Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Sudha,

In response to question 3, I would say that if you already own the .co.uk domain, and you're targeting audiences in the UK, it's definitely a good idea to take advantage of it.

Users often prefer to click on a familiar ccTLD because of the trust that they associate with them (consciously and subconsciously).

You wouldn't have to build a whole new website or stop using the .in site. If you use canonicals and geo-taregtting (through Webmaster), you'll avoid major problems with duplicate content.

Good luck!

Hi Ryan, I agree with Moosa here. Thoughtful and valuable comment posting can help you to gain authority among niche audiences, but adding your URL before you've earned this authority is quite spammy and might get you penalised by Google. If I had an extra four hours a day for SEO, I would spend:

• 30 minutes - Commenting and interacting with influential bloggers and communities in my niche
• 30 minutes - Keyword/trend research
• 2 hours - Content creation around these trends and keywords
• 1 hour - Promoting that content and managing social media profiles. Even if your assistant isn't skilled is social media management, it shouldn't take too long to get him up to speed.

Content creation and promotion is the best and most sustainable way to earn links, if that's what your primarily concerned about.

Good luck!

Hi Riyas, using multiple H1 tags shouldn't have any significant effects on SEO efforts. Because HTML5 uses powerful sectioning elements, it's quite common to see H1s used for each section of a page.

However headings are also used to show hierarchy, and most pages will have one clear heading that takes precedence. There are exceptions - such as blogs.

So using multiple H1s is fine, and it's not a major SEO issue (unless they're stuffed with keywords), but most of the time it's unnecessary.

Thanks Miriam, they're a bit reluctant to hire a copywriter because of the relatively short shelf life of many of the books. I think it's a matter of prioritising and working through as many high priority descriptions as possible. Thanks for the advice!

Wow. That's quite an audacious thing to admit on LinkedIn... I've only seen one campaign that I suspected was the target of click fraud, and that had about 15% suspicious clicks rate. In my other campaigns I honestly haven't seen anything above 2 or 3%.

Totally agree, even if they seem to be getting results at the moment it's not sustainable and will likely do far more harm than good in the long term. Give this SEO company a wide berth!

Hi Ian, I've had similar experiences to Donford. There have been a few glitches the past month or so but I've never experienced any significant problems in the 6 months previously. Good luck.

Thanks Jakub! Two really great ideas

Hi Guys,

Obviously in an ideal world all product descriptions would be high quality and unique. But do you ever have a client who you know they'll be totally impractical for?

For example, one of my clients is a niche book store with 10,000s of products. There are only two members of staff. They currently C+P the blurb. I would love to recommend that they write unique copy for all their books, but considering the books have a low retail value and a fairly short shelf life, I doubt that unique descriptions would be worth the ROI.

My initial thoughts are:

• Identify the high priority books/best sellers and write new product descriptions for them
• Encourage more customers to leave on-page product reviews

Can anyone recommend any better solutions?

You could also try domaintools.com - it offers whois, reverse-ip, ping, DNS lookup, and traceroute. I can definitely understand that Google is your priority but they tend to take a little while to respond, so rest assured that they'll get round to it.

Hi there, I would:

• Send DMCA notifications to the other major search engines and any web directories this site is listed on. This should get the site de-indexed.
• Send a DMCA notification to the Webmaster's ISP. This should get the site taken down,

Good luck.

Hi Paul, Irving has nailed it. This sounds like a link network and it's a prime candidate for penalisation.

Hi William,

The difference between SERP positions on Google and Bing can be huge, and that can be frustrating, particularly because it's usually much harder for a small company to rank on Google than on Bing.

I came across a good article recently that describes some of the differences between Bing and Google's ranking algorithms: http://www.highervisibility.com/blog/how-seo-differs-on-bing-compared-to-google/. Maybe this can help you to identify some of the reasons for the difference in rankings.

Good luck.

I'd agree with David - the benefits of having high quality content on your domain far outweighs the benefits of hosting your blog elsewhere and linking back to your site. A blog on your site will hopefully bring traffic and links to your site.

Hi John, that's a really frustrating situation, especially when you feel that the national companies have thin content.

Unfortunately there's no quick way to leap frog those national companies - being big and reputable, their sites are considered to be authoritative and they have a good range of links. You'll have to build up authority and high quality links over time to overtake them. JakubMovic's advice about contacting local journalists is a good way to gain links from authoritative sources.

I also don't see a Google Local Business listing for your site - is this something that you have implemented yet? This can be a really great way for local companies to compete with national ones (with the listings often appearing first in the search results), and it's free. http://www.google.com/local/add/ If you do have a  local listing it might be a good idea to review which keywords you're targeting so that you appear for the highest value keyword combinations.

Good luck - it sounds like you've made a great start and with a bit more time hopefully you'll reap the rewards.

As you say, I think it means that Google will pick up a higher CTR on ads. When SERPs are dominated by one site with a list of sitelinks, users will see diversity in the ads.

Hi Jason,

To answer the first question, low quality links can have a negative effect on rankings, particularly those associated with link networks or if the links look manipulative. That being said, most sites have some sort of spammy sites linking to them for reasons beyond their control, and Google don't seem likely to penalise a small amount of these - they will probably just ignore the links and discount any value that they would have passed.

Have you tried to clean up your link profile by contacting the webmasters of the blog networks and asking them to remove the links?

Starting completely from scratch seems a little extreme, but if you feel that the links are very extensive and hard to rectify, and if the current domain isn't ranking and doesn't have much authority, then it might be the easiest way to "start fresh". Bear in mind that a new domain is likely to be sandboxed and will take a substantial amount of time to gain trust and authority. It would be fine to reuse the content provided that the original content is removed and deindexed.

Good luck.

Hi Tom, generating a good range of longtail keywords is going to be more difficult without local or branded keywords, but it is still possible and it's a good way to gain a foothold in a competitive market. So terms like "oak table and four chairs", "antique oak bed" etc. may help to drive traffic. SEOMoz has a really thorough guide to keyword research here: http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/keyword-research

If you haven't set up a blog, it could be a really good way to capture longtail queries, build your reputation as an expert in the field and improve your brand visibility.

Good luck!

Hi Ben, it seems like you've got a pretty solid strategy in place. I appreciate that social media can be a tricky platform to negotiate when you're working in a sensitive industry like this, and maybe you'll find that some networks simply don't work, while others do.

One thing that I might suggest is to spend some time deciding on the niche you want to reach through social media. Connecting with potential patients in this way might be difficult for the reasons you state above (privacy, reluctance to share/like/discuss openly). Establishing your reputation and increasing your visibility among the counselling community could be achieved by joining Twitter conversations, connecting on LinkedIn, commenting on blogs, answering questions and, once you've built a following, sharing your own content.

Perhaps patients are better reached through SEO-promoted posts rather than social media promoted posts (link building, solid guest posts etc.). Having said that, there are probably lots of ways to utilise social media - e.g. awareness generating campaigns, conducting research and sharing interesting statistics and findings etc.

Good luck!

Ah I'm sorry I misinterpreted you - so it's essentially about pagination? Rel Next/Rel Previous is probably the best way to go - the first page will be given the equity and the pages won't have to compete with each other for ranking. Google have a pretty comprehensive guide: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1663744