Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi All,

I operate from the UK only. How can I exclude select countries from viewing both my organic website and Google Adwords listing.

Organic Website
Are the any free online services that give you a simple click + download/view script to cut & paste into a .htaccess file.

Google Adwords
Ditto as above with the exception to paste the IP list into Campaign | Setting Tab | Advanced settings - IP exclusions

Thanks Mark

Hi Andy + Vadim,

Thank you for your thoughts.
I have the following questions and concerns.

I have read that web directories offer little or no seo value. Google simply see's them as link farms.

I'm confused with regards to placing a 750-1500 word article on a 3rd party client site. Is this not the same as 'Guest Blogging'. Again, I have read how Matt Cutts frowns upon this practice.

Please kindly clarify....

Thanks Mark

Hi Andy,

Thank you for the information. I will read this shortly.
May I ask you for your advice and how you would tackle such a grey area.

Thanks Mark

Hi All,

Based on a hypothetical scenario, lets say you are a plumber. You live and operate within Chelsea in London. You have established a Google places profile and incorporated schema data to tell Google your fixed place location.

In addition you operate in several nearby towns with no fixed location presence. i.e Brentford, Bromley, Catford, Cheswick and Tottenham.

I create a feature rich page on 'How to find a quality plumber'. Within the page I incorporate the following description:

blah blah, as a quality plumber serving the community of Chelsea, we also offer our services to nearby towns of Brentford, Bromley, Catford, Cheswick and Tottenham.

I create hyperlinks for the towns (Brentford, Bromley, Catford, Cheswick and Tottenham) that allow the user see in details a full list of services, operation hours, etc. Naturally all towns will have there own unique content (no duplication).

Question
Is the above scenario the correct way to provide local seo or is this approach considered spammy to Google?

Thanks Mark

Dear Devanur,

Thank you for your response.

To date i have checked both Google Analytics, Keyword Planner, and live running Google Adwords Campaign. All have not yielded favourable traffic. Please bear in mind the low traffic examples stated previously have no bearing to my actual low traffic pages. However, I have seen almost 99.5% of customers hitting my high traffic page.

With this in mind, I cannot see any way that even to incentivise customers (based on your model) that any additional traffic can be found.

Therefore, would redirecting my low traffic pages still be beneficial?

Regards Mark

Thank you Chris you your response.

The example provided was an over simplified scenario.

In reality, I will be driving the users to a high traffic page that has relevance. Additionally, users would seldom search for the low traffic pages and therefore by removing these from Google's index won't make them appear in the search. Within the high traffic page, I will give the user the experience and information on all low traffic content.

Please give your thoughts.

Regards Mark

A number of pages on my site have low traffic metrics. I intend to redirect poor performing pages to the most appropriate page with high traffic.

Example
www.sampledomomain.co.uk/low-traffic-greyshoes
www.sampledomomain.co.uk/low-traffic-greenshoes
www.sampledomomain.co.uk/low-traffic-redshoes

all of the above will be redirected to the following page:
www.sampledomomain.co.uk/high-traffic-blackshoes

Question
Will carrying out htaccess redirects from the above example influence to web positioning of both www.sampledomomain.co.uk/high-traffic-blackshoes and www.sampledomomain.co.uk

Regards Mark

Thank you for your quick and detailed response.
Apologies, I think I have not explained my question well...

See link: http://imgur.com/iDy0E1Z

As you can see, every url has the same link anchor text named 'Home'.

My question is:
What is the best naming convention for this link anchor text. Should i simply leave it blank, call it 'Home', my website url, etc.

Regards Mark

Moz - Open Site Explorer using the following setup:

Tab: Inbound Links
Show: "all"
from: "Only Internal"

I have run a number of random tests and have noticed the following results in the link anchor text.

[No Anchor Text]
company name
website url
Home
etc.

What is the best practice and naming convention to be used?

Regards Mark

Hi Mike,

Thank you for your response.

I have another related question:
Can you pull the review metrics from Google Local Places in readiness to publish on your website?

Thank you in advance

Mark

Hi All,

Let’s say you are a service provider such a Garden Landscaper, and over time your customers have placed reviews on Google Local Places.

As part your sites redesign your looking to implement "Rich Snippets Aggregated Reviews". Your organic natural search results should include the reviews; aggregated star picture, aggregated review value and total reviews.

Question #1 Is this possible?
#2 What is the best way of achieving this via Wordpress as a plugin?
#3 Do you need to file for consideration via Google?

Any other useful advice will be appreciated.

Thanks Mark

Hi Remus & Kurt,

Thank you for your advise.

Mark

Scenario
The website has a menu consisting of 4 links

Home | Shoes | About Us | Contact Us

Additionally within the body content we write about various shoe types. We create a link with the anchor text "Shoes" pointing to www.mydomain.co.uk/shoes

In this simple example, we have 2 instances of the same link pointing to the same url location.
We have 4 unique links.
In total we have 5 on page links.

Question
How many links would Google count as part of the link juice model?
How would the link juice be weighted in terms of percentages?
If changing the anchor text in the body content to say "fashion shoes" have a different impact?

Any other advise or best practice would be appreciated.

Thanks Mark

Article: http://searchengineland.com/homepage-sliders-are-bad-for-seo-usability-163496

I came across the following article and somewhat agree with the authors summary.
I find sliders a distraction to B2B users and overall offers no SEO benefits.

Scenario
As a service provider, over time I have worked with many high profile blue chip comnpanies. As part of my site redesign, I'm looking to show users my client achievements.

My initial thoughts are to carry out the following:

On the home page I'm looking to incorporate some high profile company logos (similar to http://www.semrush.com) with a hyperlink "more customers" to the right of logo caption. The link will take the user to a dedicated page (www.mydomain.co.uk/customer) showing a comprehensive list of company logos.

Questions
#1 Is the above practice good or bad.
#2 Is there a better way to achieve the above

Any other practical advise on user experience, social engagement, website speed, etc would be much appreciated.

Thanks Mark

I'm looking to add a number of feature rich articles to educate, promote best practice and provide useful all round advice.

My reasearch to date on the pros and cons have drawn me to writing articles as a page, as per
http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/#pagesvsposts

My Question, etc.
I would like to get an outside opinion on the above.

Additionally, how can you find out the site structure of a website.
i.e. what are blog posts or static pages

Can you be a victim of your own success?

So your write a quality article on your website. You educate your audience and hope quality trusted authority sites will link back to your article. Great, all those plus points adding to your SEO.
On the down side you get poor quality sites with no real SEO value linking to your article.

My Question Is This: What impact will poor quality sites have on your SEO?
What impact will changing the Anchor Text to something unrelated to the article content have on SEO?
Are there any other considerations?
Thanks Mark

Robert and Devanur,
Thank you for taking the time in writing a detailed summary on how to safe guard oneself.

In particular, I warm to the idea that we can protect our content using rel=author, **rel=publisher **and https://plus.google.com/authorship

I suppose all our best attempts may never safeguard our content 100%. However, at least Google, etc will know where the article originated from. Maybe Google have some mechanics in place, to place on there radar those sites that steal content.

Thanks Mark

Everybody at some point will write a feature rich article and publish it on their website.
What is stopping your competitors from blatantly stealing your article and publishing it on their own website virtually word for word.
If your competitors website gets indexed by Google before yours than surely Google will see your hard work and cost as duplicate content.

Question:
Should site owners be worried about this type of practice?
How do we safeguard ourselves from this type of practice?

Any other good advice would be appreciated...

Thanks Mark

Thank you Oleg for your response.

Are there any other considerations I should be thinking about in my strategy?

Thanks Mark

Hi All,

Key to a successful website is quality content - so the Gods of Google tell me. Embrace your audience with quality feature rich articles on your products or services, hints and tips, how to, etc.

So you build your article page with all the correct criteria; Long Tail Keyword or phrases hitting the URL, heading, 1st sentance, etc.

My question is this
Let's say you have 30 articles, where would you place the 30 articles for SEO purposes and user experiences.

My thought are:
1] on the home page create a column with a clear heading "Useful articles" and populate the column with links to all 30 articles.
or
2] throughout your website create link references to the articles as part of natural information flow.
or
3] Create a banner or impact logo on the all pages to entice your audience to click and land on dedicated "articles page"

Thanks Mark