Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Sarah is a whole lotta woman, one man, even SEO titans like ourselves, is simply not enough for her lusty appetites. Or something like that.

Hey

If you look at the listings, what does it state about each one? Sometimes the listings themselves get flagged due to the content or some other reason and I have previously got pending listings instantly live by removing certain keywords from the services section.

Let me know the pending message as it may give us some clues & this has certainly been the case previously.

Of course, it could just be that it's a bulk upload and they want to verify it is not a spam attempt!

Cheers
Marcus

Hey SEOMoz

I have been spending a bit of time in the Q&A of late and have noticed lots of questions never get answered. I also had a question of my own that I left open for ages and I figured it maybe a good idea to add some kind of email nag or on screen notification for people to close old questions.

There are some that have had plenty of answers but that either never get closed & really, it takes away from the fun of participating if things are never closed off & searching shows the same old tired, answerd but not closed questions lingering around like a bad smell.

Not really a question, but a little tweak suggestion.

Cheers
Marcus

Hey

That's a solid point from EGOL - if there are ones that are working well at the moment, don't rock the boat and look to improve new content. The dynamic thing does make it a bit more tricky but really, it should not be a massive problem.

If your URLs are generated by the script and you have some kind of ID relating to the content you are adding it should be easy enough to put something in place that uses better quality URLs for new content.

If contentID > x Then

Build new URL Structure

Else

Build old URL Structure

End

Whether you do this entirely in the code or with some URL rewriting to add polish is up to you and in some part depends on how things work on your back end but...

Where there is a will there is a way and if you can shorten future URLs it will provide some benefit.

Maybe you could do some testing to see if it is going to be worth your while

1. Create a few hard coded new pages over the next month
2. Track them against the current pages
3. see if there is a statistical improvement in clicks, conversions, impressions etc

I am pretty much of the opinion that if you can change them going forward, you should as they are not brilliant at the moment but I would not expect miracles from this though so don't bust a blood vessel over it.

Cheers
Marcus

I would not say they are more valued than any other kind of link but they do provide some distinct benefits and opportunities.

• when people land on the page from a web search, it provides a simple tool and a convention no less for anchoring yourself within the hierarchy of the site and navigating back a level

• depending on the source ordering it can often be the first link to the parent pages so can be used for keyword rich anchor text (where natural to do so)

• it can be some of the first text on the page so it provides a natural way to get your keywords (product name etc) at the beginning of the page which can also help

• Generally it is a good way to get your keywords on the page again without having to worry about working them into the body text in a natural way (which is not always possible)

So, in summary, they are good for users, good for SEO (internal linking, keywords, relevancy) and they can help improve the format of your listing in the SERPs so... what's not to like?

Hope it helps!
Marcus

Hey, they are too long and don't really make any sense so... I think they need improving.

In an ideal world your URL should describe the content of the page as it will help win clicks and may give you an SEO boost through links that use the URL itself as the anchor.

Shorten them though, should be easy enough and certainly gives a usability boost.

Ha, I got one also, she is playing the field chaps!

Hey Joe, I have read a bunch of your questions today and let me tell you, currently, you are in a bad place SEO wise. Steve, myself and many others have given you great, informative answers yet you cast them aside, and their efforts aside as it is not what you want to hear.

You are looking for the 'secret of SEO link building' or the 'SEO Tool that allows you dominate the first page of google!!!!!!' - in essence, you are not looking to do things the right way, you are looking for spam tools to cheat your way to the top.

Steve said it above and I have said it in another of your threads but you are not alone, many of us start out there, in the place that you are in at the moment. Looking for the easy fix, the easy win, the trick, secret or tool that will let you get to the top and you know what, long term, you are wasting your time (and ours a little).

The longer you are in this game, the more white hat you become. Are you looking to do some anchor text link spam to promote some burner domains or are you looking to cheat? If you have a real business, with a future, then stop looking for these easy answers as they simply don't exist.

Sure, there are strategies, and easy wins, but if your whole approach is to spend time looking for low value links then buddy, you are just wasting your own time and everyone here will tell you the same thing.

No one here is going to give you success stories about such a tool as everyone here is working their asses off to do things the right way and that involves a whole lot of graft, hard work and patience.

Joe - if I can give you any advice it would be to stop looking at these tools, set realistic goals and maybe start reading the link building posts on this site. There are tons of solid strategies and approaches and none of these will be a waste of your time, money or effort and certainly none of them will end up with you having to burn the site and move onto a new domain.

Sorry if this comes off a bit harsh buddy, think of it as tough love from someone who has been burnt before.

Cheers
Marcus

There is clearly some kind of nefarious purpose here and it certainly looks like a spam link or hacked link network but the point is, I have seen this for sites that I know are not hacked like the one I mentioned above. Whether they are targets, or have been hacked historically and it never came off or something else entirely, the only point worth mentioning is to ignore them.

If you are certain the site is not hacked, then these links will do no good or no bad, they will just be ignored and any time you spend trying to figure this out is time you could better spend on some other, positive tasks to improve this site.

"I'm not saying it doesn't exist, or is impossible to do. There is actually a large community of like minded professionals out there for me to associate with. What I'm saying is that link building does not spread the same way as it does for more popular interests, and as such, the job is different."

I think this is true, to an extent but, if it is hard for you to get natural links, then it is hard for your competition to get natural links also so... if you can go that extra distance, and win some natural links, they will likely help flesh out your link portfolio and help you win in the long run.

Joe, from the heart, the longer you are in this game, the more white hat you tend to get as the black hat or shady stuff does not bring the benefits that you would like and you soon learn to focus on the harder to win links that do the job.

No easy answers my friend, just hard graft and lots of work,but... it can pay off huge.

Hey Keith,

I have seen it, for a hobby site of mine (well, my fathers business but...). we have certainly never bought those kind of links, it's relatively non competative but sure enough, loads of weird pages with names like xhsdfadsfa.php with scores of links in the footer, usually with the site name or URL as the anchor.

I could not tell you why they exist or what purpose they have for the creators but I have seen it before.

This site has been around for 8 or so years so... it's certainly had time to pick up these oddities, that's for sure.

No answer there, but you are not the only one in this situation and my advice is to just ignore them, they do no good and are most likely ignored completely by G & co.

Cheers!
Marcus

Hey, I think as the forum fills up with content, these words will be less and less important and as Dejan SEO mentions, these are likely to be noise words and ignored to some extent.

Concentrate on stimulating active, on topic discussion in the forum and you should be okay.

Cheers
Marcus

Hey Joe

I think you have likely answered your own question to some extent - there are lots of manual ways to check for duplicate content by searching for it. You could even automate this against new sites by setting up Google Alerts to check for various random search strings in double quotes from all the pages across your site but why do this when there are professional solutions like copyscape?

Sure, there is a charge involved with copyscape and such tools but it is a fairly low. Alteratively, you will have to spend more time (money) coming up with a manual solution that will likely be less comprehensive.

A client of mine recently got hit quite badly by duplicate problems, some internal repetition (chunks on multiple pages) & loads of other sites had taken chunks of text from multiple pages, some entire pages had been copied with small edits. The offshoot of this was nearly 3 months without rankings whilst we identified and resolved the issue and being an internet company this was nearly three months without any new orders coming in.

If your have concerns about being caught up in a duplicate filter & this could have a series impact on your business then copyscape is a solid investment.

Hope it helps

Marcus

Hey, a little, but it's one of those questions with no simple answer.

If the service you have put a press release out for is solid, and the press release itself is well written and not just search engine fodder then it may help.

Taking a look, the page is indexed, so the link has likely been logged. Equally, it looks like the press release has been picked up by several other sites and some of these also have followed links to your site.

So, in this instance, it may well give you a boost, but I would not rely on it as a long term strategy as it will certainly be case of diminishing returns.

Press releases, article marketing, links from forums, blogs etc are all things that can help and should feature in your overall link building plan but they are also all things that have been abused. So, as a rule of thumb, if you are promoting something of value in a meaningful way and building value with any PRs, articles, posts, comments etc then this will help build awareness, exposure and you will get an SEO boost out of it as well.

You should try to supplement it with some high quality links, guest blog posts maybe and links from highly reputable sources in the market place you are targeting.

Hope it helps!
Marcus

Hey, you have pretty much answered this question yourself - "we suddenly dropped to a PR1 but our traffic wasn't seriously affected". If this is the case, then, I would not worry about the toolbar page rank.

Also, you have a raft of other problems, but you seem to have a handle on those. I would spend your time constructively focusing on getting your new site up and running and resolving all these duplication issues and not spend another minute worrying about your loss of page rank.

Nope, not really.

What was the test?

Hey

So, your product pages are as follows:

productpage.php?productid=1
productpage.php?productid=2
productpage.php?productid=3

And you are worried about duplicates that would be in the following format with three versions of product=1

productpage.php?productid=1
productpage.php?productid=1&variation=A
productpage.php?productid=1&variation=B
productpage.php?productid=1&variation=C

If so,  then your canonical link for productid=1 which would go on all of the above variations of the productid=1 page would be:

<link <span>rel="canonical" href="productpage.php?productid=1" /></link <span>

Summary

The page name includes the bit that makes it a unique page but you are applying the canonical to all variations of that.

Hope it helps!
Marcus

Whilst this is one hell of a keyword to go after if you have nothing in the first 300 results then there is a chance that you have some kind of penalty or possibly a filter pushing you down the ranks. If it is an ecommerce store and it is using the standard product descriptions which are on several other sites all your efforts may be wasted.

Here is a few things to try:

1. Take some snippets of text from various pages and google them in double quotes. If you get lots of other pages returned and not yours at all, then you have a major problem. If you are returned but just below some other pages then you are likely filtered to some extent as there is nothing unique there.

2. Google some exact title tags and see what is returned. Again, if you don't come up or you come up below other results that are not crazy relevant then you have a problem.

As ever, it's really hard without seeing a URL and you are going after a really general and popular search term that probably converts quite poorly anyway.

You can test the value of this term for your client with some paid search, get 500 clicks to the homepage which I guess is what you are targeting, see how many conversions you generate from that, if it's low, then you maybe wasting your time as top 10 results may be a long way off so you are picking up scraps.

You are probably better off working around the edges and going after some more specific phrases and concentrating on building some content that is useful to the target audience to bring in links & visitors. Combine that with some other marketing activities (social, email list, offline etc) and you should slowly be able to build and reinvest in the site.

Hope it helps, no easy answers I am afraid!
Marcus

Hey Felicity

If moving the blog is a huge problem, then keep the existing one, and just start blogging and concentrating on your main site. There really is no good reason to maintain two sites and all you are doing is doubling your work.

Concentrate on making one site that is a great resource for your visitors and don't worry about cross linking, linking out and all of this other business as long as what you are doing is intended to create a great experience for your site visitors.

Hope it helps
Marcus

Hey, pretty sure I have seen this question asked before and the answer was no, not from the campaign manager settings at least. I am sure you could possibly do some technical wizadry and restrict certain links to certain crawlers - maybe someone here has some experience with that?