Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Mostly it's the same, but if you are targeting google.co.uk you will need to pay attention to the small details.

1. Language - the language is the same, don't worry about having to sound like someone from Mary Poppins, there is really little difference and colloquialisms really have no place in writing for a broad audience.

2. Spelling - watch your spelling, we do things a little different over here. Watch, your z's and s's and maybe get it read by a UK copywriter. This is important, if you have US spellings, you are telling google it's for a US audience!

3. GEO Stuff - You can specify the location you are targeting  in webmaster tools, obviously,  but you can also do more. Make sure the UK address is on the site, make sure you use the correct monetary units and any other localisation that is important to the business.

4. Link Building - You will want to find some UK link sources, ideally topically relevant ones as well. That's not to say you can't get links from the US, it's no biggy but you want  to make sure you have some quality UK ones.

Really, it's not much different, just the smaller details so don't sweat it to much.

Matt Cutts made this video about releasing the same content over multiple top level domains (TLDs) yesterday I think and whilst it is a different subject there are some good indicators of what they are looking for

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ets7nHOV1Yo

Cheers!
Marcus

Sounds good, directories are still an easy win for smaller or niche sites where there is not much discussion out there. II am working on a site for a carpet manufacturer, not a hot topic in the blogosphere for some reason.

Hey Daniel

I am not sure that this exact metric exists but you can easily get this information from open site explorer.

1. Review the links for your chosen site and page in OSE

2. Download the data to a spreadsheet

3. Search or filter the data by your required metric (.gov or .edu)
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I use open office Calc and it's pretty easy. If it was me I would I use the filtering options so

1. Data Menu -> Filter

2. Standard Filter

3. Select the column you want to filter by, filter by 'contains' and set the value as '.gov'

This gets you a list of all the .gov links.
--

There are other approaches and you could use filtering, vlookup or match. More info here:
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/OOo3_User_Guides/Calc_Guide/Using_formulas_to_find_data

It's worth getting used to manipulating that OSE data so it's certainly a worthwhile skill to pick up and Open Office is free so no reason not to (free I tell's ya).

Hope it helps!
Marcus

Hey Jared

I am guessing you are using

header('Location: http://www.example.com/');

Which triggers a 302 temporary redirection which as we know passes nothing.

I have seen this on other bespoke sites and even on some older shopping cart scripts etc and never seen it hurt anything from an SEO perspective. That's not to say it doesn't, but I have never seen it when it is used in this way. It's for an external link as well so I would not worry about it too much.

This is one of those things, you want to preserve these links, I am guessing you want to hide them and this solution kind of meets your goals.

Really, if you had lots of links to pages you want  to pass page rank or anchors into, or you were being linked to in this way, then the 302 would be  a negative thing as no anchor or link juice is passed down the link. But, in this instance, I really can't see it doing any harm.

Happy to take a look at the page and provide some more targeted feedback if it helps.

Marcus

Ha, no worries buddy. Great minds and all that.

Hey Sophie

In this instance, I am guessing you don't want to lose that page from ranking but the page itself is called 'eco-products' and the term you are targeting on the homepage is eco-products so you seem to have a conflict of interest between those two pages.

Lets look at the homepage:

**Title: **Nigel's Eco Store - Environmentally friendly products and eco friendly gifts for sustainable living 
Keyword Usage: 2 - once in a page title, once in an image title (0 times on the page itself)

Lets look at the /eco-products/ page

Title: Eco Products
Keyword Usage:  13 times on page & 27 times in total taking all HTML elements into account

Anchor Text

Additionally, lets look at the anchor text to the pages. The homepage has the standard logo and image links from the main nav but  the eco-products page has tons of links with the term 'eco products' from the 'posted in tags'.

Summary

In brief, without looking at the external issues, the ranking is kind of right. Everything on your blog page is saying hey, I am about eco products but your homepage hardly uses this term at all.

Your homepage ranks first (uk at least) for a bunch of other terms:
environmentally friendly products store
eco store

So, is this such a bad thing? I imagine, if you really want to rank the homepage for this term you could rename that page / tag to something else and work that phrase into the homepage a little more. You seem so strong for eco + x that it would likely be doable (and you have the historical ranking for the term).

Maybe it may be a good chance to look at your landing pages and add a new page to catch this traffic?

There are plenty of options but the approach depends on what you are looking for here but there is certainly no mystery why that page ranks for that term over your homepage. I think the simplest solution is just a case of changing the name of that page/tag to something more suitable and building some relevance for eco products on the homepage OR looking at a new optimised landing page for that term.

Hope it helps!
Marcus

Hey Sophy

Could be a lot of things, could you supply a link?

• maybe the blog page is more relevant for that term or you have two competing pages
• maybe the blog page picked up some external links with that anchor so became more relevant than the homepage
• maybe the sites structure or linking gives more relevance to that page for that term

The solutions are kind of similar to the suggestions above

• make sure the homepage is more relevant for that term
• make sure the two pages are not competing for that term
• do some link building for that  term to the homepage
• ensure the internal linking and anchors are not promoting that page for that term

Hard to go further  than these general hints without a URL but happy to take a look if you want to post a link.

Hope it helps!
Marcus

Nope, you are not targeting that region and you don't care about localised results in south america so don't worry about it. The search engine would never know as long as you don't block one of their crawlers anyhow so... block away.

Hey William

That's a great answer, thumbs up.

Marcus

Hey Sarah

Ryan is right, a javascript lightbox is a more modern approach to this and it does not suffer from the problems that plague a standard javascript pop up.

This is my current favourite and it has loads of cool options built in so should save your guys some work:
http://fancybox.net/

Cheers
Marcus

EGOL gets 3 thumbs down here, which seems crazy to normal, sane, experienced SEO's and just people in general who are benefiting from free advice and consultation.

But, I figure there are those out there that don't like this answer,  not because it is wrong, but because it is not easy. So, they are not thumbing down the user so much as they are thumbing down the fact that there is not a $99 tool that will get you all the back links you want without having to make any friggin' effort.

Haters always gonna hate!

Hey,

I am not sure there is a single tool that is going to do that for you without some legwork on your part.

You could review the terms for a given page using the term extractor 
http://www.seomoz.org/term-extractor

Then, you could get approximate keyword volumes for these through the google keyword tool & your clients rank via google searches or the moz rank checker tool.

The best  way to do this would likely be to set up a campaign, mark this person as a competitor, track the obvious keywords and then manually extract others with the term extractor and track it that way.

Not a perfect answer, but  there is going to be a bit of legwork involved however you approach this.

Marcus

Hey, that is really unlikely but if you want more comprehensive feedback can you provide some details:

1. Your site + pages in question

2. example of the scraper sites

If it was that easy to kill your competition, SEO would be all about nuking the opposition rather than building up your own relevance.

here is some feedback from Matt Cutts:~
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CosWAVLCZg&feature=player_embedded

Most of the time though, this content is not malicious, these sites are not indexed and they are not even linking, they are just using your domain (the scraped site as the alt text for the image).

Matt suggests DMCA & Spam reports which you can do if you are worried but I promise you, you are wasting time worrying about something when you could be working on your site.

Marcus

Quick question, do you have to change domain? It really is best to avoid that if possible as there is no 100% perfect way to do it.

Yep, you can suggest up to 15 parameters to ignore I believe (that's from memory but its a good few)

There is always some temporary problems but it can be pretty quick, a few weeks even before things start picking up but that said, it's not something to take lightly.

I just covered this in some detail here:
http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-to-retain-link-juice-moving-to-new-site-cms-and-servers

Cheers
Marcus

Yeah, this is just scraping by the sounds of it. At least they are referencing you. Don't worry about this at all. If you are still concerned you could always submit a DMCA request to google for the offending pages: http://www.google.co.uk/dmca.html

Cheers
Marcus

Hey

Well, if you think about it, the two following pages are the same content on a different page name:

/pagename.php?sess=1
/pagename.php?sess=2

So, duplicate content? Well, not really, google would likely figure it out but it's far from ideal but... they provide a cute tool to help out in these cases which allows you to suggest URL parameters to be ignored. It's a suggestion, rather than a directive but... it should be a quick and easy solution to your woes.

More details here:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=147959&&hl=en

Hope it helps
Marcus

Hey Dominik

There is not a great deal you can do here but if the sites have been nuked then the links wont count for much. If you employed a link builder and this is on the back of that then you could contact the link builder and ask them to remove the links. Equally, you could contact the sites in question and do the same if you are worried.

One other point - if these clearly dodgy links are pointing to your site, I would double check to see if you have been hacked and become part of a link network that they are promoting with links into your site.

If it is just the alt tags that have your URL and they are not actual links then... god knows what this is all about but the best advice here is to stop worrying about it and just concentrate on your site.

Hope it helps

Marcus

Hey Richard

I don't think there is a general consensus and these things have to be reviewed on a case by case basis. You have pretty much covered it above but you need to balance relevance, competition and volume and make the best call.

No easy answers in this game eh!

Marcus