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Competitions are being run for the benefit of brand awareness, social media interaction and retention. If there is a possible SEO "edge" to be gained with adding in something I don't see the issue with that.

Again the question is, do people think a share to a more prominent page like a homepage is more worthy from an SEO point of view than a deep sub page?

I don't disagree with either of the above points, I guess what I was really wondering is do people think there is an SEO advantage with doing one over the other?

Hi everyone,

Just a quick straw poll to see what people think?

When running a FB competition is there more value in sharing the competition url on the website (a sub sub page) or sharing the homepage url with very obvious directions for the user to find the competition page?

Thoughts & comments?

Have to say I am really dissapointed with the way in which some of the tools consistantly drop their service - especially the KW tool

Hey Jom,

I must admit I am not sure on the level of urgency to sort this problem out but personally I like to keep the duplication of content to a minimum.

There are multiple ways to sort this out but the most straight forward would probably be to add a rel canonical tag to your web pages.

Here is a good post discussing the faceted issues you can get from e-commerce site, here is SEOMoz's canonicalization guide and here is another seomoz blog post about e-commerce sites and the use of the rel canonical tag.

Hope this helps

SEO Moz's very own Keyword Analysis Tool

Hey Mike,

Opt is correct the .htaccess file is the way to go but I would first test this in a sandbox / development environment as messing with this file can bring your entire site down quickly if you get it wrong (and sometimes you think you have it right and there is a knock effect elsewhere).

Failing that you could always add rel canonical tags to your site which either use the trailing slash format or not. This may be easier to do depending on the CMS you are using.

Hey Bob,

I dont want to get into the whole link building aspect as this is quite an indepth thing to do, however I thought I might just throw a few on site suggestions.

1. you are using multiple H1 tags and are not using H2. I would fix this

2. Your meta descriptions are too long for the search engines (Google) to pick up without making it a synopsis ending in "...", I would try to get this down to 165 chars so you can control what is being shown in the SERP's

3. Your articles could do with having customer Meta titles and descriptions

This was just what I saw on first glance, I will let you know if I see anything else

Mark

Hi Dave,

Bandicoot is correct. However I thought I would just add 1 more thought.

If you are using Linkscape for this analysis this data set is usually a little behind in "freshness" and this could be 1 reason why you are not seeing your links, also I believe Linkscape also trys to cut out some of the cr@p so you might not see some of the lower / spammier links in here.

Hey Mozzer's, quick question:

Does anyone out there have any opinions / research on whether the use of image maps is an effective way of linking to other pages on a site as opposed to using seperate images?

Does Google read alternate text from an image map in the same way as a regular image?

I used MediaTemple for 2 years before moving hosting locally ($50 per month is cheap for Ireland!).

I have to say they were great, there was no downtime and the spec of the DV was immense.

The support was a little slow sometimes but I rarely needed them and I always got what I needed from them.

No question in mind for reliability which was my main concern.

Yep that's it.

You link the one on othersite.com so that the content is marked as being a copy and the source is mysite.com

The link on mysite.com just confirms to google that your is the original in case there is any misunderstanding

Just another thought, have you tried seeing what your search term report tells you in Adwords as this might show you search terms that have clicks against them that are not showing on the main overiew panel.

Go to the Dimensions tab and change the view to Search Terms and drag that out to Excel.

The other possiblity is that Google has just gone crazy....... had to happen some time

Also another possibility is that they have been free clicks. I think I have seen this mentioned somewhere in adwords reports, I think it has something to do with when linking your google places account with your campaign - have you done this?

For me a few nofollows are part of a natural link profile but there are plenty of ways to get these without paying any money let alone a large amount, so nofollow means no pay! Besides there are so many great links out there for free i only pay for the best. Mark

A couple of thoughts. 1) these are unlikely to have come from the display network as they would not show Under the search total, so safe to say your campaign settings are fine. 2) have you deleted any keywords or edited the keywords in any way (even the match type)? If so adwords won't show the clicks against the original keyword, it will clear the stats for the updated keyword and just keep them in the total at the bottom. E.g you had 2 clicks on "blue widget" and you edited the keyword to [blue widget], adwords will clear the 2 clicks alongside the keyword but keep them in the total below. Mark

Hi Joe, I have found that most scores for what I deem to be mildly competitive keywords seem to be around the 45% - 55% Mark, with those being strongly competitive at 60%+ and low competition at about 25%. I have never come across anything dropping below 25% or above the high 60% range so for me I use these as the limits. So to answer your question I would classify a score of 60% much more competitive than a score of 50%. Mark