Welcome to the Q&A Forum

PageRank only updates two or three times a year and the last one was around January.  If you are getting traffic and your site: query looks good, I wouldn't give it a moments thought.

Hi Gary,

Reading these two resources should give you a good idea of where to start :

• Perfecting Keyword Targeting & On-Page Optimization for SEO
• The Beginner's Checklist for Learning SEO

Good Luck!

Hello Teemu,

My guess is that Google sees the "lotto" query as a "QDF" query.  It means that Google associates this keyword with search results that would change from day to day or week to week.  Since lotteries change frequently this seems pretty accurate to me.  It's also why you would see a date next to your meta description when it is ranking high.  Google is saying "Here is some recent content from X date, i'll show this at the top of the SERPS since it's current"

I recommend watching the Whiteboard Friday on QDF, this will give you an idea of why Google is behaving this way and how you can take advantage of it to try and maintain the top positions as often as possible.

Good luck!

CSS drop down menus are fine to use, as long as the links are readable by a search engine and there are no settings prohibiting crawlers from indexing them, they should pass PR.

In fact I just logged out of seomoz to check and even they use a css drop down menu.

From a SEO standpoint if the link is on a page with good PA/DA and is not 'nofollowed' then it is still offering value.

Unless the bulk of your link profile is from these sites you don't stand to be negatively impacted by this.  You are just losing out on links that might have passed linkjuice before.

I don't have an answer for you on your first question, on your second question however, I am pretty sure domains with those spammy "godaddy suggested" alterations are going to come across as spammy to both users and googlebot.

• "my-widgets.com"
• "widgets-now.com"
• "widgets-21.com"
• "your-widgets.com"

Get rid of them all.

1. Figure out the keywords you want to rank for
2. Write and publish quality content
3. Make sure no technical settings are inhibiting your SEO efforts
4. Reach out to other sites in your niche to try and build relevant links
5. Claim your profiles on major social networks
6. Keep tabs on your major competitors
7. Read this.

Unless your business is strictly confined to Canada and will never operate outside of Canada, I would go with another domain name ending in .com

As long as there is a rel=canonical in place on each one of these sub-domains I see no problem with it.  It doesn't sound like the most elegant solution the way they are doing it... If I had my own "blog" on Facebook or Squarespace I wouldn't want their stuff to be published on my blog, it's just not relevant.  Can you pm me the URL?  I'm interested to see this in action.

No, editing comments is broken for everyone at the moment.  I've left quite a few responses that i've needed to go back and edit.  It has been this way since Tuesday.

Consider if the duplicate content is really enough to make a fuss over, if it is, go to the people he knows and explain to them what they are doing and how it is hurting your bottom line (try to put it into dollar amounts with data).

Money talks, often companies are willing to cooperate and help each other until they understand the dollar amounts involved.

Look at what the name servers are pointed to, that should give you their host.  If the host is a business you can call them and find out who the administrative contact is if they are feeling generous.

All domains are required to have an active contact on the WHOIS info so you might be able to work that angle with the host as well.  In a worst case scenario the host might be willing to relay a message as a professional courtesy.

How we help users and webmasters with duplicate content
We've designed algorithms to help prevent duplicate content from negatively affecting webmasters and the user experience.

1. When we detect duplicate content, such as through variations caused by URL parameters, we group the duplicate URLs into one cluster.

2. We select what we think is the "best" URL to represent the cluster in search results.

_3. We then consolidate properties of the URLs in the cluster, such as link popularity, to the representative URL._Consolidating properties from duplicates into one representative URL often provides users with more accurate search results.

If you find you have duplicate content as mentioned above, can you help search engines understand your site?
First, no worries, there are many sites on the web that utilize URL parameters and for valid reasons. But yes, you can help reduce potential problems for search engines by:

1. Removing unnecessary URL parameters -- keep the URL as clean as possible.

2. Submitting a Sitemap with the canonical (i.e. representative) version of each URL. While we can't guarantee that our algorithms will display the Sitemap's URL in search results, it's helpful to indicate the canonical preference.

Source

As Rebecca pointed out right after that statement, Google is able to pull the context around the link and probably the context of your own site to determine the value of that link but it's definitely not desirable.  If you can I would push for an alt/title tag.

Hi Jorge,

If I am not mistaken the /product-page would receive link juice for the links with ?afl=XXXXXX at the end.  No need to worry.

I can say with almost absolute certainty that using trademark or restricted symbols isn't going to harm your rankings.

Hello Damon,

Please see the SEOmoz pro guide to On-Page reports for the following quote.

The On-page summary automatically generates reports for any of your campaign keywords that rank in the top 50 of your primary search engine. The URL that it grades is the same URL that appears in the search results.

For instance, if you have 75 keywords ranking in the Top 50, you should have 75 On-Page Reports. This generation happens automatically within 24 hours of when your rankings are updated.

In short, the keywords it chose to grade for are the ones you have setup in your keyword tracker.  If you want to track more, I suggest adding more keywords.

I hope this helped!

Hi Joshua,

In my opinion I do not believe the read more button is a good idea, but not because of an SEO issue.  I don't think it's hurting you because GoogleBot can tell the difference between a div hidden for spam and a div hidden for valid reasons.  See this quote :

The goal of our guidelines against hidden text and cloaking are to ensure that a user gets the same information as the Googlebot. However, our definition of webspam is dependent on the webmaster's intent. For example, common sense tells us that not all hidden text means webspam--e.g. hidden DIV tags for drop-down menus are probably not webspam, whereas hidden DIVs stuffed full of unrelated keywords are more likely to indicate webspam.

Source

That being said, I do not think the "Read More" button is a good idea in your particular case for the following reasons :

1. Your pages are a bit lacking in content.  You should be trying to beefing them up a bit, you are on the right track but could definitely use some improvement.  In most cases it seems like the "Read More" button is only hiding one or two sentences.
2. If you want the photo section to always be in view I would recommend putting it in the sidebar or somehow off to the side.  I am running on a MacBook Pro at 1680x1050 and the "Read More" button is not even on my screen, much less the photos section.
3. I can't find any discernable call-to-action on the pages, as a user i'm sort of unsure of the purpose of the site is aside from information.  If this is what you intended then more power to you, but it's always good to give the users some kind of action to follow, whether that be contacting you for a brochure, or booking a reservation.  Ann Smarty has a great article on how to do this.

If I were in your position I would nix the read more button, go with a 2 column layout and put the call to action in a very obvious spot in a color that stands out.  Maybe a big button with text that says "Learn to surf for only $35" or something.

I hope this helped and sorry if my advice was not what you are expecting!

I do not think they need to be all that similar.  In one of Rand's examples he talked about in last weeks WBF he stated that he just did a blanket rel canonical on his old site to his new one and 2 days later everything was working as intended.  When I went to check how he did it, it wasn't even specifically one page to another, he just added the rel canonical to the header file.

Your case is much more specific and involves doing it on on url only, not a whole domain.  If I were in your position I would definitely give it a shot.

Quote from last weeks whiteboard friday :

The second example is even niftier and suggests some very cool applications as well, and so I want to point this one out. I was frustrated because for the last few years a very old domain that I created, I don't know, back in the late '90s, early 2000s, Randz.net was ranking really well for my name. I think it was ranking number 3 actually for my name, for Rand Fishkin in Google. I was always kind of frustrated because it's an old domain. I haven't updated in forever. I need to do the WordPress reinstall. I don't even know where the server login is. Whatever. It's kind of defunct at this point, and I haven't updated it in years. But I have this new blog, RandFishkin.com/blog. I really wish I could this one ranking because it has some good content on there, a bunch of posts that have been on Hacker News and some interesting things. It's much more current and updated. I do once a month at least put something new on there. So, what I did is I took very page in the header of the WordPress template, I took every page and I put a cross-domain rel=canonical to this URL. So every page at Randz.net now says canonical version is RandFishkin.com/blog. You know what happened? Two days, literally 48 hours, like the next time they crawled Randz.net, bang, RandFishkin.com/blog ranking number 3 for my name. It hadn't even ranked on page 1 or 2. I think it was on page 3 or 4 up until that point. So, just awesome to be able to put this, the page that I really want in the search results and kind of retire my old blog from being searchable.

-Rand Fishkin (Source)