Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Bulloogle.com would definitely have to be a metacrawler - putting emphasis on metatags - oh the good old days haha!

I have also noticed when answering questions myself and also when viewing unanswered questions that people regularly have their questions answered on here, but don't give credit to the people that are answering them. Are all mozzers aware that after so many automatic thumbs up from Q&A they no longer count, so answering a question and getting no recognition from the poster leaves the exercise almost pointless.

I think that it is a case of lack of knowledge and forgetfulness, as I have regularly seen verbal acknowledgement of an answer but no thumbs up given.

Is there no way round this? I know how busy the SEOMOZ staff are but to keep this community improving I think that this should be addressed as it is disheartening and I can imagine that some have already been put of from answering questions! Maybe look at appointing some specific Q&A moderators and not just associates?

Vanilla sometimes is the best flavour - I'd definitely give it  a go! Here's to making the web a better place Egol.

Hi Sofia,

Yes server location does still have an impact on SEO in my experience and if you are looking to target the UK then I would definitely make sure that your server is hosted in the UK.

A hosting provider that I have used for several sites and found to be reliable, in my experience, is www.uk2.net - servers hosted in London, UK and they use CPanel. Hope this helps.

Hi Marisa,

Have you done anything to encourage comments and social media shares? If you have email lists of past and present customers that you regularly use I would send them an outreach email asking for them to click on the link in your email and share your blog posts on social sites such as facebook when they are logged in of course.

You could also incentivise people to comment send them links to blog pieces, such as your competition once you have set it up and ask them a leading question then invite them to respond by commenting on your blog.

I have found increasing social shares and comments on sites has had direct impact on one of the websites that I was working on which was always sat at number 2 for one of my main targeted keywords until I went about pushing its social exposure. Without altering anything onsite other than the number of likes on facebook etc it suddenly moved into the top position and has been there ever since. I hope this answers your question or at least gives you some ideas.

Remember don't be afraid to ask the worst that can happen is you get little reponse or someone emails back saying no - which I haven't found to be the case. My point is that I have found social media impact to have a direct influence on search engine rankings so improving yours would always be a positive move.

Also you could have got the members of each of the different organisations involved with the 10 Impressive Embroidered Dragon Patches by leaving it open to which would be number 1 as it could have been voted for and you could have then posted on the different groups representing these patches pages on social media sites, such as facebook, getting them to vote for theres to be the number one and telling them to like the blog page and pass the message on to friends that would support their group, also increasing exposure for them which could potentially lead to new members. You could have also got asked them to start commenting through this method I think.

Hi Leona - what you have done is something along the lines of what I thought would work for you - sorry if I wasn't clear in my original response - I thought you meant if you created a robots.txt and specified Googlebot to be disallowed then Googlebot-image would pick up the photos still and as I said this wouldn't be the case as it Googlebot-image will follow what it set out for Googlebot unless you specify otherwise using the allow directive as I mentioned. Glad it has worked for you - keep us posted on your results.

I have worked on a site that targets two locations - for the terms that I have targeted in those locations they both rank number one. How I went about this was as follows: I setup a page on the website for both locations, optimizing all the relevant on page factors titles, headers, keywords in text etc. In your case you could focus on the clinics, how long they have been going and include testimonials from customers of each making sure that reference is given to the specific location. I also setup the URL structure to include the location targeted keyword for each page e.g Chester-acupuncture.html and Knutsford-acupuncture.html and I included the links to the pages in menu structure of the site. I then went about link building for each page getting both listings for their location. I also built group pages for each on Facebook and pointed them to the individual website pages. I went about pushing the social media exposure gaining members through offers and information building a rapport with users, this gained likes for both webpages. I found that this strategy lead to decent local rankings and traffic from the targeted place keywords. Obviously this is a brief summary of the strategy that worked for me, it took time and effort with analysis of my competition, but I gained the results I was after and I think you are looking for.

Hi Leona

Googlebot-image and any of the other bots that Google uses follow the rules set out for Googlebot so blocking Googlebot would block your images as it overrides Googlebot-image. I don't think that there is a way around this using the disallow directive as you are blocking the directory which contains your images so they won't be indexed using specific images.

Something you may want to consider is the Allow directive -

Disallow: /community/photos/

Allow: /community/photos/~username~/

that is if Google is already indexing images under the username path?

The allow directive will only be successful if it contains more or equal number of characters as the disallow path, so bare in mind that if you had the following;

Disallow: /community/photos/

Allow: /community/photos/

the allow will win out and nothing will be blocked. please note that i haven't actioned the allow directive myself but looked into it in depth when i studied the robots.txt for my own sites it would be good if someone else had an experience of this directive. Hope this helps.

Hi Paul

Have you looked deeper into your analytics - how do your traffic sources for the two sites compare- are they different? Are you getting traffic from keywords on your new site that you aren't on your old site? If so what is the bounce rate on these terms - my thoughts are you might be ranking well for some keywords that don't provide visitors with the information they are looking for. Alternatively your page could be so relevant for that search keyword that visitors don't need to dig any deeper into the new site. In this case time on page should give you a clue as to which of these it may be in this situation - is the time on page too short to read the content for you average person or not - how long does it take you to read? It might not be this but I always find looking deeper into the analytics of a website tends to hold the key, especially when you are comparing it to another site that you own in the same niche as you are in the fortunate position of having access to both sites analytics. Hope this helps.

I have been in this situation, but my site was hosted in the US and I moved the site to UK hosting and I think it was the right decision - I found my UK traffic increased shortly afterwards.

I link out to other sources frequently too - I work on this principle - will linking to another site enrich this information for the person reading it. Linking to others sites when appropriate is only natural for building a great online resource, which I think is what we all want, that is why we spend time creating great content and marketing our sites online, working on optimization strategies etc. Whether you are selling products, services or blogging creating a site that is a rich resource with great content should always be your aim as this will lead to increases in all aspects, so don't be afraid to add links to other sites if you think it would help the visitor to your site - a website with a link profile that does this looks the most natural..

Hi Eunan,

I have done this very thing in the past - creating a forum for the ecommerce site that I was working on. I actually put the forum on its own domain and found that it did help increase relevant traffic to my main website. However I found that customers were reluctant to post on this community in comparison with a well known independent forum in the same niche. The one thing I didn't do at the time and think that I should have done learning from experience is inviting customers and others with interests relating to my site to be moderators. By doing this I think that you would help increase some exposure through these sources and also give the forum more of a feel of independent discussion even though it is attached to your business.

One other thing I would say that I think you should consider is the fact that if your forum is on your main site and creates a sudden surge in traffic will your site be able to handle it without causing the whole site to slow down. As we all know there is nothing worse for user experience than a site that is slow and clunky. We also know that this also has an influence on rankings.

Thanks Keri, great advice on the use of a code monitor - I have known the situation to occur where code changes have been made to development sites and the robots.txt has been changed or removed by mistake causing the development site to be indexed again. Monitoring this would have helped react to this situation so much quicker!

I think it will work out if you stick with the guest posting route - it will just take some time and effort to encourage others, but it will be worth it. Just a thought - have you thought about running a patch design contest with the best design winning a quantity of free badges of their own organisation? They would have to be voted by visitors and not your company. You could give them a specific design challenge and then you could contact all your old customers and contact any clubs and organisations inviting them to submit their design and information about them and why they should win. Or your contest might be designing some sort of advert in relation to your brand or what you do and getting visitors voting on which they think would be best. I could see something along these lines helping you with traffic etc - what do you think?

Hi Marisa

If I were you I would keep producing fresh content, but I would also think about how I can go about it. Have you thought about asking authoritative bloggers to do guest posts on your site? This can really help with exposure as they are likely to mention this to their loyal readers and you will start to gain exposure and links from this. I would also think about guest blogging myself on other sites to bring up the interest of what you have to say - that way people are more likely to be drawn to follow what you have to say on the site blog.

I think that you have a very marketable subject - running a judo club myself I would suggest you think about sponsoring clubs with some reductions on badges and embroidery if possible and for this I would ask for a link from their sites etc. I would also think about getting these different clubs and organisations to contribute to your blog if possible. just glancing at your blog I think there are lots of opportunities to gain links.

Hi Luke

I had the same problem and this is how I fixed it - I registered the development domain with GWT and then put in a removal request. I also got our developers to setup a robot.txt file to tell search engines not to index any of the site - the contents of the robots.txt file are as follows:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

This soon fixed the issue for us. Hope this helps - obviously you don't need the robots.txt if your are just going to take the site down completely as there will be no worry of people finding it in search engines and mistaking it for your live site or search engines finding duplicate content. I used this strategy as we still use the development site for testing etc before going live.

Can I just check is the URL on a separate domain? If it isn't and it is part of your existing domain for instance you can still block that URL using either a robots.txt file or a no index, no follow meta tag. You can also request removal of specific URL's within a site in GWT.

I would stay away from the tactic of creating spammy blog comments and forum links to your website. Guest blogging and building social relationships with authority figures is always a good tactic to start gaining decent links to your site. I would also consider other ideas such as content curation for your site - there is an excellent article on this in this weeks SEOMoz blog. I would also think about ways in which you could possibly create some sort of viral campaign - maybe a video that could help you gain brand recognition and exposure thus leading to links. I don't know what your site is but have you thought about creating your own blog and encouraging others to produce guest posts for it - invite other to post with outreach emails/letters? Building those relationships with social influencers can a good way to gain guest posts. Hope this helps!

I think you need to be careful with reciprocal linking between websites, however a few links that are pointing at other websites that are an authority within your area is a good thing  as it makes your link profile more natural. However this doesn't need to be from a recommended links page on your site - I have always been a bit wary of this practice as I think this sort of page can look unnatural in my opinion - especially when you start getting lots of site that have a similar page and are linking back to you!

In regards to putting a link at some appropriate place on your website - so rather than having a recommended page I might already have some page on my site where it would be appropriate have a link to this site. I have done something like this on several sites that I have worked on and I don't think it has had any impact on the value of the original link. If you start exchanging lots of links with other sites then you could have a problem.

Hi Charles

As long as your product pages have a reasonable amount of good and unique content of their own with which you are going to incorporate short segments from an awesome piece of content there shouldn't be an issue. I have done something similar previously. I think the best way to look at it is a common sense thing, ask yourself - does this page look similar to another page on my site from a content perspective? - if no you should be fine.

I agree Andrew it has been a good discussion - that is the great thing about this community you can actually bounce ideas off like minded folks that have knowledge and understanding of what you are doing. I think it also shows that there are always several ways to go about things - it is like this discussion it has really got me thinking and I think that can only be a good thing! Thanks