Welcome to the Q&A Forum

HI Ketlad,

I'm not 100% sure on your model, but it seems pretty much like a Huffington Post, which is take others content and regurgitate it? If so Egol has a point to a degree which is, you're dealing with big names and little control over what content is generated. If Hulu or Youtube post a video sure you may have a page for it, but if somebody is already at their site why would they go to yours to watch it?

I understand there are a crap ton of video sites, most of which I personally would never visit unless they had something nobody else had and I was pointed to the site by another person. That said, it should provide some insight as to what you can do. Try to understand why people go to these types of sites and what you can do to fill those desires. Additionally getting the word out about your site can be done by visiting forums and blogs and posting (not spamming) links to videos that may interest the community you are engaging with. Granted 3k to post links on a forums and blogs per month sounds like a lot but if your assistant uses the correct approach it could certainly bring traffic.

If you have the resources, skills and knowledge to understand why people use X site, and you can fulfill those desires and even make it better then you could do really well. You may have to take things to the next level, maybe a virtual museum that a person can design, and take people on tours of their favorite videos.. I know few sites are doing this with Pictures now, surely videos would be better. Anything you can do to put some power in the users hands give them control over what they see how they see it, and what they can do with it, would be a plus.

That is just my thoughts I hope it helps.

Apple could being doing it, to make other webmasters try it.

Apple is Apple I mean they could probably pass on most of the little stuff that so many people obsess over. They could be running a nefarious plot to make other sites follow bad seo practices thus diluting those sites rankings. Who knows, but it would be hard to hurt their selves with little things.

Hi Mark,

My understanding is having Nofollow links will dilute the juice this passed to the dofollow links.

You can read more on that on from Rand.. here

I will veer off a little from what Mark said in that having the navigation in the footer as well as the top header area, maybe okay if the site warrants it. Most all cases I would follow Mark's advice, but in a case where the navigation in the bottom can be perceived has "helpful" to the user, then it would be okay to use it there as well.

In the end you can't always do everything that is considered "Good SEO Practices" simply because it helps your SEO, you must also follow good site design and useability practices. If having the navigation in the footer helps the user, and is aesthetically pleasing then I would say it is okay. The real trick of course is to merge Good SEO with both aesthetics and useability.

Hope that helps,

Don

That was a very good question, and I had to respond to this so I can reference the responses later. I know we use Thomasnet, and I have for years thought they were extremely overpriced. Very astute observation.

Also your question was phrased as in the Domain, and you asked about the URL. I actually gave advice based on the URL.

The domain is a little more important then the URL since the Search engine would look at it and say wow a whole site dedicated to apples. Again, it would be impossible to target much more then 1 or 2 keywords in a domain name so you don't have much control over it. If you look at the big companies, their Domain name is also their brand name. Pepsi, eBay, PayPal, Amazon, Zappos, Microsoft.. in these examples the domain name (accept Pepsi) doesn't really denote any type of service or product.

A keyword in the URL is somewhat important, but not enough I don't think, to completely change a structure to accommodate it. If you're building a new page, and you know ahead of time the page is about apples, then of course you should name the page apples.html(or whatever).

This logic is, how I think the search engines treat a url, if the keyword is in the url then the page is likely but not necessarily about that subject. So they will give some credence to the keyword if found in a URL. The thing is you can't put every keyword that relates to your page in the URL and I believe Search Engines know this.

In short, it does help, but I wouldn't move the world to accommodate it. If you're making a new page certainly name it appropriately, if you have a page that is preforming horribly then sure change it, but don't spend your days worrying about about a well established URL.

HI Melvin,

In general Iframes aren't good from an SEO perspective.

There are some other similar questions about this in Roger's Belly

http://www.seomoz.org/pages/search_results?q=Iframes

We had a very similar issue. To solve it I did just as Elias suggested, I created  a case statement in php and then generated as much unique / specific to selection content as possible.

As much content that you can change while still being relevant to the person's click.. I would.

HI csblev,

Forum links / blog links are very important. For 2 reasons.

A. They typically are text anchor links like... you should try "Open Site Explorer". This gives Search Engines text to relate to the page based on what other people think is important about your page.

Compared to a link directory which usually is just your company name or url linked to your home page.. little value for any specific keywords except your company name which you probably have locked up anyway.

B. Secondly on forums / blogs that relate to your industry is where you want to be for direct customer purposes.

I've given this advice before, but I'll do it again.

Personally, if you have the time I would invest it in your business appropriate forums  and blogs. Find where your potential customers interact with each other, go to their forum and "engage" the community. Offer them free advice, answer questions and in general share your knowledge. By proving yourself helpful and when it is appropriate you can drop a link to a product page or an article on your site. The biggest caveat I can say is don't run around hitting up forums and spamming them, every forum that you want to be on has some sort of moderator that will remove your post. And personally if I'm on a community site and I see a blatant spam post, not only will I not click it, I will make a mental note to never go there.

I don't know what industry you're in, but if your site is much better and a leading authority then these types of forums should be picking up on you on their own. And your users / customers should already be generating some of these links for you, if not.. you need to ask yourself why not?. Sometimes forums need a push so it certainly doesn't' hurt to follow my advice above, but you may need to focus some attention on what you can do to make people want to link to you, rather then going out and doing it yourself.

Hi Martin,

I had the same question last month. A couple of the regulars were kind enough to give some advice, which was do nothing with them if you already have a site targeting those keywords.

You can read my question and those responses here, if you like.

I hope it helps.

I think what maybe getting overlooked is the fact that Google will or can separate words in a url. I have no official proof of that except if you go to Google and type something like "Bike Shop" the words "bike" and "shop" will be bolded in domains that contain the characters bikeshop.

This if nothing else suggest that Google can at least bold 2 words they are being treated as 1 word.  Maybe Matt Cutts couldn't say this directly since it hints at something in Google's algorithm. Giving  non-descriptive advice like "if it is well indexed I'd leave it alone" is better then saying don't worry we are breaking domains apart alphabetically to ascertain words.

It almost seems trivial to worry about something like that when there are so many other things that can be done SEO'wise. I've been on both sides of the fence and have taken solace in the words of Matt Cutts if it is already well indexed leave it alone, if it is a new page or one that is preforming crappy then use / change to dashes.

Hi Logan,

I was faced with the similar question a couple years ago when I started with my current company.

The short answer is no, do not change a url that is currently using underscores to hyphens if it is well indexed.

If you're making a new page, then you should probably use hyphens instead of underscores.

Matt Cutts (Google) Hypen vs Underscore

Matt Cutts (Google) YouTube Video

Hi Dan,

I have seen this question a few times, and Matt Cutts even took a stab at answering it.

I'll cut to the quick and then give you a link if you want to follow up about the information I am providing. The notion of 100 links per page started years back when Google and other Search Engines didn't have the ability / power to follow all the links, they instead just suggested, to ensure sites get proper attention limit yourself to about 100 links per page. Nowadays search engines can follow kabillion links, but keep in mind the more links a page has the less juice each one is worth. So the rule while not set in stone still seems to apply.

The truth is having more then 100 links is okay.. but be aware of the above information.

Ref: Seo Moz Post

Ref: Matt Cutts (Google)

Hope that helps

Yep, this I agree with this. 98% of the directories I see on the web are a waste of space and actually offer no value to a person looking for something. At one time they at least gave value to a business as a backlink. There are a few exceptions in each demographic as some directories actually have real content and good information along with their listings. Efunda / EngTips / IndustrialLinks to name a few in my demographic.

If you're just looking for a jumping off point, then those directories are worth some time, but I would agree with Keith that the value of such directories are at the very least waning.

Personally, if you have the time I would invest it in your business appropriate forums  and blogs. Find where your potential customers interact with each other, go to their forum and "engage" the community. Offer them free advice, answer questions and in general share your knowledge. By proving yourself helpful and when it is appropriate you can drop a link to a product page or an article on your site. The biggest caveat I can say is don't run around hitting up forums and spamming them, every forum that you want to be on has some sort of moderator that will remove your post. And personally if I'm on a community site and I see a blatant spam post, not only will I not click it, I will make a mental note to never go there.

I don't to derail your post getting into Dmoz.org specifics since its covered so many other times here and well.. just about everywhere on the web. I will say of the 10+ sites I've been part of submitting to them, so far 75% of them are approved, the longest one taking about 1 year.

If you haven't check it out yet SeoMoz.org has a very good listing of directorys / sites to get on if at all possible and or appropriate for your demographics.

http://www.seomoz.org/directories

**if you want to see the next page, you click a crawlable link that goes to **

**mysite.com/main-category12-24 **

**The site does not offer a view all function. **

Would applying the rel canonical tag be appropriate in this instance, or do I have to let Google crawl and index each page independantly?

In this example you actually are talking about 2 different pages and in which case it can be appropriate to use the rel canonical.

Example take a look at a popular plateform like Oscommerce.

The Index.php page generates the following pages

• index.php
• category pages
• sub category pages

These are referenced by the software by the cPath (category Path) and would look much like this

• index.php
• index.php&cPath=1
• index.php&cPath=1_5

To a search engine these are all unique pages. Additionally, since many e-commerce platforms follow this type of module but also have ways to make the pages more SEO friendly you can in some cases access the same page via different URL's which is of course bad, due to duplicate content. In these case a rel canonical is very appropriate.

For example Oscommerce has a SEO friendly URL modification which turns the unspecific URL like index.php&cPath=1 into something like electronics.html However unless some sort of redirect is used you can actually access this page via either URL.

To simplify the answer the rel canonical tag is most appropriate for pages that generate dynamic URL's but content changes very little. In my examples above the pages are very different index.php and a index.php&cPath=1 page, however there can be times when you have interactions on those pages which would create a new url like say adding a product to the cart or a product selection filter, or any score of interactions that may change the url from index.php&cPath=1 to index.php&cPath=1&addToCart1&Product_ID=414&return in this case rel canonical would be very much appropriate as the page is not really changing you're just executing an action.

Never heard of any of them you mentioned. The most valuable would be Dmoz.org, though I think its "value" maybe waning, and its not a guarantee for any site.

Got you ranked at 7 here.. dayton ohio, usa

I noticed 1 site that had the keywords in their domain name, another that has been around for 20 years, and hud.gov.

additionally my domain authority tool told me that you were the lowest of all listed.. While you have a crap ton of in links.. are they all "good links"?

Attached is a screen shot of what I noticed

whyranklow.jpg

http://tools.seobook .com/firefox/rank-checker/ (Intentially put a space in there)

RankChecker will report back to rank 200.

See:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/iframes-seo

Short answer it won't do much good.