Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I work for a website that recently did a redesign, and switched from hyphens to underscores. We have seen some drop in traffic, although that may be attributed to the migration.

I have read that while Google prefers hyphens, the underscore problem is not as much of an issue as it used to be.

Is it worth 301'ing the page to a version of itself with hyphens instead of underscores in the URL?

I have worked with a few different SEO firms lately and a lot of them have recommended on the sites I was working on to "no-follow" all external links on the site.

On one hand this traps all the link equity/Pagerank.  On the other I would think this practice is frowned upon by Google.

What are some opinions on this?

I would like to look at data or sources to get the most accurate measure I can on search engine market share.

Does anyone have reliable sources on search engine volume/market share etc?

So right now I am looking to develop an infographic for a client and I was wonder from your guys' experience, how much has it cost? I have all the statistics and basic idea of how i want it to look, and its not going to be a super interactive type, more of a standard style graphic. I'm curious about where you went to find your designer and just kind of a ballpark price to work off of so I know what the market is like out there. Any input in anyway would be greatly appreciated!

I have quite a few website in Wordpress but I continuously run into the same issue.

With permalinks it is not recommended to use /%category%/%post_name%/  because it puts an undue load on your bandwidth, server and makes the crawler crawl a ton of duplicate content pages.  On one site changing to that hierarchy even crashed some of the pages (probably a permissions error).

I would like a correct information hierarchy, but this doesn't seem like correct play.

What do you use as your URL hierarchy?
Do you have any plugins or fixes for this issue?

Thanks

So the ratio is MozTrust to MozRank, but what is this good for?  What can I deduce from this and what can I use it for?

Hopefully, I started one really early yesterday and one midday and still haven't gotten them.

I am just wondering if anyone has had a full SERP Report in the keyword difficulty tool finish for them or if they know how long these take to populate?

Currently my company uses basecamp with a splash of google docs a little bit of Paymo, and Raventools for project management.  (We use other tools like SEOmoz, but not so much for management as SEO tasks)

The ideal features we are looking for are:

Collaborative document editing and sharing(Google Docs)

Task lists and project organization (basecamphq)

Time Tracking on a per task basis (Paymo)

(SEO tracking software is great too, but it doesn't have to be integrated with the project management directly. Currently using Raventools and SEOMoz along with some smaller tools.)

The project management side can be completely separate from the SEO tool side, but it would be great if there was one simple interface that all of this could be done from.

Any suggestions?  Are there features I'm missing in my current software that could bring them up to this level?

Thanks EGOL, you are a a valuable asset to these boards.

I have a hosting account that is ancient.  So is it's CPanel, its way of operation (I have to call in to change the zone file), and its hardware and software (It can't even recognize Wordpress as a user so i have to change permissions to change anything.)

I plan on moving the site, but I want to prepare for any changes that may happen.  Currently the site ranks between #1 or 3 for quite a few very valuable words.  It is also in season for this business.  I know changing hosting data or servers can cause google to temporarily drop rankings.  Does anyone have any experience with this or now how long the faded rankings can last? Or if its even true?

We solved it, our web programmer wrote a program to scrape all of our posts and turn them into a format that imported into wordpress.  As far as the redirects we kept the page titles the same and did a sitewide 301 that sent them from blog.example.com to example.com/blog/

Although I would still like to grab Richard's php script for doing this in a more efficient manner in the future.

I have always wondered this and was curious if anyone had the answer.  Most sites are.com and I assume that is most peoples go to when typing in a URL.

So why does SEOmoz use .org?

Exactly Joe, although I'm focusing on the SEO value derived from social media.  As was stated above social media sites have no-follows that don't pass link juice, but still affect rankings.  I am basically trying to ascertain if anyone on here knows "if a link is in a redirected truncated form, does it lose most or all of it's link value, including ANY value a link can have?" with an emphasis on the social media pass through value.

Does it still count as a like or a share when the link is truncated and redirected?

Do you have any evidence to back up this claim? Any reasoning behind assuming a 301 passes link juice, but it wont pass through any social media ranking signals?

I am aware that social media has its own signal as I stated above.

Let me try to refine the question once more.

Does anyone know if a 301 redirect link on a social media page still sends ranking signals?

Thanks.  I wonder how this works in a social media context though?  Since twitter and facebook don't count for direct link juice, how would a 301 link affect the social media power?

Also does anyone have any idea what the anchor text counts as in that scenario?  probably just stopped.at/SAuadh

I help a site that helps spread word by getting links on peoples social media pages.  These links are truncated ie website.com/XyUE  for the purposes of tracking clicks, referrals and so forth.  I have heard that when a link is in a redirect form like that it loses close to all, if not completely all of its link value.  The links themselves are technically 301's.  Do these still maintain value?

For example, the stopped.at links on this person's twitter. http://twitter.com/#!/Melewis18

Is there any way to make links of this type maintain SEO value?  Is there a workaround to truncating for tracking purposes?

The and operator is an and operator, not an OR.  It works like you would think it would.

Straight from the mouth of Google:

"The OR operator
Google's default behavior is to consider all the words in a search. If you want to specifically allow either one of several words, you can use the OR operator (note that you have to type 'OR' in ALL CAPS). For example,

• [ San Francisco Giants 2004 OR 2005 ] will give you results about either one of these years, whereas [ San Francisco Giants 2004 2005 ] (without the OR) will show pages that include both years on the same page. The symbol | can be substituted for OR. (The AND operator, by the way, is the default, so it is not needed.)"

Link to the operator page:

http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer=136861

I am doing SEO for a website that has constantly rotating and only temporarily pertinent subjects on it.  Let's say these information and subject cycles go for about 6 months.  Assuming this would it be more effective to optimize exact match domains for each 6 month cycle or make a main domain with a few of the keywords and just target a page for each roaming subject?

Advantage of the subject is I get domain authority to feed off of, advantage of the exact match is, of course exact match domains are a powerful tool to rank highly and it is only a medium competitive market, usually about 40 domain and page authority.

What do you guys think?  Do you have any techniques to dominate temporary and rotating markets?