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Happy to help Zsolt, I know how frustrating it can be to get some rules working.

Here's a great place to test regex: http://gskinner.com/RegExr/

Try playing with something like this:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^score=[0-9]&rew=[0-9]$ 
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com? [R=301,L]

The score part of the URL are being treated as parameters.

An alternative would be (in GWT and BWC) to tell Google/Bing to ignore the score and rew parameters

The right wire to use depends very much on the industry you're targeting, the geography and how much you've got to spend.

Since you're in the US, I'm assuming the target is US and national - I quite like PR Newswire, but on the whole, any premium wire should get you some pickup. Just don't expect journalists in the national newspapers etc. to pick up your news from the wire service and use it.

Getting solid media coverage is core 'media relations' work - think of it as similar to the outreach you might do for linkbuilding. There is some skill to it and contacts in the media help a lot. You could hire a PR freelancer/agency with contacts in the industry you're targeting to pitch the story out or if you need to do it yourself, here's the minimum steps you should consider:

1. Build a list of targets
2. 'pre-sell' the story to some key journalists/bloggers to forewarn them/gauge interest
3. Update your release based on 1
4. Issue the release to your targets via email and also on the wire (keep an eye on any news/announcements due on the same day that could 'drown' your news)
5. Follow up with people that don't cover it - find out why so you can do better next time/remind them since their inbox will probably be overflowing with press releases and they may have missed it

Thanks Marcus, we're not persuaded either way on the .jp site or /jp approach yet. Just looking at the options since the product being launched is targeted at Japan, but other products are not.

Yep, been through that WBF.

As I understand it, in rough terms, Bing seems to lean more heavily on keywrds on-page (esp. titles) than Google - I was really wondering if there are any similar 'preferences' that engines serving Japanese-language sites exhibit.

Perhaps I'm over-analysing this and should (as I think you've been hinting at) focus more on the basics and targeting of visitors than worrying about the subtleties

Sorry, that was a bit cryptic - though not intentionally so!

Its micro-electronics (components etc.) and a handful of devices at that. The queries will likely involve the standards/protocols that the components support - not quite as specific as part-number/serial number queries.

Searchers will be looking for 'widget protocolX' type queries. Might be competing with some Japanese sites.

Hi Ryan, I tried the mozbar and seobrowser

Has anyone got any tips on targeting searchers in Japan from a UK site? This is for a (very) small and niche B2B site.

I've looked at the WBF on international SEO etc. so here, I'm hoping you'll be able to help with which engines & optimisation tips for those engines - I've read that Google Japan is big, but are there any others that people would recommend?

Thanks!

Has anyone seen this kind of 'hack'?

When looking at a site recently I found the Google cache version (from 28 Oct) strewn with mentions of all sorts of dodgy looking pharma products but the site itself looked fine.

The site itself is www.istc.org.uk

Looking in the source of the pages you can see the home pages contains:

Browsing as googlebot showed me an empty page (though msnbot etc. returned a 'normal' non-pharma page).

As a mildly amusing aside - when I tried to tell the istc about this, the person answering the phone clearly didn't believe me and couldn't get me off the line fast enough! Needless to say they haven't fixed it a week after being told.

In my experience, OSE sometimes takes a (long) while to 'notice' links. Perhaps that's it?

Andy, issuing ten releases over three months is absolutely fine. Some of our clients issue many more releases - it tends to vary by industry but two or three per month is not (at all) uncommon.

Our research shows that unless you use a premium wire (say prweb's advanced service or prnewswire etc.) your news won't get picked up elsewhere (or if it does, it will have been scraped onto poor quality sites).

The links you get from the releases are really from the press release distribution service and (if you had a good story and used a premium wire), from the few news sites/blogs that cover the story and link to you. The link on the wire service is okay, but gets buried quite quickly.

Hi Denns, Are you talking about cheaper/free geodge?

Geoedge already offers some free proxies - though I guess if you want more you'll have to pay.

There may be some way to hack something using TOR networks or somesuch, but I've not investigated those - and the effort involved strikes me as way over the top to do something like that.

Have you tried http://www.geoedge.com/ they even offer some free proxies in multiple locations.

Traffic Travis has a nice  and easy to use free windows app that does what you want (for low volumes). http://www.traffictravis.com/  you'd be better off using a proxy service with it though.

Hi Gary,

Here's some code from an htaccess file I've used before that solves the issue you've got with index.php at the end of all your urls:

#remove /index.php and ensure admin works okay

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/administrator

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^.*/index.php\ HTTP/

RewriteRule ^(.*)index.php$ /$1 [R=301,L]

notice the line that contains ^/administrator , in Joomla, admin login is usuall on http://site.com/administrator/index.php

so, removing the index.php from the admin url would prevent any access to the admin screens! If your cms has a similar url, be sure to replace 'administrator' with the relevant url.

You're very welcome

BTW, I use SH404SEF with Joomla too, which is pretty good, but is a paid-for product.

An alternative that I've had working on Joomla sites is:

#add www

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^site.com$ [NC]

_ RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.site.com/$1 [L,R=301]_

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} !^POST

#remove /index.php and ensure admin works okay

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/administrator

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^.*/index.php\ HTTP/

RewriteRule ^(.*)index.php$ /$1 [R=301,L]

One final thing, have you tried using

Options +FollowSymLinks

In answer to 'will it bring traffic' I'm not so sure...not done any testing, but (as far as I can recall) I've never seen twitter results in serps where the twitter handle corresponds to the keyword I'm searching for.

All things being equal, I'd be inclined to go for brand name, social media is about engagement and people like to know who they're talking to.

Having said that, if you can get a nice keyword name that doesn't feel 'forced' then that would be good. For example, in the pr industry there's @ThePRCoach which is nice and doesn't feel like someone is squeezing a keyword unnaturally into the name (as it happens his site is called ThePRCoach too, but hopefully you get my meaning!)

I think you're stuck with it. I also get odd effects sometimes when scrolling in PDFs when the mozbar is on in chrome. I read somewhere that there's an update in the works for the chrome toolbar - hopefully that'll make the chrome version as whizzy as the firefox one is now.

Fair point, it is a bit OT - I was thinking of mynewsdesk as a monitoring tool (because, as I understand it mynewsdesk republishes releases from other sources)

Thought people might like to see an alternative.

Having said that, a bit more on topic is the survey our team is doing of free release sites - I think we're up to 70 now. Will post link on this thread to the review when it is done

--

EDIT:

Here's the research - in depth look at free release sites:

http://www.vitispr.com/blog/free-press-release-sites/

If you're in the UK/Europe, try www.pickanews.com for media alerts - it is great!