Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I'm helping out on a site (www.treadmillreviewguru.com) which formerly had rich snippets appearing in Google. They use hCard markup. All of the markup is visible on the page. The search preview in Google's rich snippets testing tool show a picture, a rating and all that.

However, nothing is appearing in search results. Here is an example page: http://www.treadmillreviewguru.com/nordictrack-treadmill-reviews/nordictrack-commercial-1750-treadmill-reviews-ratings/

This page ranks in the top ten (for me, global results) when I search [nordictrack commercial 1750 treadmill review].

Does anyone know why Google would display the rich snippets a few weeks ago and then not display any at all?

Thanks, I put the link code in the bio and emailed Jen. I'll wait a while and check my youmoz stuff next week and see if I got it right this time

I am doing the http:// and including the full URL. Should I add the link code? I didn't realize that was an HTML editor.

And treadmill review guru is my friend who asked for help with his site. As far as I know it's just him, but if that changes I will adjust the signature accordingly

I've done several Youmoz posts and only recently noticed for some reason that other authors have included author links and links to their websites in their bio section at the end.

I edited mine with a full URL but it only shows up as text. No editor there when you edit your profile so no way of adding a link. Anyone know how this is done?

Finding relevant article directories is very easy. Simply go to Google and search your keyword + articles. For example, if your niche is widgets, search widget articles in Google and see what comes up.

What you will find are generally sites that contain articles related to your niche. Google obviously values these sites if they are ranking them so highly.

You will usually find a bunch of sites that don't accept just any author and that's fine. Some you will find you can apply or register to become an author. There you can produce an article to be published.

Just some tips though, always include internal links in your article. So few article directories do this and that's why articles get dinged. Find some relevant articles on the domain to link to. Also, link out externally to more than just your website. That makes for a good article with natural links, one of them being to you.

I wouldn't spend too much time on this, but if you could find a relevant article site each week and get a decent article posted on it, that's pretty good.

I'm guessing the T in tw could be term, text, title, time or trust. Those are common t words in SEO.

The W could be whois, whitehat, wordpress, wall, web, widget.

Just trying to get some ideas out there.

At SMX during the You&A with Matt Cutts, Danny asked why the algo update was called Penguin. Matt said:

"We thought the codename actually might give too much info about how it works so the lead engineer got to choose."

Last night Google released their 39 updates for the month of May. Among them was this:

"Improvements to Penguin. [launch codename "twref2", project codename "Page Quality"] This month we rolled out a couple minor tweaks to improve signals and refresh the data used by the penguin algorithm."

Whoa, codename twref2 for Penguin improvement? Is this giving us an insight about how it works? I would guess the ref2 means second refresh perhaps. But tw I am not sure about.

What do you think? Is there a hidden insight here?

Hey mozzers, I'm trying a post-penguin experiment with a brand new website. New domain, separate hosting from all my other stuff, all that. It is run on an article script that allows new authors to make articles and post them.

It is all health related and there are no other topics. I'm trying to see if a brand new site can get something to rank quickly with no SEO being done. No links of any kind, just social media sharing of articles. Authors can put links in their articles to anywhere they want, so if you want to help your health site out with a link, go for it.

I'm looking for any writers who want to join us in this experiment. i figure if we get a lot of content on there, all original, no spun, natural links, we can do well. if so, I'm abandoning all penguin hit domains and starting over. And you all can get some links out of it. I've already got me and my employees, so the more the merrier.

Just let me know if interested.

I am not looking for a full service SEO agency. I just want link building. Not paid links, not link networks, not blog comments, not bookmarks...real, legit, decent links.

Does anyone have any experience working with an SEO agency that helped them develop their link profile positively and at a reasonable price? I'm willing to pay for the service, I just want to work with someone who won't buy links or send a bunch of spam our way.

If anyone has worked with such an agency, please let me know so I can contact them for more info. Thanks!

I believe Google has two options for site search which you can see here: http://support.google.com/customsearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=72326

I believe the free version is called CSE which you can find here: http://www.google.com/cse/

If you are set on leaving Google there are a few alternatives like:

http://www.atomz.com/

http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/

http://www.beyondink.com/beyondsitesearch.php

Usually free depending on size of your site. Hopefully that helps.

The best way to avoid duplicate content issues is to write unique content. If you are going to quote a website, fine, use the code you have indicated above and I would be sure to drop a regular<a href="" link="" to="" the="" source="" as="" well.<="" p=""></a>

<a href="" link="" to="" the="" source="" as="" well.<="" p="">But why stop there? If you can add one block of text taken from another site, can't you add another block of text, only make it original and unique? I find it odd how people get so hung up on how Google will treat their duplicate content and it is so worrisome to them. Best solution is to write more content so that what you have isn't 100% duplicate.</a>

I just did the search and it is your junior cricket bats page that is ranking and it is coming up at #13 in Google. Same page is #2 in Bing for the same search. Whatever was going on was likely not a real issue but a test being conducted by Google. This happens from time to time and you see incredibly odd things in the SERP's and their index, but they typically last 24 hours or less. I can't see any indication that anything is off here any longer.

You are thinking of Facebook widgets, you can find them here: http://www.facebook.com/badges/

This allows you to post content from Facebook to other sites, so what you are looking for should be there.

Joshua,

In your section you have some errors and so cleaning them up will get your code valid. Here is what you have:

At the end of each of these meta and link elements you need the closing / which is not there. So instead of ending them all with > you end them all with /> instead. That will fix a lot.

Also, you have this in your head section which doesn't belong:

Just delete it. You can't have a div in the head section. You also have a

That's just it, their web developer has all sorts of problems. I had to set up their wild card redirect because he had no idea how. Now I'm having to figure out how to install this tracking stuff because he has no idea. Would be a lot easier if they had a web developer that knew web development

A site I help someone with in link building was recently redesigned. I do not have access to the site in any way. Well, after the redesign, no conversions were tracking in Adwords and Analytics ecommerce tracking showed no transactions and no amounts.

I found the Analytics code and sent it to their programmer. I have linked the Adwords and Analytics accounts. So now conversions are tracked in Adwords and transactions are tracked in Analytics.

However, amounts have vanished and not returned. I'm not technically savvy enough to figure this out. How do I get this Analytics code to track transaction amounts so that they appear in Adwords and in Analytics ecommerce tracking?

Couple little things you want to take care of that should fix a lot of what is going on. Any element in the section that opens with at the end of it. Your itemprop things for example are not closed properly, so that makes the validator think things that follow it are incorrect.

Also, I may be wrong here, but I believe the

Like I said I saw this once before and I asked their SEO guy how it got there and he told me they used Google Sitesearch. If there is more to it than that then he didn't tell me and I've never tried to get it myself.

I have seen this before and it was due to the website employing Google Sitesearch. Basically instead of using the default search function on your website platform you install Google's own Sitesearch product. Then your sitesearch will appear in search results.

Info on sitesearch here: http://www.google.com/sitesearch/

Are any of these domains indexed? Do any of them have links to them? If they are neither indexed nor have any links, then redirecting them will do nothing as search engines don't know they exist anyway. The only value for you is with direct traffic. When people misspell your domain if you have all those possible misspellings redirect to you then they end up on your site no matter what. You also prevent competitors from taking something very close to your domain name and pretending to be you.

The only time this can have an effect is if you buy domains. If you go out and buy domains that are indexed with links to them and then 301 redirect all of them to your website then this is what is referred to as doorway pages. You are essentially buying pagerank. Google no like.

I have had success with a domain like mythings.com and buying mything.com and redirecting it and getting a good bump. But it was only one domain and it was very similar. If you go out and buy expired domains or high PR domains and redirect them all you can have trouble. But in your case, just redirecting a bunch of domains that are essentially invisible to search engines won't have any positive or negative effects.