Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey Jane, a little off base here. Let me try and help.

Can you say which search terms you are going after? If you can drop them in the post (or PM me) then we can look how difficult they are, look at your site and

Really, I would look at doing this with some content. It seems like you know why this is a better machine, start talking about it online. If there are some kind of tanning communities or other blogs, see if you can network with some people and do some guest posting to generate some better links with more longevity.

Honestly, it all depends on how competitive it is for the keywords you are after but a few high quality links, some focused service type landing pages and some content articles to try and go after the larger slice of search than just dry transactional queries will all help.

If you blog about tanning, share your knowledge, use twitter to network and reach out to lots of other tan / beauty related blogs and see if you can guest post. Identify some targets, add comments, get friendly with folks, let them see your amazing blog, then ask if you can guest post. You would be surprised how easy this can be and if your competition are just doing the same tired old stuff then... you will see results from this.

PRWeb - meh, can be okay, but for what you want to do, you may be better writing content for your own site and networking with other bloggers. If you are small as well, a few quality directories, maybe there are some vertical directories? Maybe there is a tanning community where you can share some knowledge, make some more contacts etc.

Hope that helps!

Dan totally nailed this here. In essence, use pages for static content and posts for news, blogs etc. If your site is mostly static, use pages.

If you are coming at this from a purely 'SEO benefit' perspective then you are not going to get an SEO bump from forcing static content into posts or vice versa.

Hey Richard, for us it all depends on the kind of work. For audits we generally charge up front for smaller jobs and 50% up front and 50% on delivery for medium to large jobs.

If it is a monthly arrangement, then that is generally a monthly billing cycle but I would always make sure the client is serious about the project and has enough going on to ensure they can pay and if payment stops, so does the work.

For content creation we will often do a 50% up front and 50% on delivery as well.

No hard and fast rules really - you just have to figure out what is fair and what works for you and your clients.

Hope that helps

Marcus

Ha, well, I am back.

Been busy, busy, busy, but nothing works for letting off a bit of SEO steam like the Moz Q&A!

Oh, and I really want that Roger T-Shirt!

Hmm, I would tend to avoid this.

Think about it

• you have three sites
• they sell the same products

So, if they have unique content, you may have a chance of getting results from all three in the SERPs. If you interlink them, you may as well write a letter to Google HG saying:

"Hey, these sites, they all sell the same stuff and guess what, they have the same owner so you may as well only show one of them.

Matt talks about this here and whilst it is unlikely to generate you any kind of problems unless you do sitewides

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufGw65-1je8

So, if you were going to cross link them. Do it gently, from a resources page, or even an article talking about the other site rather than some horrid sitewide link with keyword anchor text or via some leaky sitewide nofollow which is just pouring your link juice down the drain.

Ultimately, the best bet would be to combine these three sites into one site and concentrate on marketing that one site properly than trying to manipulate things through this little mini network.

That's my take and it is certainly not something I would advise or do for one of my clients.

Hope this helps!
Marcus

Hey Robert

The best way to think about this is from a user perspective and both categories and tags are useful structures to organise and browse content. So, from a pure user perspective, which is what really matters here, then, yep, use both.

But, you are right in that this can be a problem with WordPress in that it can create so many different taxonomies which are essentially duplicate pages.

If we consider a single user  blog you could have

• homepage
• author page
• tags
• categories
• date archives

All of which can be duplicated or substantially duplicated. If you don't use the read more tool as well this can be made worse.

Fortunately, there is a really easy way to deal with this and the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin will pretty much do the job for you. Install that and then just noindex all of your non essential landing pages to keep the uniqueness as high as possible.

Again, much of what you do here depends on how you use the categories. Will you have one parent category that has everything in it or lots of parent categories? Are these landing pages? Could you not build your content and build better landing pages if you no indexed them all?

If you have several categories and articles are only going in one category then by all means index them and try to add some unique content to each one beyond the post previews. Maybe use the excerpt on categories and a snippet on the homepage to keep them even more unique.

Plenty of options, no right or wrong answers, just try to keep the site as unique as possible and the above should give you plenty to be going on with.

Shout if you have any questions!
Marcus

Hey Matt

The first of your options looks right and google and other engines look for the robots.txt file in the site root rather than for each directory.

If you had a reason for not wanting that info in the root robots.txt file you can always use  the robots meta tag on the pages in a given directory.

Few useful links:

Robots.txt
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=156449&&hl=en

Robots Meta Tag
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=93710

Hope that helps buddy

Marcus

Hey Elissa

It seems that you have a couple of things going on here:

1. That URL relates to a piece of content on your site yet you are not using that permalink structure any longer so:

http://www.finalduties.co.uk/2011/06/23/rules-are-complex-when-it-comes-to-dying-intestate/

Is now

http://www.finalduties.co.uk/probate/rules-are-complex-when-it-comes-to-dying-intestate/

Also, if we google a chunk of text from an indexed blog post we see another site that is indexing your feed so, Google this:

"When someone dies they usually leave behind a will, which contains their last wishes on how to divide up their assets or estate to the family they left behind."

This shows the feed sites that seem to go to the correct URL but it warrants a little more investigation.

If you wanted to sort out the 404's you could always remove

To be honest, it seems you have a few configuration problems and possibly some indexation issues as well and I would try to do a bit of an SEO audit to ensure everything is all squared off and that you are not generating these URLs internally.

You are also serving up content on two different URLs:

http://www.finalduties.co.uk/2011/06/23/rules-are-complex-when-it-comes-to-dying-intestate/

http://www.finalduties.co.uk/probate/rules-are-complex-when-it-comes-to-dying-intestate/

So, making sure the old 301's to the new would help clear that up. You could also do the same thing with the /feed/ URLs to help clean things up more quickly.

Also

If we use the

site:www.finalduties.co.uk

query and then add &start=990 to the end we can see the dreaded:

In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 170 already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.

This means you likely have some older (duplicate) urls indexed. I had the briefest of looks and found at least three different URL variations:

page_id=x

year/month/day/name

category/name

---

I have probably made it sound a bit worse than it is but you should really consider an SEO audit if you have big traffic problems to get a really clear picture on what is going on and then any advice can be given based on what that uncovers.

It is likely just some fiddling around has been done in the WP backend and subsequently you have some URL based duplication (and possibly other problems).

Hope that helps!
Marcus

Ha, for sure! Good domains are like gold dust in some instances and I would pay 5x what they are asking.

Hey Holger

I don't use all in one SEO Pack so it may do this but certainly, the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin will allow you to sort out a lot of these issues.

You can likely noindex your author and tag indexes as they are essentially just duplicates and the WordPress SEO plugin will allow you to fix your page titles.

Follow the advice in this article and you can't go far wrong:

http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/

Hope that helps!
Marcus

Hey Ofer

There are different kinds of penalties and if you had this before penguin then you have a manual penalty and unfortunately, you have to work a bit harder to dig your way out of this hole as it will be manually reviewed.

So, if we just review what you said above:

"I have contacted some of the top webmasters who link to me and they have removed the links or added a nofollow."

Imagine how that looks to Google, you are almost saying:

"Hi Google, I have contacted some of the sites with dodgy links, but not all of them and some of these have removed or no followed them. Can I start ranking again where I was before and carry on benefiting from the rest of my manipulative links?"

I am really sorry to sound so harsh, but if you have a manual penalty, then you are going to have to do a little better than that if you want to get out of this and unfortunately, when these links are removed and you are no longer benefiting from them, depending on how much of your link profile this makes up, you may well rank lower than where you were.

Lets just look at something else you said:

"What do I do now? I can't remove all of my links?!"

Unfortunately, if you have followed short cuts to the top, and not invested in content and safe link building then the days of easy ranking are over and if all of your links are manipulative, you may do better to burn this house down and start again.

Really sorry to be the barer of bad news but with a manual penalty, we need to be transparent and show you have done your very best to sort this situation out which at the moment, you have not done.

Marcus

Hey, sounds interesting, I am a UK gamer so you will have to let me have a link!

Really, this should be a common sense, usability driven decision so the way you have listed it above seems to work for me.

The main categories are the consoles themselves so

/xbox/
/ps3/
/wii/
/vita/

These then all break down into your four categories so

/xbox/News
/xbox/Reviews
/xbox/Screenshots
/xbox/Trailers

/ps3/News
/ps3/Reviews
/ps3/Screenshots
/ps3/Trailers

This gives you plenty of flexibility to add new root categories, children categories etc and it gets your keywords in your URL if that is your SEO goal here. Ultimately, it makes for a nice, descriptive URL as well.

Good luck with the site!

Marcus

Hey

I would leave the 404s if they are not causing lots of user problems, they will go of their own accord in time.

Argghhh re the backup, install VaultPress, it is part of jetpack or can be downloaded and for $15 a month you have the best back up system money can buy (daily back ups, easy restore, DB and files!).

I can't really feed back on the URLs without looking at teh backend but it would seem when you put your site back up, it was likely misconfigured and used a different permalink structure.

Shooting from the hip there but let me know how you get on!

Marcus

Hey John, unfortunately, we could flip this question on it's head and ask, has anyone not had problems with the Google places Google Plus changes, in the UK at least.

The thing I am seeing though is that it seems to be settling down a bit and the duplicate google+ page that was created after our Google places page got shut down (and we already had a Google+ page) has been merged with my brand page so... it seems to be getting better.

Can you give an example? The business name or some such? Local is not my big area but happy to take a look and see if anything jumps out at me from the ones I have dealt with so far.

Hey, I have seen this in a bunch of older ecommerce platforms and often the this is just a case of the shopping cart or some such doing some processing and then issuing a redirect to throw the user back where they need to be.

You may not be able to easily fix this but these redirects are part of the platform rather than a 'page moved' kind of response so ultimately you are best clearing this out of your reports so you have a nice clean report and can forget about this.

I would imagine this is not something you need to worry about but you could consider noindexing these pages and nofollowing the links. You could also potentially block them from the SEOMoz and Google crawler in robots.txt if you don't want to mess with the platform itself.

Hope that helps!
Marcus

Yep, don't try and cram "buy natural progesterone uk"," buy progesterone cream uk" into your text. Google knows you are in the UK and hopefully that you sell progresterone cream.

A better strategy would be to create your product page and then create some content based landing pages to support this page and hoover up traffic looking for information about the product.

A quick Google gave these ideas

• why do women need progesterone cream

• how to use progesterone cream

• how to take progesterone cream

• what is progesterone cream

• how to spell progesterone (okay, I made that one up).

But, you get the picture. Have one main page, optimise it and then lots of other pages that support information driven queries that can be used to show an offer for your magic cream and to target a wider range of keywords  than the tired old money phrase that everyone is going for. You could even do a free sample or some such incentive to get an email address to keep marketing to these people downstream.

If your information pages are good, they may win some links. You may also be able to build some links to these pages a damn site more easily than to the money page and they will help promote that one for it's targeted phrases.

Hope this helps! 
Marcus

Yep, I guess, but to play devils advocate here, what if it is a cross platform review?

You could review on one platform, make that the main one and then have the same content on other URLS that have a canonical pointing to the main review.

Alternatively, you could have another category

/cp/ - cross platform

Then you could have:

www.totallygn.com/cp/reviews/fifa12-review

And the review could be listed under all categories from a browsing perspective and just have a caveat that the version reviewed was for PS3.

Either way, this is not going to skyrocket your SEO, but your current URLs are a bit on the long side (standard wordpress set up?).

Just try to choose something that makes for a good, readable, descriptive URL that is not too long and you will be okay.

Oh, and make sure you 301 all the old page addresses else you will run into bigger problems. In fact, take a look at this plugin: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/redirection/

It gives you loads of 301 options from within wordpress but more importantly, it creates automatic 301 redirects when a posts address changes so it will do  most of the heavy lifting for you. It also logs all 404's so you can see any changes you didnt make and add the relevant rules.

You are doing a lot right though: Wordpress is a great base and your site has tons of great content so so keep at it!

Marcus

Odesk is half decent as the people have profiles, reviews etc.

Have you ever been to TK Max store? There is some great stuff, but it's kind of hard to find and requires some real rummaging around. Well, ODesk is kind of like that, there are some great people on their, but be prepared to spend a few hours looking!

http://www.odesk.com/trends/graphics

Hey Gianluca

The site is going to be on an .es domain and it is for a small local business that serves Spanish and English speakers (ex pats).

This is really useful though:

"Hence, if you are only interested in Spain for whatever reason, than the hreflang should be set es "ES-es" and "ES-en" (Spain-Spanish and Spain-English)."

Thanks again for the input, I actually read one of your posts on here when I was gearing up to figure out the best way to do this - for anyone else interested this is a great read:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-dropping-the-information-dust

Thanks for the input all.

Marcus

Hey Michael

I guess the obvious question here is why do you care about the order? I have never seen anything over on http://www.sitemaps.org that indicated that the order was of any importance and in fact, if you check the FAQ they have this statement.

Q: <a id="faq_url_position" name="faq_url_position"></a>Does position of a URL in a Sitemap influence its use?

No. The position of a URL in the Sitemap is not likely to impact how it is used or regarded by search engines.

---

So, I would not stress, make sure everything else is right and forget about the order as that seems like a really horrid cut and paste job for a Friday afternoon.

Hope this helps

Marcus