Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Looks great guys. Appears to be much speedier than before!

Hi Diane,

Yes, I would suggest adding the above code I suggested and customizing it to the page.

The rich snippet testing tool indicates that authorship is working for your page but there still must be something which is incorrect -

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.in2town.co.uk%2Ftrip-advisor%2Ftop-american-ski-resorts-for-over-50s&html=

Let me know how you get on,

Mark

Hi Diane,

• Apply Authorship markup for the person who has written the article.
• Apply publisher markup (your brand Google + page) to the homepage of the site.
• For the logo, just link it to the homepage. I'm not sure what you mean by text in regards this.

Best wishes,

Mark

Hi Diane,

I thought I wold jump in as no one else has so far. My suggestions are noted below -

• Apply Google + authorship markup to all of the articles on your site.

If we take the article you just linked to as an example, you can see that markup has no been applied to it.

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.in2town.co.uk%2Ftrip-advisor%2Ftop-american-ski-resorts-for-over-50s&html=

If you can't find a suitable Joomla SEO plugin (apologies, my Joomla knowledge is poor so I can't recommend one), you need to add the below HTML to each article and tailor it.

| |

• I would also suggest improving the content a little bit. The title of the article is 'Top American ski resorts for over 50s, but the content of the article doesn't make it clear what the top resorts actually are. The body of the article would benefit greatly from more information about the resorts in a clear format, and possibly with added images.

• The alt text for the image seems a little spammy - 'skiing holiday ideas'. The alt text of an image should reflect what the image is about.

• Random suggestion, I find it strange that your logo doesn't link to the homepage

• The title tag of your site doesn't contain your brand name. Worth putting at the end of the title tag.

I could go a lot deeper but hopefully that's a starting point for you Diane.

Any more questions then just shout!

Best wishes,

Mark

Hi Alan,

I noticed this earlier today. We lost 25% of the +1's across each of our business pages. It seems to be a common problem at the moment and hopefully just a glitch.

http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/google-plus-discuss/dBaF3946f2A

I'm remaining hopeful that this will be fixed as everything was fine yesterday.

Hope this helps,

Mark

Hi there,

Quick question - What CMS does your website currently use?

From your post, I can eliminate Wordpress and Joomla so my question would be whether it's a custom built CMS or one that you downloaded and installed.

"1 way would be to simply create a standard page for each of the questions and to link it all up from a  main "FAQ" page. This however wouldn’t be easily searchable (something I think an FAQ section should be) "

Why not? If you're correctly interlinking between the pages as well as appropriate on-page SEO applied, I don't see any issue.

Apologies - My linked source was a little outdated but it did indicate it would become more widely adapted

Hi Susan,

Sorry if I can't get into too deep of a response as I don't know the full back history of what links you had removed, and also how the link profile for your website is at the moment since you didn't include a link to it.

However, what I can point out is a problem with your current link building tactics.

• Classified Submission
• Article Submission
• Guest Posts
• Blog Comment
• Forum Submission
• Q & A Submissions
• Product Submissions
• Review Websites

I personally would avoid all of the above methods except for Guest Posts, and even then you need to be incredibly careful about websites you distribute your content on.

Classified and article submissions will generally hold very little weight now (highly depends on the actual sites), blog comments can appear spammy if they're quite generic and on poor quality sites. Forum submissions I would generally avoid completely, but still considering interacting with people on forums within your niches and offering high quality responses to relevant topics. The same applies to Q & A submissions as well since you need to be thinking about what you offer the user.

As for review sites, it really depends whether you mean users can submit reviews themselves through sites like TrustPilot, or if they're cheap review sites which you're building fake reviews on.

My advice Susan would be to dip much deeper with your link cleanup process. You may have tried to remove as many links as possible, but if your link building tactics consist of the above list, I would be quite worried about whether or not you're adding to the problem.

If you have any questions etc, feel free to give me a shout

It's not surprising really. Yahoo uses Bing to pull in organic search results and has been doing so for quite a long time now.

http://searchengineland.com/yahoos-transition-to-bing-organic-results-complete-49228

It makes sense that you would be seeing the same results across both platforms.

If a keyword is ranking for poor quality content..then it's not a keyword worth having.

So for this reason, I would remove the comments. If they haven't already been picked up by Google's Panda update,  then expect it to happen shortly.

Even if you take a hit with rankings for these keywords, it's better disposing of the generic comments now, rather than them having a negative impact on your whole site in the future,

Cheers guys - Both options are great.

I think I'll go with Woothemes

Hi guys,

Maybe a little bit off topic but could anyone recommend where I could find a designer to create an e-commerce template for Wordpress?

Also, I'm open to suggestions about where I could find templates available for purchasing.

I rather not use PayPal for taking payments through my store, are there alternative methods which would work with Wordpress E-Commerce?

Cheers,

Mark

Hi  Mubashir,

I would suggest you begin by focusing on the on-page SEO first.

I'm not sure what level you're at in terms of your SEO knowledge but for a re-cap, the SEOMoz beginners guide to SEO is always great - http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo

Once you have the structure, content and on-page optimization correct, you can then consider who your audience is, where they can be found online and appropriate methods for putting your site in front of the right people.

With this in mind, you can then begin to build relationships with the influential people who will allow you to put your site in front of their audience.

Hi guys,

I'd appreciate any advice with this one.

At the moment I'm in the process of arranging a URL re-structure. I was wondering what the best way would be to track the performance of the old URLs against new ones?

We will be ammending the URLs for any new property pages which go live on our website but leaving the old URLs in play for any old properties listed. We're taking this approach for the moment so we can conduct analysis on the change.

It has been mentioned to me that placing a 'setvariable' in the code of pages with the old URLs and ones with the new URLs would be a way of tracking performance. However, my knowledge in this area is a little bit grey.

Any advice?

Cheers,

Mark

My instant reaction to looking at that website is that it's a very poor quality directory site.

It looks like a paid directory and a low quality one.

I struggle to understand why people chose to pay for these. They hold no weight anymore.

What a waste of money. Avoid.

A lifetime link? You'll maybe soon have to pay extra money to get the link back off of that site.

This type of directory is no longer effective at all. I would highly suggest keeping your money.

I'd still be slightly cautious. That blog post is two years old. A lot has changed in two years about the success of such tools.

I would still highly suggest you follow the tips in that other article and earn the link.

Hi there,

Nope, I haven't heard of it and I'd highly suggest you stay away from it.

You need to do this all manually.

Identify the blogs you wish to be on. Build that relationship. Build that trust. Earn the link.

An excellent article was posted here yesterday - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-blogger-outreach-equation

I dropped a comment on it as well. I'd suggest you read the article and take note of the points. Forget about using anything that makes things easy.

I hope this helps. Need any other help then just shout.

Mark

Hi Arlene,

I find this hard to understand though. If you added a product right this minute, would the duplicate site have the same product listed within a matter of minutes?

What I've found is that any site that goes to such lengths is typically a competitor wishing to go down the black hat route of trying to have your website penalized. I have witnessed this and it wasn't pleasant. Thankfully we were able to have the duplicate site shut down within 24 hours.

I would stress how urgent this is to you. This site needs to be deleted immediately.