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Thanks John!

The problem is that by definition long tail keywords have relatively low individual search volume, making it difficult to identify them in an algorithmic manner.   A lot of people stand by http://ubersuggest.org/ you could give that a go.

I prefer other methods, such as digging into analytics or site search data to figure out what information people are seeking from your site. If you can collect data from other sources, such as a sales team that answers queries from clients, that could also be useful.

Hi folks. The site in question is at http://bit.ly/UDV186

It is split into English and Spanish versions, each at root/en and root/es respectively. The home page is in Spanish.

We're trying to rank the site for English keywords so we want to switch the homepage to English and put the Spanish version as secondary.

What are the best practices for this? Can we just literally swap the two versions around onto the existing URLs, i.e. take the English text and put it onto the home page? Provided all links point to the correct page, would that be fine?

Are there any other best practice considerations to take?

Thanks in advance.

Irving, I had a client who had been hit with a manual penalty for Doorway Pages. They weren't Doorway Pages, they were just pages on various domains (that he owned) with a lot of duplicate content on them. We got him reinstated when we implemented cross-domain canonicals and filed a re-inclusion request. Sounds similar to this case?

Just wondering if anyone had heard of sites being hit like that for dupe content?

I'm no technical expert but it sounds like you're playing with fire. I've seen more than one site penalised for exactly this. If it looks like you're trying to rank the same piece of content twice, at least one of the URLs is at risk of filtering or a penalty.  Isn't this exactly what the cross-domain canonical was created for?

Thanks Kyle, much appreciated.

My first priority is to see if they'll consider a new HTML version, it remains to be seen if they'll be convinced.

Does anyone know the latest on how well Google is indexing flash sites?  I'm talking to a prospect now whose site is 100% flash, but looking at it all the content within the site is indexed and returning in the results.

This is promising enough, but does anyone know exactly how well Google is indexing flash content these days and are there still any problems with that?

Thanks!

This is all related to another question I had about Authorship / AuthorRank:

Google Webmaster Tools will show you author stats for the sites that you are a verified contributor to.  So if you have GWT linked to the same account your Google+ profile is on, you can see your own authorship stats.

But what about a corporate or client's site that you're working on, with multiple contributors?  Is there a way of monitoring the impact that all your contributors' AuthorRank is having?

A common scenario will be websites commissioning content from freelancers with high AuthorRank.  As the client or the agency, how will we monitor the impact of that AuthorRank without access to each individual's GWT?

This would make a very handy addition to SEMoz's Research Tools...

My company provides search & content marketing services for a number of high end / luxury travel brands.  We don't really share your problem.  We don't build sites ourselves, but the sites we work with have usually been well built by SEO standards. When we come across a site that does need some work, it's usually very easy to explain to a client why they need to take a second look at their architecture, and how they can do that without sacrificing their branding.

There's absolutely no reason that a luxury brand shouldn't have content on its site. In fact, I'd say the opposite: a luxury brand should be finding every opportunity to communicate its unique expertise and authority in its field, using a variety of content to do that.

When it comes to content creation and off-site SEO working with luxury brands can be trickier than most since the bar is often much higher in the level of quality that is expected.  So our luxury clients usually end up spending more on content development, which means we have to be very careful how we deploy that content to ensure they get best value.

We also spend a lot of time on publisher & blogger outreach and building relationships with high end publications that we can partner with to help promote our client sites.

But in some respects, this is actually easier than doing SEO for a non-luxury brand, because the client already has an understanding of the need to invest in quality, and they don't expect results from cheap, spammy tricks.

Regards, Matthew

Hi folks,

I've been dealing with an online travel agency who came to me looking for content marketing services. One look at their analytics & GWT was all I needed to see they have some serious site cleanup to do before they can start spending money on our services.

Their search traffic floored with the first Panda update back in Feb 2011, and they've gone through all sorts of turbulence with the Penguin updates too. There are no messages in GWT, but I suspect their previous SEO guy might have deleted them to cover his tracks.

I did a quick look at their link profile and there's all kinds of junk in there, they have dupe content all over the place and the whole thing needs cleaning up. In other words, it's a mess.

I'd like to win some business from them, but first they need to talk to a Panda/Penguin recovery specialist. If you're interested, drop me a private message and I'll put you in touch with them.

Thanks, Matt.

I guess that's a no then!

It's pretty clear that "AuthorRank" is going to be a big thing for SEO.

Although the main principles seem to be pretty straightforward (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/authorship-google-plus-link-building) what I'm less clear about is how we can start to think about author influence as a measurable metric.

Webmaster tools gives us Author Stats as an impact on the site's impressions/CTR, but how do we measure the influence of an individual author? Are those factors even defined?

Will we get to a stage where authors can be given a Klout-like score for Google Authorship? If not that, how will it look?

This will be a HUGE question to solve for future content development strategies, and is something I'm thinking a lot about right now.

Best, Matt.