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Hi Don,

I have a couple of suggestions for you. Regarding article submissions, no, it's probably not worth your time any more. Yes, guest posting would probably be way more beneficial, provided you are selective and relevant about what and where you choose to write.

Regarding social media, do you have a Google+ account? If not, establish one and then establish authorship of your Website and blog. There are numerous articles that can guide you through this process. Here's one just for reference: http://www.google.com/insidesearch/features/authorship/index.html  Learn everything you can about and start participating in Google+. Skeptical? Here's a great post that makes the case: http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/author-rank

Regarding your blog. I notice that it is a Wordpress.com blog instead of a blog built on Wordpress.org  I made the same mistake myself when I first started blogging and built a blog on Wordpress.com out of expediency. I only found out later that Wordpress.com is terrible for SEO because it is inherently limited. Last I checked you can't even install Google Analytics. If at all possible, move your blog to its own hosted domain. I'm not sure how complicated a migration from Wordpress.com to a regular Wordpress ite would be, but I can't image it's that bad. If there's an alternative to move it onto its own domain via Yahoo that might be a good possibility too.

Lastly, and this is very subjective so please take it with a grain of salt, you sound bored with your own content. If you aren't passionate about it, that lack of passion is going to come through. Perhaps it might be worth outsourcing some of the content production if it's something you don't feel a fire in your belly to do. There's just so much competition out there that if you aren't communicating passionately about your products, services or whatever it is, then it's going to be nearly impossible to persuade a complete stranger to care about it.

Those are my suggestions. I hope they help somewhat. I think some of your products are cool and quirky. I hope the holidays bring an upturn in business!

Dana

I would try posting on LinkedIn and possibly also on Inbound.org. As an advanced SEO, those are the two places I look at first when browsing for new opportunities. Hope that helps! 
Dana

Great question Ricky. I deal with this all the time. It really depends on the publication. The first thing I would do is browse around a bunch of their other articles and see if you can find an example of where they linked to a source or a source's company website. Get in contact with the writer/editor and find out if they have a policy against linking or if perhaps it was just an oversight. The print world still doesn't necessarily think "on line," so sometimes they just need to be reminded that a link can be really helpful to their readers who want to find out more about the people, places and things mentioned in the article.

Almost every time I've ever gone back to a publication and asked for a link in context, they've been more than happy to comply. I did have one hold out, that flat out said "no." The person saying no was not a writer, or an editor, but the VP of sales. I chalked it up to her just not wanting to be bothered with it, so I got on LinkedIn, found out who the online editor was, sent them a connection request (they also turned out to be the SEO). I asked them to include a link in that very same article, and Voila! We got the link.

My advice is just to be very gracious and appreciative in your tone. The fact that you have a positive mention at all is awesome. I usually say something like " We have been big fans of your publication for years [only say that if it's true!] and it was so nice of you to mention us in this recent article. We thought it might be helpful to your readers if you included a hyperlink from our name to our site, Would you be kind enough to add that? We'd love to reference your write up in our blog."....or any variation. The more genuine you are, the better off you'll be. If you can, pick up the phone and call them. They have a way harder time saying no via phone.

Hope that helps!

Dana

There's no guarantee that the turnaround time will be as fast as you would like, but have you tried submitting your updated page via "Fetch as Googlebot" in Google Webmaster Tools. Most likely, you've already tried this, but if not, I'd start there. Just make sure after you've done the "Fetch" that you click "Submit."

Other than that, we are all really at the mercy of Google's crawl bandwidth allowance so it could just be that it will take a bit more time. What is the cache date on the current Google listing?

Yes and no EGOL. Their sales tanked, but they still rank really well for some terms for which we are competing against them. I think it's only a matter of time.

I like http://www.workingperson.com  - especially like their usability. Another great one from a content perspective is http://www.bhphotovideo.com

I've seen this problem rear its ugly head in a number of instances that cause various, interesting problems. For example, there are two major Audio Video brands: Allen & Heath and K & M Stands that both feature ampersands in their branding. The problem we've had with it is from a database perspective. Ampersands just cause all kinds of problems. Still, these brands have been around a long time.

Think "M&Ms" - no one really searches "M and M" [unless it's "Eminem" ]  - So, I think it's a matter of choosing one for branding purposes and sticking to it. In your case, with a law firm, searchers are really searching proper names (I'm thinking). So if I were to search for a string of last names, I might be more likely to use "and" instead of "&" - Until the "&" becomes part of the branding, I think Google is probably going to defer to the "and" version. Even if the law firm was huge, I'm not sure it would ever reach that level of brand recognition. Some successful brands with ampersands [Just for fun!]:

H&M, A&W Rootbeer, A&P Grocers, Proctor & Gamble, B&H Photo, Bang & Olufson, AT&T, Ben&Jerry's, Arm&Hammer, Boys&Girls Clubs of America, A&M Records, Bed, Bath & Beyond, Johnson & Johnson, H&R Block, Ernst&Young, Fod&Wine, Black&Decker

(Thanks to Sporcle, but they left M&Ms off their list! How can that be?) Thanks for the fun question

I agree with Jeff's suggestion. Although, just for fun I plugged both URLs into Open Site Explorer and they are really kind of a statistical dead heat, One has one more link than the other, and the one Jeff prefers has marginally better MozRank and Moz trust, but not by much. The overall Page Authority is identical at 13. They probably both could use some love, but yes, it appears you might at the very least have a keyword cannibalization issue. I understand how this happens because it usually results from an attempt to address navigation and try to assure that visitors are finding items they want via several different paths. Frankly, duplicate content happens a lot on eCommerce sites. People often talk about "duplicate content penalties." There is no such thing. It might just cause Google to rank one page and ignore the other, or rank both pages lower because it can't tell which one is really the important one....but it isn't a penalty, per se. Still, lots of duplicate content can cause other problems (like interfere with how much of your site gets crawled on a regular basis), so it's good to address where possible. Canonical tags should do the trick in this case. Cheers,

Dana

Hi Christopher,

I hope you are well! Have you considered using IFTTT? (http://www.ifttt.com) I am thinking there may be a way to create a "recipe" that goes something like this: "If" someone mentions my company/product/brand on Twitter "Then" send me a text message. That might be a scrappy way of accomplishing it, but it might take a little maneuvering because I don't think you can use Twitter directly. If I had zero budget, but some time on my hands, I might try playing around with that. There may even be someone here in the Q & A who's already figured out how to do it.

If I had a little budget, I'd consider Email2DB. They have a 30-day free trial so it might be worth exploring:

http://www.email2db.com/

Hope that helps a little!

Dana

I too have seen this kind of change make a big difference, but sometimes it;s short term and the page sinks back down to where it was before. I think a new page title makes Google bot temporarily "curious" and it thinks "Oh I've found a new page!" Remember, bots aren't as smart as humans, so it takes them a while to catch on.

It's great that your page moved up. Watch it for a month and see what happens. If it retains its position, then maybe it's a good tactic to try on other pages

It could be that the change you made was a better "title" for the actual page. Finding better, more accurate, concise and descriptive titles that really hone in on what your page is about is always a good thing.

Hope that helps!

I agree completely with Simon. We too have attempted to syndicate content and had the sites we submitted to then outrank us with our own content. The fact is, if you submit your content to a site that has higher authority than you, chances are they will rank for the content, not you, even if you have canonical tags and authorship in place and even if you publish the content on your site first. We've seen this happen not just with content like articles, we've seen it happen with products (i.e. if we have the same products for sale on our site, Amazon and eBay, Amazon and eBay will outrank us for those same products), and we've certainly seen it with videos. Post the same video on your site and YouTube and YouTube will rank for the video, not your site.

This isn't to say nothing should ever leave your site or get posted externally. If your business or someone at your business wins an award or does something positively newsworthy, reaching out to a reporter or blog editor with a story is a great way to raise the brand awareness you seek and obtain valuable referral traffic from the exposure.

The scenario at my company is almost identical to yours. The other difficulty I face (and I'm sure you and Simon have seen this too as in-house SEOs) is one of vanity. Stakeholders can get very caught up in the number of views their videos are getting on YouTube, or the number of eyeballs an article will get if it's syndicated versus just placed on their own site. Convincing them that being the sole location of that original content is sometimes a hard sell. I think the best way to do that is to produce a couple of pieces of great content and convince them not to distribute those around, then track how well that content gets positioned in the SERPs. If you can show them some real examples of the strategy being successful on a small scale, they'll be more apt to allow you to continue down that path. Hope that's helpful!

Thanks so much Gianluca for this thoughtful and valuable advice.

Yes, page load speed is definitely something that's been a concern. This is why we went back to 24 products displayed per page instead of 50 a few months ago. However, since then we've made some significant improvements in page load times and we think we can probably go up to 100 products per page and still be fairly fast. We will have to test.

On the up side, we only have 7 categories with more than 100 products, and only 24 with more than 50. The biggest problem we have effecting speed isn't so much the images. It's the fact that the website does real-time pricing calls on every product to ou business back end every time the page loads. This may be a sticking point.

I have also thought about the canonical tag problem. Of course, it's a problem now too, but if the "View All" page just ends up getting that generic URL and no proper canonical tag...then we really are back to square one.

The possibility of no-indexing all of the categories that are related to paginated series is something that crossed my mind yesterday, so it's interesting that you mentioned that. While it would solve certain issues, wouldn't this be a problem in terms of having valuable content in Google? Granted, some of our category pages are purely there for navigation purposes, in which case, I suppose there's no harm in no-indexing them. However, with the roll-out of Hummingbird I began looking at our category pages as valuable opportunities for "topics" pages that could act as a hub for visitors searching for products or information around specific uses or brands.

Wouldn't there be a significant risk in losing valuable market share for key terms by removing so many category pages from Google's index?

If I am understanding your last suggestion you are saying to have the page default to "View All" and noindex everything else...You are right, not a great scenario, but you are also right in that this may be the only solution given management's steadfast stance on not wanting to pay to fix it.

Lot's to think about, but your comment has been extremely helpful. Thanks again!

You might also try this one recently published on the Moz blog by @CyrusShephard : http://moz.com/blog/google-plus-correlations

I have seen the same scenario in many of the e-commerce sites I have managed too. I never saw any adverse effects as far as SEO went. I think it depends on what the perceived purpose of those links is. If you are really just helping your visitors find additional content or products that are relevant to what they are looking for, I think you should be okay.

In this particular case, I don't think it's a problem.

However, I am always willing to admit that I could be wrong and am very interested to hear what others might have to say. There might be some folks here who've had completely different experiences.

Hi Chalis, I could be mistaken by I think the only way to adequately do this is to set up a new campaign under the new domain name.

Yes Marisa. I have seen both Amazon and eBay creeping into the top results for a niche product we sell that only churches buy. I am wondering if this is less Google and more a concerted effort by Amazon, eBay and Wikipedia to dominate. Let's face it, they have resources for research that we little guys don't have.

Hi Kenji, First and foremost, congrats on getting the interview!

As far as link building for a larger company, the first thing I would tell them is that you want to do a complete audit of existing inbound links, you versus competitors. From this, you will be able to identify some missed opportunities (i.e. low-hanging fruit that you could immediately harvest). You'll also be able to identify opportunities based on who's linking to competitors. For example, we had a competitor who had an inbound link from Columbia University. When I researched the link I found out it was from a professor who linked to our competitor (and several others) as a resource for his students. My company really belonged on that list. I wrote to the professor and told him that I thought we would make a good addition to his resource list and, simple as that, he added us and we got and inbound link from Columbia University.

In your interview, I would say that you will make an organized effort to be connected to the activities being performed by other departments that might result in linking opportunities. An example might be, if a department is reaching out into the community and mentoring a group of students, reaching out to them and asking when and where their work might be published online and just politely request an link back as a courtesy...They will say yes.  The same goes for charity involvement. A company of 5,000 employees without question probably does a whole lot of #RCS. Find out where they are involved in the community and look for possible linking opportunities (i.e. donor pages on charity websites).

I bet you will cover so many existing "missed" opportunities that you'll be busy for a long time chasing them all down.

I hope this helps and GOOD LUCK!

Dana

Arafah, I respectfully disagree with loss of ranking and "link juice" (I hate that term - I prefer "page authority") being a misconception. Matt Cutts himself states that 301-redirects do not pass all the value of the original link. Here's a link to Eric Enge's article/interview with the quote directly from Matt Cutts: http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2010/03/google-confirms-301-redirects-result-in-pagerank-loss.html

Hi Thomas,

I think you have a really good point. Do you know I was a member of SEOMoz for four years before I ever even realized there was a Q&A forum? Maybe I'm just unobservant, maybe it took Jennifer Lopez asking at MozCon 2012 to pique my interest, I don't know.

Once I did get involved, it took quite a bit of involvement for me to really "get" it.

I think there's an upside and a downside to what you are suggesting. On the one hand, because I kinda had to work at it, I felt like I was participating in something "special." On the other hand, I know there are a lot of people who are great SEOs who maybe aren't even aware that this great group is chugging along with great content in here (I didn't, and I'd been in the industry for 8 years).

I don't know that making the whole "point" issue clearer or more obvious would produce positive results. It might just produce a bunch of point-hungry hounds that post garbage and give thumbs up without really genuinely being involved.

Right now, I think the SEOMOz has a pretty magical thing thing going so I'm not sure if doing something different would hurt or help. Interested to hear what they  have to say. My guess is they already have something in the works.

Dana

Mozcast indicates some fairly "hot" activity (or buzz about activity) in Google's algorithm on December 10th. That doesn't mean there was an update and it doesn't mean there wasn't. Most of Google's updates aren't ever announced (They do hundreds every year). It could be that you suffered from one or the other or both, but the short of it is, you are on the right track to simply making a better site, period.

IMHO, it doesn't matter which one it was. What matters is that you are doing all the right things to making your site better. I think that's the true essence of SEO. Knowing what the algo updates are and what they address is interesting, but if you are taking care of some real SEO issues, like structured data, removing duplicate content, writing better content and earning great links and yes, important house-keeping issues like addressing your 404 errors properly, algorithms can come and go and unless you try again to take a backroad and easier path to success, you should come out just fine. #RCS will help make your site algo-proof Glad to hear you are back!

Dana