Welcome to the Q&A Forum

That would be rel=publisher but I haven't seen it show up for searches when I'm not signed in to my Google+.  Meaning that I believe (no evidence) that it only shows up the company logo when someone who is searching is signed into G+ and already follows the brand.  Not 100% on that. You can check to see if rel=publisher is markedup correctly in Google's rich snippets testing tool. http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets I have it for my homepage,  http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?q=www.vzpro.com  You'll see half way down the page that there is a place that shows Publisher markup

Hi Mark, I'm so sorry about the late response here. We know it doesn't behave as well as it could with the iPad and mobile devices, and it's on our list to fix. Thanks for your patience!

As an early member of Moz, I can tell you that what brought me back to the site everyday was the blog and the comments on the blog. However I rarely commented on posts,  I didn't didn't answer or ask any Q&A, and I  didn't use the tools very much (although I used free tools at other sites pretty often) but I thought they provided a lot of credibility.  The content was very high quality and taught me to do my job better. You could tell that quite an investment was being made in the content and that there was a dedication to it and the community. It's my feeling that it was the content and the tools that developed nurtured a community Q&A section--it didn't just spring out of nowhere.  A lot of work first went into building a community where a Q&A section could flourish. I think the long term rewards will be worth it as long as you're in it for sake of building a community and not for the sake of any SEO value the community can provide.

Hi Mark, No, not stupid at all. Integration of Google's products is definitely a work in progress that has left tons of people confused! I hope the TCs in the Google forum may have some guidance for you. Good luck, and if you get an answer, I'd appreciate you coming back to update this thread with what you've learned.

Thanks everyone. Im looking into working more on G+ as well as all the others.

Thats why its good practice to compete on price but not go nuts as if you do its just a race to see who is out of business first, I agree.  Lots of these people can not do math.  They don't know what their profit margin is.

thanks ill look into that.

Thanks for the info. You have confirmed my thoughts on this. Their really is no place left to get an easy link is there. Even earning them is proving epicly hard.

Mark, One of the mistakes I believe people make on e-commerce sites is a lack of content.  I would not look at a percentage I would  look at how many potential searches you can pick up with each page you add. If you have social media set up look at the benefits of marketing this content through these platforms.  An area people often forget is Video and picture content.  This may be a good way to show up on searches your competitors are not showing up on. If you have competitors you want to get click share from you might want to look at Spyfu.  Their recon files program will allow you to see the key words and content that is actually getting clicks. They also have another tool that lets you look at your competitors paid advertising over time to see how their advertising has evolved. This might give you some good clues on your on line messaging and/or ideas for your own advertising or other marketing campaigns. Hope this helps, Ron

Hi Mark I'm assuming it only banner ads which you are looking advice with. We started banner ads a few weeks ago, with mixed success (so far).  I would recommend remarketing, it converts well.  I would guess there is a little bit of cannibalation going on, but I still think it works (reminds customers of you, and make you look like a big brand) Because of our industry the categories/topic are usless to us.  (In my last job in the furniture industry, we found the categories/topic more useful) The Keywords are very tricky because you will find you ads appearing on sites that have little to do with you business, just happens to have the word on the page. So far we have not had a conversion yet from keywords, but a free "ad seen and converted".  I'm also having problems with analytics's picking up all the banner clicks, but I think its because of a quick bounce (analytic does not even get loaded to record the bounce) I would start with a very small range of keywords and monitor it closely and use negative keywords and block site that are no good to you (flash game site are the worst for 100% bounce rate). We started in on region, and once we are happy with the banner campaigns we are going to expand them out (we are already going to expand the remarketing campaign as its working) Hope this helps

There's no perfect solution, but Google's advice is to use rel=prev/next. This looks like pretty classic pagination. Rel-canonical is a stronger signal, but it's generally going to keep pages 2+ from ranking.

its been about a month but ill give it a bit longer. ta

My 2c; I'm deleting all mine now, even though I originally paid for a lifetime listing. Why? because Link Detox (for one) is now classifying BOTW as 'highly toxic'. I've come to agree with them. They are, at the end of the day, paid links.

The industry i work in is a bit old fashioned and i find it hard to get links from quality well ranked and relevant sites as there is not many around. For a Small business with a growing site £500 per link is just insane! I understand the value of quality links but finding a relevant site above PR3 (I realize PR is not the be all and end all these days) is very uncommon in our industry. Our competitors have massively more links than us but in my opinion there links are a tad spammy. If my link profile looked like my biggest competitors i would be disavowing them asap. I feel a quality link is, From a site that relevant to the topic of your site/page. From a high ranking site. In a prominent position as near the top of the page as possible. Surrounded by quality content about the page you are linking to. Preferably as close to the index page as possible, not 8 clicks down. The anchor text should vary from your other existing links. The page should not have a high number of external links on it. the page title should be relevant to your page and not be a links, forum or directory page. Preferably not on the same C block as other links to your site. The link should be likely to drive direct traffic as well as produce an SEO gain. I'm sure i missed some things as I'm a site owner not an SEO specialist. I was not judging "Good link builders" more the companies who claim to get you to the top of google in a month guys. Unfortunately I'm yet to find a good link builder. I keep finding the conmen and black hat guys. I think the good guys must cost too much for most small to medium businesses. As a retailer with an ecommerce site the current google methods seem to be geared to kick small businesses to the kerb. Ebay and amazon and now google shopping are wiping out businesses that are already hurting due to the economy. I agree with goggles lust for quality sites i just feel it is sending big multinational sites so far ahead that it is almost impossible to get any momentum if you are a smaller business. The thing i don't understand is why google seems to want so much content on ecommerce sites. Surely if real world shops are anything to go by shop layout, cleanliness, good displays, stock volume, price and service are what matter not how many leaflets and books you have on the products. in googles eyes you don't need to have the product and you can be double the price so long as you have a lot of info on the product none of that matters  it just seems odd to me as a retailer that they don't differentiate sites by type so each can be optimized for the particular purpose. That being said its just the way of the world. Rant over!

I've used this for a number of clients. It is useful in generating a list of potentially harmful links and classifying them. However, you still need to manually review the results as sometimes there are false negatives.

My biggest competitors have a much ldata number of links than me but having looked at there link profiles I think 50% of them are a bit dodgy and I have a nice clean if a bit sparce link profile yet I seem to be the one stuck behind. My content was the issue but it has been getting much better. Still ont great but better than my competitors. I hope the next updates help me but I assume I will get messed up by google again! Lol.

thats really helpful thanks. ill have a think about the about us link. Its a design V usability issue and i cant decide in this case which should win. I like to keep things as clean as possible. content and blogs wise we have mountains to do but we are working on it and i'm in the process of recruiting bloggers and more writers but its hard to get quality writers with specialist equestrian knowledge. If you get a good writer with no horse background they stand out like a sore thumb! I plan to rewrite the about us and faqs to optimise them more effectively, this will include adding details and length. Thanks again for the advice. Been running fast into the SEO darkness and i have not been 100% sure it was in the correct direction so your comments give me a bit more confidence to keep going! thanks.

We didn't get an instant hit. It was a 50-60% drop spread from aug to end of feb in a pretty steady downward slope. It has been pretty level from feb until now. That's why I'm a bit unsure of the reason for the drop. I havlocal ready cross referenced the google updates and there is a rough coronation between the updates and the start of the declin but nothing concert.

Thanks My site is not huge about 3000 pages. We did some architecture upgrades and a bit of a design change and since then Google has hammered us! I cant see any reason for its and have been trying to find the issue and it is just taking ages to bounce back. we are also doing a content upgrade site wide and its having a slight effect but I think it may just be to little over the whole site to have an effect. my site is www.centralsaddlery.co.uk i would love to here any ideas or issues architecture wise. Its a long way of on content and the product pages could be better but we are being held back by an outdated CMS(new CMS is under construction). it just seems like all efforts are failing. if its just time and content that is the issue I can just keep working but i am worried there is a bigger problem lurking in the site architecture.