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Yeah, blog is going through a restructure today and new sitemap submitted tomorrow. Went up on G+ yesterday when it was posted I believe.

Thanks though.

We've a new intern who spent a good few hours writing this article http://appointedd.com/blog/nominees-for-the-british-hairdresser-of-the-year-2013-announced/ - quite a good we one feel.

Our main competitor has taken almost the entire thing word for word and put in up on their blog http://www.inaa.com/apiblog/?p=821

While this is a foolish move on their part, we're still quite offended over the incident as this was the intern's forst article and she'll be looking to add it to her portfolio.

I was wondering what the best practice is in this situation? Is simply writing to them enough if they've demonstrated they're underhanded? Should we call them out on it? I'm simply unsure as I want to protect no only the business but the intern also.

thanks!

Hi,

Firstly, I think I'd clean the homepage out a little. At the moment my eyes are being drawn to every part simultaneously. Have a think about what it is you want the user to interact with first when they land on your homepage - blog, sign up, sales pages?

Once you've got that, work the rest of the page around it. Make your calls to action clearer and the main point of focus.

For instance, it seems like you'd want people to immediately select their bin size right? If so, drop the side panels, it doesn't seem like they're needed there.

Sigh - just wrote a nice long answer and my computer failed. The short of it:

• Guest blogging is fine if it's relevant and good quality.
• Be careful and check where you'r posting and don't do the whole link swap.
• Make it a part of a larger picture.
• Read this http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-guest-bloggers-are-sleepwalking-their-way-into-penalties

Hope this helps!

Thanks - I hadn't encountered this before so immediately panicked. Having spent the last several hours doing research I've calmed down a little and will work around as best I can Really appreciate the help!

Not yet, but I get the impression they weren't very good as they managed to down all emails from the domain while working on it and didn't even realise. Hopefully I'll be able to get some answers tomorrow. If HTML snapshots are being seen (though only by Google, nothing else it seems!) then that's at least better than nothing, but currently, it doesn't seem to be looking like that.

Yeah, we can bring that up for the homepage, but every other example only brings up the original homepage. Do you think this is because the rel="canonical" is pointing back to the homepage on every page?

Thanks for the response - does this mean the search engines are actually finding the information properly in the form of an HTML snapshot?

So does that mean we've lost all of the SEO benefits? I had thought Wix used HTML5 templates.

Hi,

We recently (yesterday) had a developer make a new site for us on Wix http://www.appointeddhq.com/ as the one we were planning to put up had a few teething issues (the beackend booking system wasn't ready and we needed something up immediately for a TV show we were being featured in).

Having now had the chance to look through it, I'm not quite sure what's going on. None of the text appears to be there on any page, I can't find any of the descriptions we gave the developer, the alt tags behind pictures (and even the pics themselves) don't appear to be there, the URLs are messed up, titles are incorrect and there are no title tags to be found. Am I misunderstanding or is the whole site built in java?

Obviously, this is quite a huge issue and I'll want to get it sorted immediately, but I thought it best to see what the good folks here though.

Thanks!

In most themes, but by no means all, the h1 tag is the name of the post or page you're on.

Thanks for all the help! Hopefully that'll be it sorted now. Cheers!

Hi,

I seem to be having a few problems with getting google authors set up on Wordpress. I've set up my G+ account, put the link to my blog http://appointedd.com/blog/ and then registered it on the yoast plugin.

However, I'm not sure it's set up correctly and I can't seem to be able to get it to work.

I'm hoping a fine someone here has experience in this as I'm a little flustered.

thanks.

Thanks!

That's a great idea. This is exactly why I love these Q&A areas, everyone is so willing to help and provide assistance.

Once again, thanks!

Hi,

I know that it's not advised to engage in link swapping activities, but what about when it's actually useful for our readers?

As an example, I'm writing a guest post on a hen party website on how to choose the right hairdresser for your wedding day (relevant content to both their site and mine). They asked if I'd like a post in return about the best way to do makeup if you're going on a fancy dress night or hen party (which is again relevant to both our audience groups and will be of great interest to them).

Is this sort of link swapping okay, when the primary goal is to actually provide our audience with a richer experience, or would this still raise red flags for search engines?

Thanks!

I'd say probably not a good idea. As I understand, you risk having all the content on your site devalued as a result. Also, you run the risk of getting involved in building very weak links that don't have much value and could possibly have penalties involved.

Instead, I'd look to create new content if you're wanting to publish it elsewhere (though I'd still be awfully careful).

Ah, thanks - that's very useful to know. I might try and incorporate a bit of the article content into the title as way suggested by Simon above.

Cheers!

Thanks very much!

I hadn't done that as I'd wanted to keep the sense of consistency week to week, but what you say makes a great deal of sense. Do you think it might might be better to highlight the main article content and then put a consistent part at the end.

As an example, today will mainly be focusing on a new UK cosmetic surgery review, so the title might be "Cosmetic Crisis: UK Cosmetic Report - Beauty Industry News" or do you think it better to simply leave the last part out?

Thanks!

Hi,

I do most of the current copy for our blog which you can find here http://appointedd.com/blog/

I believe having a regular blog structure with a mix of irregular ad hoc posts to go in around these. So, for this blog, I write an article on "Beauty Industry News" every week.

Now, I don't want to use the same title for each post, so I've peen butting in the date after each one i.e. "Beauty Industry News - 24/04/13". Is this best practice or is there a better way of naming regular posts?

Thanks in advance!

Ah - whoops. The more you learn, eh? I'd be interested in the differences between how the two function.