required there is also the option of sending a question to the SEOMoz guys and their associates in private (one a month) if there is a question that you want answered a little more discreetly.

There is access to past and future Pro Webinars from people like Rand and some of the recent ones of these have had some excellent and actionable content.There is also a discount on certain conferences including around $600 off the upcoming MozCon

As an in-house SEO my resource is unfortunately limited but the tools here save me a lot of what I call donkey work, in terms of saved time the tools pay for themselves. There are a number of other tools that I haven't really used but the benefits listed above mean that even if my company didn't pay for the Pro membership then I would fund it out of my own pocket.Hopefully I should be able to put across a strong enough case to my head of department to ensure that I don't have to!

Hi Claudia

Your home page has both domain and page authority and has thousands of links to it.

The job scheduling page doesn't have any page authority and has no links to it as far as I can tell.

The job scheduling page has a URL of www.uc4.com/what-we-do/business-automation/job-scheduling.html where www.uc4.com/job-scheduling.html or www.uc4.com/products/job-scheduling.html would be more search engine friendly.

Just to let you know it took the homepage 150 seconds and the job scheduling page 180 seconds to load up. Please note that is seconds not milliseconds and even then the site didn't load up properly.

Cons:

May lose some of the link juice from the 301 redirect from the old URL's (between 1 and 10% is the usual quoted figure)

Initial (usually short term) drop in rankings and potentially traffic of weaker site pages

www.weakersite.com is a "nicer" looking URL for offline marketing than www.strongersite.com/weakersite

Pro's:-

If on Subfolder rather than sub directory pages will benefit from domain authority and links to domain of stronger site.

Can focus future link building and on-page SEO efforts on one site rather than 2, potentially doubling the amount you can get done

If building from scratch and choice of 2 sites or 1 I would say go for one. As two already exist there is more of a call to be made.

Hi Atul

If users are searching on a term, for example Amy Winehouse the results prior to her death would have probably been Youtube videos, Lyrics, her official site (if she has one) etc

Immediately after her death users will be wanting to find out what happened, the latest update. As such the CTR for the existing SERP would probably be lower as the user doesn't want the Youtube video or lyrics etc. They want the QDF results to kick in and show the latest news item(s) at the top.

Hope that explains it.

I'd kindly ask them to remove it with the veiled threat of legal action.

If they decline then I would approach their webhosts, which can often be worked out from the Whois record, and ask them to remove the offending site giving them the full details.

If none of that works then perhaps you could go blackhat on them (not that I would condone that)

Yep - if you think you have a problem best to raise it with the Help team at help@seomoz.org

If the keyword being targeted is french translation services then assuming everything else on the page being equal the second option would be better as by virtue of its name it is telling the search engines that the page is about french translation services rather than french services.

SEO tools can be great to automate tasks and highlight issues by quickly checking across entire sites but they are only as good as the information input into them which may not be up to date, may be an individuals interpretation of best practices etc. As such relying 100% on the output of an SEO plugin may not give optimal results. It is worth querying, checking and keeping an eye on any recommendations provided by them to see if they feel right given your accumulating SEO knowledge.

What happens if its summer and I want to book my winter break or winter and I want to book my summer break. I would make sure that they are definitely sure they want two versions of the site before I started but if they are then there is a possible 3rd option to consider - subfolders - www.example.com/summer and www.example.com/winter

For 6 months you redirect anyone coming to the www.example.com site to the required seasonal version. Any links in will to an extent benefit the whole site rather than the one subdomain of the site.

One problem you are going to face is that if you build up links to the summer domain or folder then switch to the winter site some people may remove their link to you as it no longer points to the page that it did when they set up the link.

My preferred option would be a home page giving the option to get to navigate to both sets of content which is held in subfolders with the focus of the home page (in terms of content and design) switching when the seasons change.There would be no need for redirects, less SEO issues, better for a user who is planning ahead and means that any links achieved by either section of the site benefit the domain as a whole.

If wanted to minimise the footprint of the link to the other seasons site then like some sites that have small country selectors at the top of the screen there could be a small season selector that a user only uses when they want to view the off season site.

These are the tips I have picked up from various blogs and books...

• Use keywords in the filename and URL
• Use keywords in the link text for the file.
• Write an interesting description of the video including keywords
• Enter metadata for the file e.g title, keywords, and a description.
• Include the word 'video' in the metadata as people searching for videos will use that word
• Provide a transcript
• If hosting on a 3rd party site (e.g Youtube) provide links back to your site
• If hosting on a 3rd party site be aware of any limits on display lenghth of the title
• Allow users to rate your video
• Use a video sitemap to help search engines find your videos.
• Submit the video sitemap to Google using the Webmaster Tools

For info on video sitemaps you can go to http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=80472

Hope this helps...

Hi Eric

The guidance above means that Google when it looks to crawl your site won't its not a message to Google telling it never to come back.

Once everything is sorted, remove whichever approach you took to block the search engines and supply a sitemap to Google via the Webmaster tools. Your site should be crawled in no time after that.

Hope this helps.

I would be highly suspicous of the claims and although the sites may have some authority how much relevance will theu have to your site? The value of links is made up with that combination of relevancy and authority.

If you are strongly tempted as them to provide some examples of companies that have used it, then check the links using Open Site Explorer to see what sort of approach they are actually taking.

If Google came out today and said "site traffic, time on site and bounce rate are all going to be factors of our algorithm" then ethically-challenged individuals and companies may considering banks of users based in places with low labour costs to try to manipulate the algorithm.

It is almost certain that Google has considered this in the past but is worried that people may try and game the system. As such I would expect any ranking element related to the quality of a site to be more complex.

There are suggestions that Google is trying to get algorithms to be able to judge the aesthetic quality of a site and that this could be a factor in the future

Some clients might not want to find out that their 'SEO Expert' is on here asking questions of other SEO's...they may think they should have employed the SEO Experts answering the questions.

Also some companies may not want their competitors to find out that they are using SEO services as if their competitor then hires an SEO the amount of competitive advantage is potentially reduced.

I would use example.com, company.com./product etc to get any points across. If it looks like you can only get the help you need by revealing more details then it may be best to PM the people who offer to help.

There is a Webinar later this week titled "Using SEOmoz Tools to Acquire Whitehat Links" - it may be worth tuning in for that one. There is one later in the month on the future of link building too.

In theory I wouldn't expect it to be an issue that the same products are being sold but you may wish to ensure that the text content varies. If you look at it from Google point of view is it worth them showing all three sites if the user will only find the same information.

Not sure of the advantages that you see by this approach. Having to set up and monitor 3 sites instead of one and having potential inbound links (hugely important to SEO) split between 3 sites makes me think that you would be better off with the one site.

The meta description tag doesn't influence SERP's.

As you know search engines often use it as the description for your page in search results.As such a relevant, unique, compelling meta description can have a positive influence on how many clicks you get on your search listing.

Most customers and web site visitors are only aware of the existence of a handful of TLD's such as .com, .org, .net and country specific ones such as .co.uk if you are in the UK.

Therefore moving from a .com site to a .travel site may mean that visitors are confused. They may enter .travel.com and they may not think that www.yourcompany.travel is even a proper URL and assume a part of it is missing.

Research into the postive and negative effects of different TLD's would suggest that .com or the country specific TLD are the best option. So everything else being equal there may be an negative SEO impact of the proposed move.

You say that "i expect google to give more weight to .travel domains" but what is the basis for that expectation? You also say "I also think it is easier to remember than www.brandname.com" which is unlikely to be true.

I strongly believe the downsides are greater than the perceived benefits (a couple of which I have questioned).

Hope this helps!

Danny Dover's new book "Search Engine Optimization Secrets" has a chapter on the SEO Consulting process including preparing for the first meeting, paperwork etc that may be of use to you.

If you haven't enagaged anyone to undertake link building for you and these links have been created then it does seem suspicious.

You suggest that some of the links are going but obviously it may be worth monitoring this. As suggested below contacting the relevant sites may be worthwhile but if they are spammy sites of porn sites they may not be worried about your concerns.

I would use open site explorer to see if this has happened to any of my competitors or to see if any of them are obviously using a link building agency as this may have originated from an attempted stitch up by an overzealous rival.