Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Move your blog within your website: http://www.celynnenphotography.co.uk/blog This will allow links to you blog to increase your domain authority.

Rand's opinion on this is pretty clear in a recent White Board Friday: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/mixing-viral-content-with-business-content-whiteboard-friday

Distilled has a great blog post that explains how to create a representation of link juice flow using Xenu and Excel:

http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/understanding-site-architecture-with-xenu-and-excel/

I could be wrong, but from what I remember of the webinar, he was referring to paid text links in her posts, which is manipulative. I believe the emails only offered cash in exchange for links.

But to the point of whether text links in a guest post are manipulative, I think it depends on the relevancy of what is being linked to. Would a user actually want to go to that site from the post they are on? I'm guessing not many people would want to go to a car insurance site from a travel blog.

I think blog owners need to remember that whether they've written the content or not, if they are putting it on their site, they are vouching for it. Your credibility with your readers and with search engines is on the line. So the blog owner should still take responsibility for making sure the links in a guest post go to reputable sites.

Bruce Clay might be a good place to start researching the topic of SEO certification. He offers a lot of SEO training courses and certifications. SEMPO is an organization that might be able to institute something like this. However, it is unlikely that an SEO certification will ever be widely accepted.

I understand the desire for a certification process, but personally, I think certification has the potential to be more damaging, by giving companies a false sense of security when hiring an SEO consultant/agency. Knowing how to do SEO and acquiring certification doesn't mean you won't take the easy way out with your clients and resort to black hat tactics to get quick results. Like with anything in business, the more research you do yourself, the better decisions you'll usually make. Don't rely on people who aren't really invested to make important decisions for you like whether someone is a credible consultant, especially when knowledge usually isn't the biggest factor in the success or failure of a person.

Pruning links from page templates (header, footer, etc.) is generally a good idea if they don't go to important pages. As Albin suggests, listen to the data. What are users not clicking on?

I can see some of these as not being needed in the footer. If your store pages are used as navigation, these are redundant, unless users like using them in the footer. Pages like "returns" and "order tracking" probably aren't making you a lot of money, and can still be easily found from a customer service page that is linked to from the footer. This way users can still find what they need, but you only devote one link instead of four or five.

I don't think removing a handful of links from the footer will diminish the look of the site or the user experience significantly.

Considering how massive the changes are, I'd say it's best to do them all at once. This will let you start rebuilding as soon as possible. Making one big change and then waiting to start ranking again, followed by another big change that could drop them out of the rankings again would likely cause a longer period of your client not getting traffic. I wouldn't say that the on-page and metadata changes need to be made at the same time, if there are limited resources.

One problem with doing this all at once is that it will be more difficulty to evaluate the effect of each change. This might not be a huge deal to you, but sometimes it is nice to know what return came from each change.

In my opinion, these sort of blog comment links are pretty low quality. A handful of these shouldn't hurt you but don't expect them to bring a lot of value. It is a pretty common practice, because it is such an easy link to acquire. Which is often one of the things to consider when evaluating the quality of a link; how difficult is it to acquire a similar link? Some easy links will be of decent quality, but not many. Other things to consider when evaluating the quality of a link are:

Page Authority.

Number of outbound links on the page. The more links leaving a page, the more diluted the link juice will be.

Relevancy. Would it ever make sense for a user to travel from that page to your page and be satisfied with the experience? Users don't have to use the links, but this is a good way to judge topical relevancy.

Anchor text. The more descriptive the anchor text, the better. Expect poor anchor text ("click here") on some links, but good anchor text is a definite bonus.

In most situations, you will want the canonical tag pointing to the page that it exists on. The canonical tag tells search engines which page to index, if there are multiple URLs for the same content.

I agree with Ryan that a Like Button on your homepage is best utilized by that user "liking" your FB page, as this is likely a vote on their part for your brand.

However, I think for deeper pages, like a product page or a blog post, it makes more sense to have the like linked to that specific URL, since that is what the user most likely is "Liking". And this should help that page rank better. There are others who would disagree with this advice, though. I believe Ian Lurie from Portent has the Like button on his blog posts pointing to his FB page to gather a stronger following there.

Looking at the page, the use of "Berghaus" seems fairly natural. The excessive usage is necessary for good product names used as anchor text to the products. I think your best move is to increase the content blurb, which should dillute the keyword density for "Berghaus".

A 301 redirect is the best solution as it will point users and bots to what will then be the only source of the content. A rel="Canonical" will tell search engines which page is the canonical version but you will still have users hitting pages on the old domain and potential creating links to those pages instead of to your new subdomains, which isn't ideal.

I can't speak to how thorough OSE is. I know they don't find every link, but in my experience, they seemed to find most of the strong links. I can suggest Majestic SEO for a very thorough, but not free, backlink profile.

The code you would want to add to the would be:

You can find more information about using the rel="canonical" at :

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=139394

Seth, Ryan's response gets at a more important issue than the URL, so if you can flatten out your navigation, I would recommend that.

In response to the question you asked, I would recommend http://www.yourdomain.com/cat5/cat6/. With six categories in your URL, you'll be targeting too many keywords with each page and potentially having too many pages competing for the same keywords. SEO isn't all about getting as much traffic as you can, but getting it to the right pages so you can convert.

Google is going to go to the pages submitted in the sitemap and see that they are serving a 301 response code, which they don't want to see in sitemaps. Either find a way to create a sitemap for the URLs you want to use (this is what I'd do) or shorten your URLs so they work with your sitemapping solution (although it is not a good idea to change URL structure because of a software limitation).

Pages can definitely rank for multiple terms, so having anchor text around one term does not necessarily mean you can't rank well for another term (Lots of pages rank for terms other than "click here" despite the majority of their links having that anchor text). Standard practice is to only target one main keyword per page, but that doesn't mean you can't make it work for a page to rank for a couple different major terms.

The main question I have is how different is the term your going after from the anchor text you are getting? I'm of the belief that if anchor text isn't just exact match or nothing. If the anchor text is topically relevant to the terms you are targeting you're in good shape. If that isn't the case why do you have so many links like these pointing to that page?

You won't lose PR.

This is something that is most likely filtered out by search engines after a crawl. SEOmoz has probably just chosen not to implement such a filter.

You should be fine linking out to a site that links back to you when there is reason to do so (relevant information, helpful to user, etc.). Cyrus covered this very well in the latest White Board Friday.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/external-linking-good-for-seo-whiteboard-friday

I understand the concern with having pages that don't convert as well outranking your "more important" pages. Fortunately, this is probably one of the better problems you could have. There are two things you can do to take advantage of this situation, assuming these pages exist in subfolders of your site and not as a subdomain or separate site.

First option, optimize the internal links on your resource pages to dirrect users and bots to your homepage and commercial pages that are relevant to the content of that specific resource page. The fewer links you have off these pages the better in order to not dilute the PR that is going to the pages you want to rank.

A second option, is to move the content to your commercial pages, assuming the information make sense to have on those pages, and 301 the resource page to the commercial page. I imagine this is going to be less ideal for users, depending on your site and content, but this should completely avoid the problem you're concerned about. I would only go this route, if option 1 doesn't work and the traffic that is entering your resource pages isn't converting.

And, although I don't know if search engines consider it at all, you have the option of designation a page's priority relative to the rest of your site in the sitemap. So you could set your resource pages' priority to .3 and your commercial pages to .7. But again, I don't know if this is actually used by search engines.

The server shouldn't be an issue at all. PR in the tool bar is very unreliable. Soon Google is going to stop supporting it. I wouldn't worry at all about it. Domain authority and page authority from the SEOmoz tool are much more reliable.