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Google is pretty clear on hidden text:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66353

In practice, it's pretty common to "organize" text using CSS or Javascript in a way that sometimes hides it from the user.

In your case, since your intention is not to deceive search engines, but to enhance user experience, one option would be to include the "read more" via javascript, and then include the same text in a <no script="">tag.</no>

Keep in mind, Google will read this as html text on the page, and often in the same position as you place it on the page. So if you place several paragraphs of text in a no script tag towards the top of the page... ask yourself is this is how you want Google to view your homepage.

As long as you follow Google's guidelines, and are careful to make your text accessible, you should be fine.

Hi Marco,

I took a look at your page at http://www.beautifulpuglia.com/it/linea-costiera/isole-tremiti.html

Looks like you've got the canonical in place okay here. The next step is to add the canonical on every page that is a duplicate of this page. And you want to make sure to point to the right page. Let me be clear: Every page that is a duplicate of this page should have the same canonical. In this case:

  <link rel=”canonical” href=[”http://www.beautifulpuglia.com/it/gargano/isole-tremiti.html”/](view-source:http://www.beautifulpuglia.com/linea-costiera/%E2%80%9Dhttp://www.beautifulpuglia.com/it/gargano/isole-tremiti.html%E2%80%9D/)>

You can find the other pages you need to add this tag to in your SEOmoz report. In each duplicated content report, it will list the number of other pages that are duplicates. Simply click on the number to see the URLs.

I'm not a Joomla expert, but webmasters I've talked to have expressed that other platforms such as Wordpress and Drupal are much more accommodating of these types of fixes. There are some various plugin modules you can use, but you'll have to select one appropriate to your configuration.

Here's a good resource from Dr. Pete: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world

Hope this helps. Best of luck.

Both have metrics have merits. But because DA is consistent across your entire site, and is higher correlated with higher rankings, if I had to work on choosing one metric, I would choose DA.

That said, DA is only a predictive metrics, that is useful when prospecting for links and some other activities. I wouldn't build an SEO strategy around it. Instead, if you focus on getting a good variety of links from authoritative sources, your DA and other metrics will take care of themselves.

Great Video from Rand here:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/which-link-metrics-should-i-use-part-1-of-2-whiteboard-friday

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/which-link-metrics-should-i-use-part-2-of-2-whiteboard-friday

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

Hi Dan,

Sorry to hear you got hit by Penguin. Because Penguin is an algorithmic action, you often won't receive any messages in Google Webmaster Tools, unlike when they place a manual penalty on your site. But it's not uncommon to receive both a Penguin slap and an unnatural link warning.

Ok, deep breath.

1. First things first, you need to take a deep hard look at your backlink profile to see where you stand, if clean-up is worth the effort, or if you should start over.

If you engaged in questionable link building practices, you need to asses if you have any links worth saving? Do you have any editorial (non robot generated) links that you didn't pay for and/or didn't control the anchor text?

You probably know the answer, but for more complex cases a couple of resources that might help:

A. Manual Review - In the end, you're own eye is the best tool you have. You want to look for:

• links with keyword-rich, optimized anchor text
• Comment Signature and Forum Signature links (these are different from the more legitimate forum links)
• Sitewide links, such as in the sidebar or footer
• Obviously paid, or suspicious looking links on low-quality sites

Our friend Paddy Moogan wrote a great guide on how to do this step by step. You should check it out.

B. Link Detox - http://www.linkdetox.com/ For $40 dollars it will analyze your backlinks (be sure to upload them from Google Webmaster tools) and give you a full analysis of what links they think are bad.

Most of the links I'm seeing for your site are similar to this: http://www.computer-desk-furniture.net/date/2012/06/  which would be considered a low quality link.

2. You may decide to try to get the links removed, which to be honest can be a long, arduous process.

Even if you didn't get a link notice, you can file a reconsideration request to see if they will verify a penalty. Sometimes this will get you more information then you had before. In any case, it might be well worth it to do a complete link audit and cleanup, and even go through the disavow process if necessary.

in addition to removing suspicious links, I'd continue to build good, high value links as well. If you need inspiration, here's a good place to start: http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies

Hope this helps clear things up! Best of luck with your SEO.

As others have mentioned, the best solution would be to place a robots "NOINDEX" tag in the section of the page.

Some other resources that may help you to understand duplicate content and what to do about it:

http://moz.com/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world

http://moz.com/blog/duplicate-content-block-redirect-or-canonical

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

Hi Jeremy,

You're in luck, because a guy named Mark Collier just did a study on the matter. He found that exact match .net domains had a much lower correlation to higher rankings.

.net exact match = 0.08 Correlation
.com exact match = 0.18 Correlation

The full study can be found here: http://www.theopenalgorithm.com/correlation-data/domain-name-seo/

In the latest SEOmoz study, the correlation for exact match .com domains was .22 and previously .38, which indicate that the power of overall power of exact match domains in general is diminishing.

http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#metrics

It's worth reading both of these studies in whole. It's also worth noting that there are likely several reasons for .net exact match to rank lower. #1 being that .net domains tend to be spammier, less established domains.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

Hi YGF,

Congratulations on launching your new site. As others have mentioned in this thread, MozRank is a predictive popularity "score" that comes from Linkscape, the SEOmoz link index of the Internet.

The short answer to your question is: in order to get MozRank, make sure you earn good, high-authority links to your site. Linkscape generally finds most important links on the web in 30-60 days, but sometimes it can take longer. This is especially the case if the links are buried beneath layers of navigation or not well linked to.

Just so you know, MozRank is a predictive metric based on, and similar to PageRank. Earning MozRank in itself will not help your site to rank, but there is a correlation between sites with high MozRank and ranking potential. The highest correlation with ranking potential is actually Domain Authority.

Regardless, keep working to build high quality links to your site, and they should show up in Linkscape soon. As soon as they are in Linkscape, new MozRank calculations are automatically made for your site.

The next update is scheduled for April 10th. You can find the update calendar here.

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

There's no right answer to this, but here's my take.

The links seem perfectly fine, and natural, to me. They don't contain overly-optimized anchor text. In fact, most link to you with URL anchors, which are generally considered safe.

Even if the links had more precise anchor text, it's usually not a problem unless there is a pattern of unnatural links. If you haven't already, I highly suggest reading this post from Rand:

Dear Google, Links from YouMoz Don't Violate Your Quality Guidelines

Including the first comment, from Marie Haynes, where she pretty successfully defines an "unnatural" link:

• -Intent to manipulate the Google search results
• -Whether it is part of a large pattern of similar links

Regardless, hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

I'm biased towards a flattened architecture with fewer directories. I think it can help with click-through and makes more sense from an organizational point of view.

To be fair, with the exception of #4, I've seen real-world examples of all of these that rank and perform very well.

If this were a vote, I'd vote for #2. Consider how Yelp organizes their URLs using the following example listing for a dentist in Seattle.

http://www.yelp.com/biz/randall-broom-dds-seattle

The above example is actually a hybrid, because the /biz directory is actually a category, but so is "seattle" which is appended to the end of the URL.

Whatever you choose, make sure it's consistent and follow a logical navigation and linking structure, so that both search engines and users understand where they are at all times.

Hi Salehwelli,

Unfortunately, it sounds like your web designer may not be the best person to help you with your site. It's nice when web designers understand SEO and proper techniques, but this isn't always the case.

It's hard to tell how serious these problems are without looking at your site. The fact is, if you can't take care of these yourself, you probably want to find someone who can. It sounds like you're overwhelmed at this point, which is understandable. So your 2 possible actions are these:

1. Hire someone who understands SEO
2. Begin learning what these errors mean

I would say #2 is by far the most rewarding choice.

In most cases, SEO requires only a minimum knowledge of HTML and web structure to get started. So learning some basic HTML might be a good place for you to start.

Tackle each error one at a time. Research the web to discover how each applies to your site, and dig deep to find what is causing it. The community here is tremendously supportive, and the web, and SEOmoz is a great resource.

I'd start by reading everything in the Learn SEO section of SEOmoz. Also, it's a little old, but the Beginner's Checklist for Learning SEO is a great place to start.

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

If you don't have the authority to access IIS, then your options are indeed limited.

But, it may not matter. If it's the homepage root, your homepage may get all the credit for the link equity (including pagerank) instead of the individual file.

For example, depending on how people link to you, the authority may actually life on example.com instead of example.com/index.htm.

If it were me, I'd likely place both a meta refresh and a canonical tag in the .htm file

You may want to add a 10 second delay to the meta refresh, with a message to the user that they are being redirected (you can Google how to do this). This will help prevent Google from interpreting the meta refresh as a sneaky redirect.

Not a perfect solution, but perhaps the best under the circumstances!

Hi Gary,

Good question. Could be a couple of things going on. Let me address each in turn.

1. Duplicate content and the Irish version of your site. Could be an issue if you're duplicating content, even with the hreflang tags. Google also recommends to use canonical tags on international versions in addition to hreflang tags if the the content is duplicated.

Good discussion here:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.fr/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html

and here:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/115984868678744352358/posts/9zA3a96XahN

2. Fresh content. In general, fresh content will help your rankings. But there are a couple of things to look out for when updating your content.

• If the content changes significantly from the original, Google may interpret as contextually different, and alter it's ranking score.
• Same for title tags and other on-page factors. If these change too much from the original, Google may do a "reset" on the page, which basically says "this is an entirely new subject, so you have to earn your rankings again.
• Internal links. Sometimes our content ranks from the power of internal text links, and we can inadvertently change these when updating content. In the absence of strong external link signals, this effect can be strong.

If you kept your content, subject matter and internal links fairly consistent, there may be other factors at work, such as an algorythm update or the aforementioned dupe content issue.

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

Yep! Exactly. Each root domain can link to your page/site multiple times, from multiple pages, and these are all included in the report.

I'm not aware of this ever being a ranking factor. There are more than a few high-profile sites that use the noarchive tag, generally because their content changes quickly.

Google even gives instructions how to use it, so it's likely okay.

That said, we should consider adding this to our list of ranking factors

Hi Rhys,

Taking a look at your site, your links all seemed natural and within reason. ( I did think the homepage was a little light on content - mostly just navigation and quick links to products. But that's another conversation.

"Best practice" is to consolidate your non-important links into a format that makes sense and is human friendly. Rand wrote a post about footer links awhile ago that still works today:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/footer-link-optimization-for-search-engines-user-experience

I wrote about this in another Q&A thread a short time back.

Today, you don't hear much about PageRank sculpting. Most SEOs don't bother with it, partly because of it's decreased effectiveness, but also in part because there are more effective ways of controlling the influence of links.

...Link "equity" or PageRank, (or MozRank), is only one small factor in the overall value of a link. Anchor text, position on the page, and a host of other factors all influence how much influence any given link can wield. Here's a good introduction on the subject (again from Rand)

If you "no-follow" your important contact pages (about us, etc) Google may have trouble finding and crawling those pages. Because these are both valuable pieces of content and trust signals for your site, this probably isn't the outcome you want.

To summarize: Adding nofollow in your case doesn't make sense. It really only makes sense in a very few cases, and isn't as effective in controlling ranking signals as many people would like to believe.

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

Hi Lynn,

Great question! This can definitely be confusing, but fortunately there is an easy explanation.

The metrics in the competitive analysis of your PRO campaign refer to Root domain metrics - this means the totality of all links pointing to your entire root domain.

On the other hand, when you type a URL into Open Site Explorer, the first metrics it shows you are URL specific metrics - meaning it only shows you links going to that specific page.

To find your 22k number, hit the "Compare Link Metrics" tab and scroll towards the bottom where it lists Root domain metrics. These numbers should jive with what you're seeing in the competitive analysis, and more closely reflect what you see in Google's Webmaster Tools (although Google Webmaster and OSE don't always agree, as they tend to report different numbers)

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

Hi John,

Question: When you say WMT reports 421 instances of "pharmacy" - where do they report this? In your inbound anchor text, content keywords, or somewhere else?

Also, does Google report any malware on your site? I couldn't tell from the question.

Regardless, if you're unsure about any lingering hack, I'd use a tool like Securi to do a site check. If you're site is indeed clean, I wouldn't worry too much about the latent data in Webmaster Tools. But if you're site was infected for a long time, you can try filing a reconsideration request which might prompt a set of human Google eyeballs on the site. If you site is clean, you can also perform a "crawl as google" and submit all linked pages to the index.

Hope this helps! Best of luck.

Hi there,

Without knowing more about your site, it's hard to say exactly what the best practice is for your situation, but obviously you want to build relevant links to topic specific pages.

It's possible, if your main pages are optimized in a way that aren't providing any benefit, that you could try freshen the content on those pages to more accurately reflect the keywords you're trying to rank for.

Really, out of the two options you proposed - building new pages or updating the old pages to take advantage of the existing link equity/authority - it's really a toss up. More important is going to be the quality of links that you build to those pages.

As long as you're building new links, my preference would be to create new content. This

• preserves your old content (assuming it's relevant)
• gives your domain greater link diversity among a higher number of URLs (deep linking)
• give you a more options in the future if you ever have to "cut" spammy links

Either way, as long as your building new content and creating new, good links, you should be fine.

Keyword density today is somewhat of a myth. If it is natural, then Google is very forgiving of keyword stuffing, and they have pretty good algorithms to determine what is natural or not.

With that in mind, the SEOmoz On page tools should be considered more of a guide than an absolute rule.

I could go on, but these two videos say it better than I could:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/advanced-onpage-optimization-whiteboard-friday

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-new-onpage-optimization-whiteboard-friday