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Hi, I've just checked the number of keywords appearing on my website's pages.

On some of them the keyword density was way too high (7-10%) if you included the meta tags, but all under 3.5% if I didn't include the keywords and description meta tags.

So my question is - when looking at number of keywords used per page, do I have to worry about what's in those meta tags? Do the keywords in there count towards keyword density / number of keywords per page?

Thanks, Luke

That's good to hear Rand - I'm checking my backlinks a little more often since that encounter...

For the first time I've been approached by somebody wanting to do negative SEO, which isn't a good sign really. From what I understood, this involved pointing hundreds of horrible backlinks from porn/gambling sites. Let's hope my competitors don't bite!

Thanks Anthony - that's very helpful feedback - I'll have a go with those formats and see how it goes. I have quite a few pages to play with so I'm gonna test, test, and test again...

I once did a blog post and ended up with several hundred exact match pieces of anchor text hitting an internal page (I did not syndicate content but a major blog took my post, wrote about it, linked back to my website, syndicated cotent). If you look at the link profile on my site you get less than 150 backlinks coming in on even the most popular page, then a mad spike on an internal page. I wonder if that pattern alone may flag an over-optimization penalty?

PS> One thing I'm learning about this SEO lark is white hat can become grey hat can become black hat. You have to be very strategic, though that's sometimes virtually impossible!

Hi,

Question 1) I have gotten in the habit of putting e.g. Pizzas Birmingham, Pizzas Coventry, Brand name, for pizza outlets that straddle 2 towns / cities (which is often the case) - in title tags.

I tried, for example, Pizzas, Birmingham & Coventry, Brand Name - and it didn't work as well.

PS The Brand Name includes the word Pizzeria, not Pizzas.

Both towns / cities will be key markets when I use the above format.

But could this be seen as an over-optimization I'm thinking?

Question 2) In one of my title tags, I have Pizzerias, Restaurants, City, Brand name

which is working well, but that's 4 elements - is that too many? Is that an over optimization signal?

Thanks in advance for your help

Thanks so much Matt, Kerie & Marie - brilliant advice there - really brilliant. With your help it's all removed now.

Blimey, that discovery sure set my heart racing (eeeek.)

Thanks Ben, O&M, Alex and MHM

(hey Ben, that info's really useful btw! - thanks again!)

One thing I didn't understand O&M is: "One thing you shouldn’t include a slash is after a file name in the URL" - do they mean file name extensions I wonder. I took a look over at Matt Cutts's website and he'd bunged in a trailing slash on all his pages (I think - all the ones I looked at anyway).

Hi, I'm just about to put up a new site and I need to decide between having no trailing slash at the end of the all the URLs, or putting one in there.

I think Matt Cutts has a slight preference for them, as stated here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-interview-googles-matt-cutts-on-redirects-trust-more

"Matt says he would slightly advocate for using a trailing slash simply because it clearly indicates that a URL is a folder and not a document."

However, I'm really wondering. I mean, if people link to my site, they'll tend not to insert a trailing slash, I'm thinking...

Your thoughts would be welcome on this one!

Cheers, Luke

Hi all - I've been trawling for duplicate content and then I stumbled across a development URL, set up by a previous web developer, which nearly mirrors current site (few content and structure changes since then, but otherwise it's all virtually the same). The developer didn't take it down when the site was launched.

I'm guessing the best thing to do is tell him to take down the development URL (which is specific to the pizza joint btw, immediately. Is there anything else I should ask him to do?

Thanks, Luke

Hi, I have a blog, and like most blogs I have various search options (subject matter, author, archive, etc) which produce the same content via different URLs.

Should I implement the rel-canonical tag AND the meta robots tag (noindex, follow) on every page of duplicate blog content, or simply choose one or the other? What's best practice?

Thanks Mozzers! Luke

I agree. I've been in touch about the developer's work now. It's simply not good practice, yet. I've heard that Bing is more definite in its advice on H1 than Google.

Thanks for feedback AWCthreads - tis a good question - ho hum - he's just not using them right. I've had this problem with people putting in hidden tags too. They're just not taking Google, etc., into account. Almost screamed as I counted through them yesterday hee hee.

Thanks Jennifer. Yup, doing all that too. I'm paying him on contract and part of the prob is if he's using H1s so much it could end up in a lot of expensive re-programming. I'm gonna stamp my feet I think. I often wonder whether anyone's tested the impact of such heavy use of H1s. We need an SEO Moz testing lab ;-).

Thanks for your input too AWCthreads Some good points there...

Thanks David, Ryan, EGOL, Nakul - really useful feedback

I think I'm erring on the side of caution really, quite simply because any risk is too much risk. I'll read up on HTML5 some more Ryan as it sounds like it's changing thing a great deal. I've noticed the developer's used about 18 per page, for all headings. which seems quite strange, and possibly incorrect even in HTML5. I mean, blog posts headings to tweet headings to... just about every heading.

Hi,

My very well known and widely respected developer is using multiple H1 tags I see - they like using them in their code and they argue multiple H1s conform with HTML5 standards. They are resisting a recode to one H1 tag per page.

However, I know this is clearly an issue in Bing, so I don't want to risk it with Google. Any thoughts on whether it's best to avoid multiple H1 tags in Google (any evidence and reasoning would be great - I can then put that to my developer...)

Many thanks for your help, Luke