Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi and welcome!

I'd check out these two links. They have a ton of how-tos and videos and FAQs... I reference these ALL THE TIME!

http://www.moz.com/help

http://www.moz.com/help/pro

Hope this helps.

Mike

Hi Jess,

Using Screaming Frog, it looks like your /blog page actually has 131 links. If you add up your footer (30), plus links to your homepage (6), plus pagination (9), plus Link Building and Content article (5), and your Alex Bogusky Video article (6) - you already have 50+ and that is not including top and side navigation, as well as the rest of the articles on your page.

Matt Cutts sums things up really well in this article saying:

"...Google will index more than 100K of a page, but there’s still a good reason to recommend keeping to under a hundred links or so: the user experience. If you’re showing well over 100 links per page, you could be overwhelming your users and giving them a bad experience. A page might look good to you until you put on your “user hat” and see what it looks like to a new visitor.

But in some cases, it might make sense to have more than a hundred links. Does Google automatically consider a page spam if your page has over 100 links? No, not at all. The “100 links” recommendation is in the “Design and content” guidelines section, and it’s the Quality guidelines that contain the things that we consider webspam (stuff like hidden text, doorway pages, installing malware, etc.). Can pages with over 100 links be spammy? Sure, especially if those links are hidden or keyword-stuffed. But pages with lots of links are not automatically considered spammy by Google.

So how might Google treat pages with well over a hundred links? If you end up with hundreds of links on a page, Google might choose not to follow or to index all those links. At any rate, you’re dividing the PageRank of that page between hundreds of links, so each link is only going to pass along a minuscule amount of PageRank anyway. Users often dislike link-heavy pages too, so before you go overboard putting a ton of links on a page, ask yourself what the purpose of the page is and whether it works well for the user experience."

Hope this helps.

Mike

Hi Christina,

For the location that you actually have an office, I would suggest having a single page devoted to that particular location (landing page as Bereijk suggests). Then I would use GetListed.org and list that physical location's information in all of those business directories.

I would then create landing pages for the other locations using a similar structure seen in Perfecting Keyword Targeting & On-Page Optimization.

That said, if the particular search terms you are going after include local results, only queries regarding your physical location will appear in the local results. So for instance is someone searches "SEO" from say Essex and your physical address is in Essex, and if Google applies the local SERP, your address and site information may appear; however, for the location landing pages you create, someone would have to do a search for "SEO London" to find your SEO London page, because it does not have a physical address located in London... does that make sense?

(the above is just from my personal experience. we did this for a ton of different locations at a previous job I held. in my opinion it was a waste of time, because my particular industry [at the time] would not have searched for "ERP software los angeles" - because software is not part of the localized SERP [at least at the time] so no one was even making it to those pages)

Hope this helps (and sorry for rambling),

Mike

If you go to your Campaign and under the Rankings tab you can export your full rankings report to CSV. Once you have that report, you can quickly copy and paste the keywords from that campaign across your other campaigns.

Hope this helps.

Mike

Typically ebooks are in epub (for ereaders) and mobi (for kindle) formats. A book can be available in epub, mobi, and PDF versions, but they are not really the same.

True ebooks will adjust depending on the device they are on. The text and page length usually adjust with ebooks, while PDFs are more or less an image of a page. When you adjust the text size on an ebook, the layout can shift, while when you adjust the size of text on a PDF - you are actually just zooming.

Some ebook PDFs will have password protection to prevent book piracy; however, any PDF can be password protected... so it really isn't just for "ebook PDFs". If you go with any type of password encryption, your PDF won't be able to be indexed.

To my knowledge, Google does not index epub or mobi formats, but does index PDF. If you haven't already, you should read over this article regarding optimizing your PDFs for search.

Hope this helps.

Mike

Personally, I would try and mix it up. From a user standpoint, if I am on your Google+ page and am wicked impressed, then decide to visit your website and am greeted with the EXACT SAME TEXT... boring. It would seem to me as a user that you just slapped up the Google+ site just to have it.

That said, Matt Cutts and SearchEngineLand.com say, "...duplicate content issues are rarely a penalty. It is more about Google knowing which page they should rank and which page they should not. Google doesn’t want to show the same content to searchers for the same query; they do like to diversify the results to their searchers."

So will you get into trouble - No.

Will Google rank your homepage higher than your Google+ page - It should.

Will your users have a fantastic experience - Probably not.

Hope this helps.

Mike

Hi Jesse,

It all depends

Depending on the number of pages, the number of layouts, whether they need to write copy, perform usability testing, etc. And depends on the type of platform they are developing on OR if you are going to get a new platform.

The price changes with the number of iterations needed to layouts/design and the time frame you are looking at.

It also depends on whether you have a freelancer or agency do it. Without knowing the complete scope, I would guess somewhere between $50k-$250k if it is a pretty large site. If it is only like 50 pages and you only did a few templates, you could maybe get away with spending $10k-$30... depending on the people you work with.

First, I would look at design firms available in your area. Check out the websites they have developed and contact someone at the company they developed for and ask them about their experience. Do this for a handful of firms. Then contact each firm and ask them for a quote. After you have quotes from firms, go out and ask some freelancers... look at their work... ask for a quote. You will probably have to have some sit down, in person interviews with these people to make sure that they really get what you are asking for.

I know that doesn't completely answer your question, but hopefully it gives you a few things to think about.

Mike

Hi David,

It sounds like you did everything right. As long as you cannot see the dev site in the live SERPs, you should be safe.

I have seen it take MONTHS for WMT to update any information regarding crawl stats, resolved errors, etc.

Just keep a close eye on things, but you should be safe if you can't find it by doing a Google search.

Hope this helps,

Mike

PS you may want to check Bing as well.

Hi Oliver,

In the research I have done on this subject, between 2005 and 2009 the NoFollow directive was used to preserve link juice and keep it from passing through to the particular link. This would allow you to reallocate that link juice to other, more important links on your page. It was mainly developed to discourage comment posters from spamming sites with misc. links; however, web masters soon figured that you could "link sculpt" your site... more or less hoarding your link juice and only pushing it through to your really important pages... making them rank higher.

In 2009 things changes. Matt Cutts commented on the subject saying, "So what happens when you have a page with “ten PageRank points” and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are nofollowed? Let’s leave aside the decay factor to focus on the core part of the question. Originally, the five links without nofollow would have flowed two points of PageRank each (in essence, the nofollowed links didn’t count toward the denominator when dividing PageRank by the outdegree of the page). More than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each." - more or less stating that link juice is discarded and not reallocated.

Matt Cutts also says, "Nofollow links definitely don’t pass PageRank." - So while the PageRank flows through the link, it is discarded, and is not passed to the linked to page.

"The essential thing you need to know is that nofollow links don’t help sites rank higher in Google’s search results." - Matt Cutts

I don't know if the subject of the article you were reading was about sculpting your site, but depending on who you talk to, there are many other tactics that can give you a higher ROI.

I hope this helps answer your question.

Mike

When you are in your campaign settings, under Manage Keywords, place a check in the box(es) adjacent to the keyword(s) you want to associate a label. Then, use the Add/Clear Labels dropdown to select a current label or create a new one. Finally, click Add Labels to add the selected labels to the selected keywords.

Hope this helps.

Mike

Hi David,

This typically happens when your PDFs are full of content people want. I have seen this personally with a previous company I worked with and their spec sheets (it was for a software copy). This is good and bad - good people find your content awesome and are linking to it - bad that your PDFs are ranking vs your pages.

Solution - make your pages better. You could potentially take the content from your PDFs and make a page - this in theory should still compel people to link to you. If your PDFs are massive in size, you could consider condense the contents into a webpage that contains FAQs, a summary of the information, etc.

This isn't a bad problem to have. If you can't beat them, join them - optimize your PDFs for search.

Hope this helps.

Mike

Here is a step-by-step of what you could try doing from Cypress North: Hacked? Here's How to Remove the Dreaded Google Malware Warning.

Google also says, "If you're the administrator of a site we've identified with this warning message, learn how webmasters can fix this issue. Note that in some cases, third parties can add malicious code to legitimate sites, which would cause us to show the warning message."

Good luck.

Mike

Crazyegg measures how far people are scrolling down on your site (there website is down right now... which is odd). I have used them before and you get some really good data.

Clicktale is another one that can not only do scrolling heatmaps, but it can also do actually recording of how your visitors are interacting with your site. They have a free and paid version. I have not used them... yet... but am looking at implementing this over the next few months.

Hope this helps.

Mike

I would check out Wistia - "SEO embeds use old object tags so they're crawlable by those creepy search engine robots that make you Internet famous. SEO is inconsistent with IFrames; Google's official stance is that they don't crawl IFrames, although sometimes things like an image still or link might sneak their way in. These also use noscript tags to make sure transcripts are visible to everyone. However, they lack the universal compatibility of IFrames."

And they just added backlinks if someone embeds your video too.

Hope this helps.

Mike

It appears that your problem is that you have 2 canonical tags. One referencing the desktop site and one referencing the mobile site.

Remove the /mobile/clearwater/bankruptcy-clearwater-lawyer-attorney.html tag from that page and you "should" be good to go.

Hope this helps,

Mike

You should try and get your business listed in all of the directories listed on https://getlisted.org/

Hope this helps.

Mike

Hi Aditya,

1. That is personal preference. Search engines used to associate paths ending in / as a directory and paths not ending in / a file. Here is a great article on the subject from Google Webmaster Tools Blog.

2. I would say optimum is 3 to 4, but depending on the size of your site, you could probably go up to 6 without too much of a problem.

3. URL.

Hope this helps,

Mike

Hi Nenad,

I guess it all depends on your marketing strategy. If your company is THE watch company and people are mainly coming to your website for watches and nothing else, then it would make sense to move them to a subdomain/new domain and 301 redirect from the old pages to the new ones.

But if your company is THE watch company that is now expanding into other daily accessories (ie: leather wallets, bags, belts) you could be transforming your company into THE accessory company. You would simply have a landing page for watches, one for wallets, one for bags, etc.

Does that help?

Mike

Hi Joel,

Sounds like you have everything setup correctly so far with the canonical and GWT.

Next step would be to do a 301 redirect from the https version to the http version. After that and your changes above, it should get remove from Google's index.

Note: You may also want to run a scan with a program like Screaming Frog to ensure that you are not accidentally linking to the https version somewhere on your site or in your sitemap.

Hope this helps.

Mike

Hi David,

This is completely normal. My understanding why this happens is that

1. the algorithm is in a constant state of change
2. your competitors can just as easily start doing SEO to try and rank higher
3. backlinks are in a constant state of change on your site and your competitors (gaining/losing)
4. Google crawls websites at different rates, so depending on why yours is crawled vs your competitors, the index will change where you are ranking

Just to name a few.

You shouldn't have to worry about anything UNLESS you see a big drop that is constant. If you move from position #4 to #24 and it stays like that for over a week... you may need to investigate things further; however, if you are just seeing some bouncing around, but are usually maintaining a good position, I would not worry about it.

Hope this helps.

Mike