Was looking for proof - I feel sorry for the client as the other people have mis-guided her - we doubled her traffic and were just waiting for the off site seo to start to have an effect but she said it was taking too long and went somewhere else. I have proof in analytics that we doubled the traffic and sent it her just before she left but so clients won't learn. We are a small company with a conscience and hate to see people ripped off so not trying to get her back so much as guide her and just send her some sort of proof without referring her to this post

I found this but it does not really answer the question...

http://makeyourselfvisible.com/internet-marketing/seo/does-bold-text-help-seo

A client has just switched from us to another provider and I have been checking up on the work done and the only change they have made is to bold lots of keywords on each page - I thought this was a practice that did not work - is there any evidence of this working or not working? Any articles/proof that we are not using out dated practices as we stopped doing this ages ago and yet the new provider is doing this.

Who is right or wrong?

Hello,We have a wordpress site that has some "hidden" pages with weird URL's. Due to the way the site was built (not by us) if we setup our standard practice for 404 pages some site functionality will be lost.Standard Practice for 404's www.domain.com/fafsaf shows 404 error pageProposed solution:- www.domain.com/safaf >forwards to> www.domain.com/404 - shows 404 error page. Will this stop the search engines indexing the pages? - we have also amended the robots.txt to try and stop some pages being indexed but we still keep finding the odd little "hidden" page.The aim is to try and get all the search engines just to index the few simple pages on the sitemap instead of finding all these extra pages.

Hi Alan,

Nice answer - I have a large site we are sorting the XML sitemap and is in 3 languages. You say only include the important pages - does this mean Bing will index the other pages if it feels like it - i.e. you cannot force it to index/update?

Also I have have a question about XML sitemaps if you have a moment to have a look - http://moz.com/community/q/xml-sitemaps-how-to-create-the-perfect-xml-sitemap

Cheers

Hello,

We have a site that is not updated very often - currently we have a script running to create/update the XML sitemap every time a page is added/edited or deleted. I have a few questions about best practices for creating XML sitemaps.

1. If the site is not updated for months on end - is it a bad idea to force the script to update i.e. changing the dates once a month? Will google noticed nothing has changed just the date i.e. all the content on the site is exactly the same. Will they start penalising you for updating an XML sitemap when there is nothing new about the website?
2. Is it worth automating the XML file to link into Bing/Google to update via webmaster tools - as I say even if the site is never updated?
3. Is the use of "priorities" necessary?
4. The changefreq - does that mean Google/Bing expects to see a new file ever month?
5. The ordering of the pages - the script seems pretty random and put the pages in a random order - should we make it order the pages with the most important ones first? Should the home page always be first?
6. Below is a sample of how our XML sitemap appears - is there anything that we should change? i.e. all marked up properly?

This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below.
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"><url><loc>http://www.domain.com</loc>
<lastmod>2013-11-06</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq></url>
<url><loc>http://www.domain.com/contact/</loc>
<lastmod>2013-11-06</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq></url>
<url><loc>http://www.domain.com/sitemap/</loc>
<lastmod>2013-11-06</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq></url></urlset>

Hope someone can help enlighten us to best practices

Hi Gary,

Yes I read this today which is what has prompted my question - I just want to make sure that the site code is doing what it should be and check that something technical is wrong with the site. i.e. Something not marked up properly etc...

See my reply above to get the URL and details.

Cheers

Hello,

The pages I am looking at/that have been totally completely are all the sub pages of the "About Us" section.

This is not the page title.... The page was last updated on the 29/09/13 and last cached on 01/10/13 - Please let me know if I am looking at the wrong information.

Sorry in advance if I am being retarded - I just want to make sure the robots.txt or any other part of the code is causing this problem.

Cheers

[identifying information removed by staff at request of author]

In Google SERPs we have several websites (built in wordpress) who's pages are being displayed without using the page title - is this google ignoring the page title or is there a problem in our code - also if this is google is it still taking notice of the page title to determine what content is on the page?I have read several articles on this but wondered if someone can advise - I can provide the URL if required.Also I wanted to 100% that our robots.txt is behaving its self.

Hello,

The search engines have indexed a sub-domain I did not want indexed its on

old.domain.com and dev.domain.com - I was going to password them but is there a best practice way to block them.

My main domain default robots.txt says :-

Sitemap: http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml

global

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/
Disallow: /wp-content/cache/
Disallow: /wp-content/themes/
Disallow: /trackback/
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /comments/
Disallow: /category//
Disallow: */trackback/
Disallow: */feed/
Disallow: /comments/
Disallow: /?

Is this the page you are looking for?

http://www.binaryoptionstrategy.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/12.png

What are you trying to do? Where the link coming from?

Why is the domain only in one part?

Is there a best practise way to do this - I was going to watch the webinar about the transfer from seomoz to moz...

So would I create an htaccess file and put it in the subdomain folder blog.domain.com to redirect to domain.com/blog - also how would I create a wildcard redirect for pages I might miss i.e. blog.domain.com/page - to domain.com/blog and these redone pages should I 301 to the blog home or just a 404 page?

How is best to mass redirect old domains - Listing the URL's in htaccess?

We are looking to use Joomla as a CMS - transferring a blog from a sub-domain to the main site and want to 301 all the sub domain blog posts - any ideas?

It's still redirecting and the "image" holding page is not loading.... Whats the time scale?

If you install google custom search on a site - does it record a list of all the searches people type into the search box? Is there a Joomla & Wordpress Search plugin/extension that keeps a track of the search history used on your site(s).

We are looking at working on a site that needs a warning for users visiting - This splash/warning page is the only just google sees this not performing well in search engine - The sites are Wordpress sites - Would we use script to force a full screen pop up? This would be needed on a visit but if the user leaves and returns to the site the warning would need to reappear.

Any ideas?

I have thanked and had very good conversations with them but yes that's a great idea - maybe a follow up message in a week or so's time.

Thanks for the great idea.

We are still working to capitalise on the PR we sent out got a target list of publications and working through them....

We feel very proud of what we have managed with this PR!

We have recently sent out a press release to targeted publications and have been lucky enough to be featured on a hand full of quality news websites which all feature links to our main URL. A minor draw back is some of the sites have just used the press release with minimal changes so we are a tiny bit worried about duplicate content issues but the sites are all high quality with a Domain Authority of 65+.

Anyway I am wondering how best to capitalise on these. A few ideas I have:-

1. Go to our Company Google Plus page and +1 them.

2. Go to our Twitter profile and favourite the "tweets" that have been sent out mentioning each article.

3. Go to our Facebook page and "Like" the articles on each of the sites.

4. Setup a Squidoo page called "My Company featured around the internet" and link to the news pages.

5. Setup a Tumblr page called " MY Company featured around the internet" and link to the news pages.

We are not sure if featured the links/urls on our "Press" section will undermine any benefit of link juice - we were thinking of doing a PDF of the pages and hosting the PDF on our site.

I'm looking to find a high quality writer who understands SEO and the art of Guest Blogging/Posting on really good quality sites. Sites like Life Hacker etc...

My Question is... Where would you advertise this job? I have tried People Per Hour in the past and never really found anyone and I find My Blog Guest (Guest Blog - Whatever it's called) to only really have low quality sites on there.

What would you do?

Cheers