Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Jack,

Buying links to boost google rankings? Sounds bad... either if it is from a link farm or a well known web directory.

I suggest you read the official statement from Google about paid links here :
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66736

Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer.

Hi Gyi,

I have experimented that not only content can be used as link magnet but also tools. They might be harder to develop, but they are more likely to be linked.

If you write an article about something, someone can simply take all the content from your article and write a new one out of it and not link back to yours.

A tool is more likely to attract link as it is useful like educational content, but is also harder to replicate. For example, with an article about dog breeding, you could as well integrate a tool to estimate the date of birth.

Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer.

Hello fellow SEOMozzers,

For a long time I've been wondering what would give the most SEO benefits for a keyword based query between these :

1. A sitewide footer link on SiteA with keyword anchor text to SiteB homepage

2. A sitewide footer link on SiteA with brand name to SiteB homepage

3. A single link on SiteA homepage to SiteB homepage

4. An editorial page on SiteA about SiteB with links to homepage and deep pages

Did someone ever did that kind of experiments?  Is anyone having better results with one kind of link strategy?

Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer.

Hi HomeFinder,

You could export your data to CSV and then use Excel or an other spreadsheet program to put all OSE updates in a different column and then compare the colomns to see what are the new links and the vanished ones.

Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer.

Hi Paul,

When you say that you willl change "host", do you mean web hosting provider, domain name or ecommerce platform? If you meant :

Hosting provider : you shouldn't have to do any 301 redirect as all the Urls will remain the same, only the IP adress of the website will change, but this is not a big deal.

Domain name : If you have a apache server, you could create a .htaccess with single line of code that will redirect any pages or images on the old domain to the new one, without having to create a single 301 for every file.

Ecommerce platform : This one is the hardest one.  If you are to switch to a new ecommerce platform, I suggest you try to keep as much as possible the same Url structure as you had if possible as it already looks good.

Depending on the type of move you do, please specify the kind of change you will be doing so we can help you better.

Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer.

Hi Martin

Using the following tools, I can see that your website does in fact has a pagerank of 2 out of 10.

http://www.prchecker.info/
http://multipagerank.com/
http://www.g-force.ca/referencement/pagerank

But, I suggest you don't focus too much on Google Toolbar's PageRank value and instead on backlink metric tools like SeoMoz OpenSiteExplorer.

Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer.

Hi Joel,

I think those are mainly based upon internal linking so you might want to look accross the website at all the links pointing to that page and try to use consistant anchor text.

Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer.

Hi Mjmorse,

What do you mean by SEO content? Do you mean that your content is only targeted for search engine spiders?

In case your content is also targeting the actual real users that will visit your website, I suggest you avoid javascript for content in case some of them are using mobile device with limited javascript support.

Plain text content right in the HTML is always preferable over dynamicaly loaded content from JS. Using javascript is usualy a way to hide content to search engines, not the opposite.

Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer.

Hi Blaine,

If the CMS allow to modify title of the page, meta description, page content, anchor text, url structure, etc. then there nothing to worry about.

As long as you can set those as you wish and that the source code is clean and readable by search engines, then it there shouldn't be any problem.

Search engine spiders doesn't care what CMS you use, they look at the source code of the page and gather the information they need.

So, as long as the pages can be parsed by spiders and that you can modify the important stuff on it, it can be optimized.

Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer.

Hi Chris,

I would suggest that you don't remove all them overnight, you would probably be better to remove them over time.

Removing pages is something normal, I remember reading Rand saying that a high percentage of the OSE index pages were returning a 404 when trying to reach them again.

Of course, for best practice, I would also recommend you 301 redirect those pages to their new version, even if it might not be easy, it will be usefull, not only for search engines, but also for user that might have bookmarked the page.

Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer.

Hi Stephen,

If your server can't handle the SEOMoz spider, it wouldn't probably survive to all the malicious spiders out there... You should realy think into getting a new hosting account/server (or a new IT dept...).

In the "Campaign Settings" you have a "Weekly crawl completed _for campaign: _" checkbox that you could uncheck to disable the crawling of a certain campaign.

You might also want to use the "Crawl-delay:" directive into your robots.txt file, I don't know if it is supported by SEOMoz spider, but it might protect your server from other spiders.

Otherwise, like Barry Smith suggested, you should get in touch with SEOMoz team and see what they can do.  If their crawler doesn't support the "Crawl-delay:" directive, you might want to suggest them to implement it.

Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer.

Hi Upick,

You might have more trouble ranking http://www.topgifts.com.au/ because it seem to have some nice keyword stuffing in the footer... I also see some other stuff that might look suspicious to search engines on both websites.

If you should do a redirection? You shouldn't only rely on SEO to answer this question but also on your business and branding goals.

With two website, you have twice the chance to rank well, but you have twice the job to do for maintaining both website. That's up to you to chose what way you want to chose.

Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer.

Hi Supriya,

Matt Cutts just released a video about that on YouTube :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAWFv43qubI&feature=youtube_gdata

Enjoy!

Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer.

Hi Joel,

Instead of trying to fix this problem by adding even more stuff, I would try to get rid of this problem by removing stuff.

So, can you explain why the product description, the images and the add product to the cart stuff couldn't be on the same page?

By putting all these on the same page, first, the user wouldn't have to crawl 3 different pages to see everything, search engine spiders neither, all the content would be on the same page and you wouldn't have the duplicate content problem you're having now.

Is it something you think you could implement?

Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer.

Hi Freek,

Here are my thoughts :

1 : Might look like a spammy keyword stuffed url to users and search engines

2 : Short and sweet, you do lose the idea of parent/child relation, but I think it's the most clean and optimized one (as long as you keep it short)

3 : Less descriptive, but looks less keyword optimized and might help to get breadcrumbs because of the parent/child relation.

4 : Not that I can think of, you might want to try both, number 2 and 3 on a certain part of your website, track your rankings and see wich ones goes up and wich ones stays the same or decrease. Then you should be able to decide wich one is the best.

Also, don't forget to ask website's customer what they think would be the best URLs, their opinion also counts!

Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer.

Hi Bobby,

What eBay used to do when you were reaching the www.ebay.com from Québec in Canada, it used to display a lightbox saying something like : "Hey, we have a french canadian version of our website, would you like to use it? Click here" and then you would be redirected to www.cafr.ebay.ca

So, my suggestion is, instead of using a 301 redirection to redirect the user to the appropriate geotargeted portion of the website, let him chose by showing him a friendly javascript lightbox.

As web spider won't be prompted the javascript lightbox, they will be able to crawl and index both version without problem.

Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer.

Hi Jennifer,

Both tools uses spiders to crawl the web and gather links into a database like search engines do.

Who to believe? Why not both! If you must really chose one of them, then I suggest your export the data to spreadsheets that you will then be able to analyse and compare in Excel.

Then, according to the result of your findings, chose the one that is the most accurate based on your criterias.

Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer.

Hi Conradh,

The redirection is a 301 Moved Permanently, so it does pass link juice. You can find out using different tools like the followings :

http://www.seoconsultants.com/tools/headers
http://web-sniffer.net/
http://www.g-force.ca/referencement/entetes

But, to know if a link pass any link juice,  there are also multiple things to check. First, check if the page is indexed in Google using site: or cache: command.

If the page is not indexed, it might be only a question of time, but it might also be because it is blocked by robots.txt, robots meta tag or by X-Robots-Tag.

Also, check if the link doesn't have the rel="nofollow" attribute. Any of those variable can prevent the juice to pass other than the type of redirection.

Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer.

Hi Shailendra,

If your analytics reports lots of visit coming from a web page that's doesn have any links to your website, this is probably a case of referrer spam. See more details about this on the following Wikipedia article :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referrer_spam

Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer.

Yes, I saw the difference after a second look.

First of all, let me suggest you that you should recode the design to a div/css/tableless design, but this would require to pretty much restart from scratch and at the point your are, I don't think that's what you want. But still...

Otherwise, to answer your question, here's the fix : Change the submit button to a input image and remove the unecessary styles.

Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer.