Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I agree with Andrea Moz are great at giving away stuff for free, especially when you get involved with the community. I have received all sorts from tshirts to keyrings to fridge magnets.

Welcome aboard

I agree with Rob you would be best to place a nofollow on the links between your country level domains. By doing this you get to keep the links and convenience from a users point of view, but you are flagging to Google that you are not trying to pass authority between your sites by interlinking them. Essentially you are waving a flag that says you are not trying to manipulate your rankings by creating your own link network.

I think you are right about this Adam I should have looked what I wrote I didn't mean just point www.competitor.com to www.yoursite.com and have done I meant do a 301 over a single link from homepage that auto-redirects after 10 secs - you should always redirect at a page by page level as it helps the user find the content they are looking for. I think that redirecting at a blanket level like this can actually hinder rather than help you - see http://moz.com/blog/save-your-website-with-redirects

so thumbs up

Quick note as Cyrus says in the above linked post you won't see much benefit in terms of SEO by doing a blanket redirect to your homepage!! So don't waste your purchase take your time and make your redirects relevant Mike

Oh yeah one more quick thing I would have a glance at this thread on webmasterworld - http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4348449.htm

I have never personally bought a competitor and implemented a 301 redirect - what adam and myself speak of would be best practice for this in terms of pass authority from the site you have bought in terms of its link profile. However this is all done around the pretext of boosting your ranking and Google knows this goes on and isn't daft!

Have you done this in the same situation Adam - buying a rivals site? I would be very interested to hear yours or anyone else's first hand experience on this and I think it will help Mike as well. As you are redirecting between two sites that are well established in Google's index rather than between an established site and a new one or new structure, which I have done and think is more commonly the case for 301 use.

I personally would look at doing a 301 redirect from their website to yours. This will give you the most benefit as it will pass authority to your site from links that they have gained. Increased authority equals better ranks in general so this will be a good thing! Much better than having a single link from their homepage effectively passing the benefit of a single link from their site rather than the multiple links they have gained. Have a look at this video about the passing of pagerank through 301 redirects from Googles Matt Cutts

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Filv4pP-1nw

Hi Quilbur

These guys have all given you some great answers I just thought you might like this extra little bit of info - Bing actually takes meta keywords as a spam signal since about 2011.

Have a look at this article by Danny Sullivan - http://searchengineland.com/the-meta-keywords-tag-lives-at-bing-why-only-spammers-should-use-it-96874

As the only thing that meta keywords actually do is make it easier for your competitors to know what keywords you are targeting  (as jamesm5i stated) I never implement them.

I always make sure that there is a strong call to action on the meta description as I have seen the results of implementing this with sites already in postions 2 and 3 - a strong call to action increased the search traffic generated by them significantly.

Hi

I personally would say that you want all your classifieds ads indexed (INDEX) as they will help with your long tail traffic from the search engines. I used to run a classified ads section on a site that I ran and the classified ads system picked up a fair amount of long tail traffic. In turn this helped drive more traffic and conversions through the site as a whole.

Have you considered adding a plugin like Yoast SEO? This is an excellent tool and it will help you sort out your Moz Campaign results.

Have a look here - http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/

As far as too many on-page links goes moz reports what is best standard but I can tell you from experience that I have had successful sites redesigned and there on-page links have increased to above this threshold so have been flagged by Moz. However my rankings went up even with this issue because it made sense from a users perspective so I stuck with it and it paid off.

Meta descriptions are your page description and call to action so not having them misses out on the added benefit of enticing a potential visitor from the SERPs. However Google is pretty good at determining what meta to incorporate and this element doesn't directly affect your rankings. I used to have a summary section/text box that users had to enter a short description into in order to submit a classified. This was also used to populate meta description. It just made this element easier to populate and make unique I found.

FINAL NOTE - just to be clear you don't want to restrict access to any of your sites content in terms classified adds and their categories - the more unique content that is indexed the better it is for your SEO - more chances of picking up traffic especially from the long tail specific searches.

I hope this helps

Hi

You are obviously going to need to change around the 301 redirect and do it on a page by page basis, so that any links gained on those pages will pass the authority gained to the corresponding pages.

If you don't do it at this level you will end up with an increased bounce rate and this is likely to impact your rankings as visitors that find a current page in the search engine results aren't likely to search your site again if they are just taken straight to your homepage - they are likely to just assume that this content no longer exists.

You will also need to set the change of address in Google Webmaster Tools to help Google figure out your change.

I would recommend you read this great article in relation to minimising the impact of a change on your rankings -

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/achieving-an-seo-friendly-domain-migration-the-infographic

Also have a look at the other articles mentioned in this one.

Hope this helps!

Thanks - I have always found it a quick win in terms increasing traffic to your site and it is one of the first places I would look at optimising in order to see noticeable benefits.

The meta description tag hasn't had an impact on your actual ranking in the search results for a very long time. However you should still be utilising this tag and writing a custom description for each page on your clients site in order to help increase your click-through in the search results. I always view it as a call to action to help increase CTR - how can you entice searchers to click your page over others surrounding you?

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/meta-description

Great bit of info by DR Pete of SEOMoz -

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/why-wont-google-use-my-meta-description

Glad I could help Brian and welcome to the community, by the way

Is your domain a brand name or an exact match domain targeting a specific keyword?

If it is an EMD then it could be as simple as your site doesn't rank as well as the others and these types of domain don't have the same benefit they used in terms ranking for the terms they match quickly.

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2214115/Google-Warns-of-Upcoming-Exact-Match-Domain-Algorithm-Change

Without the "site:" query in Google it is common to only have one result when doing a domain search - this may have multiple sitelinks under one listing. An example of your typical domain listing would be amazon.co.uk typed into Google - a strong well ranked brand but it only appears once for its domain search on page 1, yet it does have multiple sitelinks for the one listing.

When you say you had a robots.txt live at first - many well ranked sites have them live all the time, but it is more a question of what was in the file? For instance where you restricting access to any or all parts of your site?

Hi Brian

I think you might find this helpful - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6634302/how-to-leverage-browser-caching-at-asp-net-iis-7-5

and...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/642954/iis7-cache-control

You should be able to do this by making/editing (if you already have one) a web.config file in your root folder, which is explained in the article above.

Firstly welcome to the community David :),

Very interesting video  - I hadn't seen this! Additions like this show why this community is so great! We are constantly helping each other expand our knowledge.

I think you will agree that a 301 is still the answer to this question and the best method for moving domains and taking the value of your old domain with you in terms of the search engines and ranking...

Google has been changing/rewriting title tags in some situations for a while you may find this article interesting - http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2049990/Google-Changing-Titles-in-Search-Results-SEOs-Not-Happy

Try the following in your .htaccess:

RedirectMatch 301 ^/stuff-1/(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/stuff/$1

Hi Chandu - yes you can do this by using a 301 redirect from your old/existing domain to your new one. It will pass 90-99% of the link juice and therefore value in terms of your search engine rankings.

Here is some more info - http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection

Google on 301 redirects - http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93633

Doing this will lead to keyword cannibalization, so I would recommend you have a read of this post from Rand in regards to the issue for a greater understanding

- http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-solve-keyword-cannibalization

If I were you I would aim to make each of the title tags different...

One suggestion I would make is look at your pages meta description as it sounds like you have relatively strong rankings but people searching the related terms aren't clicking on your listing in the SERPs. I found that there was a significant increase in the traffic generated from pages that were already ranking well by optimising my meta description in order to entice people more.

I would suggest you read this in relation to meta descriptions

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/why-wont-google-use-my-meta-description

Always good to refresh the basics:

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/meta-description

Consider using rich snippets if you don't already as this will also help entice users to click on your result as it will make it stand out more in the results.

Have a read of this excellent article in relation to them -

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/a-visual-guide-to-rich-snippets

Good point Keri - I think it would probably be appropriate to have a link to this as well http://www.business.ftc.gov/documents/bus61-can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business

Have you glanced at SEOMoz's best practices for title tags? - http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/title-tag

In my opinion you should have the title as natural as possible and that should be the a clear label as to what your article is about. Have you looked at examples such as how SEOMoz has titles on their blog - article title | brand

In my experience you will also pick up more long tail traffic with more natural titles such as using the full title rather than just a specific keyword. It also looks less spammy and over-optimized which is something to take into consideration after recent Google updates.