Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Luke, if you're looking for a 10%-30%-XX% ratio of links I think you won't ever find nothing regarding this.

Even if you'll find that I recommend you to not follow that guide just because: only google knows how much weight they give to each link and also because google can change their algo on a weekly or daily basis, but your seo strategy should be long term based.

So in that sense I strongly recommnend to be just natural. If your site is good you probably see it in blogs, directories, other sites, and also on comments, forums etc etc. Everything is good if it's balanced and natural. Try to avoid any kind of pattern and let things flow up trying to avoid huge unnatural increases.

Also you may consider seeing how your best competitors are doing and try to follow their same strategy.

Hi Spence, IMO you may have two situations:

• if the old international sites were in other languages you may consider redirecting them to the same language version on the main site
• if the old domains were focused on specific markets (countries in this sense) you'll better point the 301 the to the specific directory pointing to a specific country (if it was domain.es focusing on spanish users point to domain.com/spain/)

When you're trying learn something which is basically online don't focus on books the first paragraph goes out of date when you end writing the last one.

Google has a lot of documentation on its own product, take the google certified professional course and evne if you don't take the exam you'll learn a lot!

I think that SEO grew alongside the search engines. In the first period the SEOs were geeks programmers which tried to achieve top rankings spammin here and there. both internally and then externally.

Google seemed a machine to game to achieve your top positions. Now I think that Google helped a lot in giving to this job a further qualification. As they evolved their algo we evolved our knowledge in a game which is starting to move from the pure development to a larger integration with the marketing side of our job.

SEOs are everyday more marketing oriented, integrating a lot their job with pr building relationships with other webmasters. As you said I see SEO as an enhanced art where technical knowledge melts with marketing skills.

A good SEO is a marketing artist imo.

first of all try to include those terms in your pages. You're already doing good (rank 6 for cfd provider) without even mentioning that keyphrase in your title neither in the whole content of your mostly relevant page http://www.accendomarkets.com/our-products/cfds/

use titles, h1 h2 and meta desc, without spamming them but try with a few tweaks and see what you achieve only with internal optimizations.

hey Tony you made it in the right way, you added the error code + the noindex. However google won't drop your page from the index until it crawls it several times.

You can do this: first of all be sure that you have no links pointing to that page then:

• see in GWT if the page is showing as a 404 and when it will disappear from GWTools errors
• or go to GWT and ask google to remove it from the index. This is the fastest way, and google asks you to add a noindex or return a 404 to make this action, so actually you're more than fine to do that, however it depends on the volume of 404s you have this may be a huge and repetitive task to do.

It really depends on which are your purposes. 99% of the tiem remarketing campaigns are pointing to direct response goals. In that sense it may be best to use CPC bidding to better calculate your ROI.

If your remarketing campaign are for branding purposes then a CPM may be the best way to be sure your ad is getting the highest exposure possible.

I think that CPC is the best model in terms of ROI calculations, just depends if you have catchy banners with your phone/branded so you want them to be shown as much as possible or if you have text links pointing to your best converting page.

Moreover. I remember that google translates CPC bids into eCPM ones when competing which means that if your CTR is really low you may risk of paying even more than by bidding with CPM. I can't reckon the exact formula, maybe someone can help here, but I remember that if your CTR is lower than 0,10% you may consider CPM since you're paying much less for 1 click than for a thousand impressions. (need more insight on this)

Sorry Mavvy maybe I didn't understand you, are willing to rank for SEO right? You don't need any SEM or other kind of advertising to rank good for SEO, they're different and definitely unrelated channels, even if advertising may raise your branded terms search volume.

About social, it seems that this still doesn't influence seo rankings but it will probably in the near future, so you should push your watchdog to let you use it. Btw social is useful to create a network and build relationships (in the future links) there. You can always use your personal profile to do that.

About how to rank for SEO, make a good and depth keyword research, optimize your site structure and title+metas, create good content and then go out building relationships+links!

Also if your main keywords are highly competitive start with longer ones, with less competitors, these slight variations will lightly improve the rankings of the main keywords too, so you'll start to achieve easy traffic. Normally the 1 visit keywords summed up give more traffic than the main ones, although are more difficult to track.

Hope this helps!

Hi Ray, unfortunately there's no clear science on how to avoid any possible issue on your migration however I understand your strategy.

You would like to create a landing page which reflects the old sites name so google would still match backlinks branded anchors with what it finds in your site. You may try to put a couple of mentions of the old brand so you'll achieve the same: Google will see link pointing to brand X and finds correlation with the old page and the new one since there are mentions of the brand X in the new one too.

Hope this helps, I'd like to know your achievements on this!

IP redirect may be tricky since you'll have to maintain that information up to date and be sure that it is working properly. Also there may be users who even staying in a uk ip wants to see the american or eu site, and having the possibility of using the hreflang to set up correctly every site I'll change that strategy to:

• instead of redirecting via IP, I'll consider using that info to show a banner which states, "hey we've seen you're in UK, click here to see the uk version of the site, you'll find many offer based on your country!" (or maybe something shorter than this
• use the hreflang tag to specify to engines which language is optimized for each site, in that way google won't give you duplicate content issues and it will also make the right site ranking depending on the country.

In the short time I'll also give more focus on the .com site because it ahs the widest audience and because it's the most common TLD used for commercial sites. However in the long term you may want to have specialized teams which will make this differences even stronger with an highly focused marketing activity.

mmm same number of dupe titles/content, let me think of pages with few content in them.

If you're sure that your developer didn't  make any change you can:

• put a dynamic rule in your title so to have it changing based on the changing elements of the page (like appending page 2 for the second page etc)
• about the content if the duplication happens on different pages you can ask a freelancer to write some new content, but if the content appears on the same page but with some filters or pagination you may consider both: noindexing those pages, canonicalize them or simply remove the content from pages different than the first one.
• export seomoz data and find where are you missing your title(you got same info on GWT)
• the same for 404, see which pages are linking to bad urls and fix that issues. IF you're lucky you may fix more than one link if they're dinamically generated.

I think there's no agreement on that, it normally depends on personal choice. Normally I prefer to use all the separators just to make the site a little different and don't use always the same structure. However if I need to choose one I'll use user experience and readability for it, and personally I find the pipe much more readable than the hyphen just because separates better the sentences, However you may use a combination of both if the two portion of text are related.

Examples:

• Guide to Ibiza - Boat trip to Ibiza | IBIZATRAVELS.COM
• Hotel Ibiza | Bars and Restaurant in Ibiza

The first sentence (the last part is just for branding if you want although I don't love so much having the domain in the title), got an hyphen in the first part because boat trip seems to clarify which part of the guide to ibiza we're speaking about. The site name is not related that's why I put a pipe. In the same way I separated the two parts in the second option just because they're both about tourism in ibiza but they're not co-related in this case.

Hi all, I think that your alternatives would be:

• one big site with all the thematics. In that way all users can access all content without leaving the site, no need for noindex no need for canonicals since you won't have dupe content
• three sites with specialized articles in each one. You may change slightly your design to give the user the feeling that the site is different but in the same network. Then you may interlink those sites as useful resources. Not optimal since they'll have a huge interlinking,
• as you said noindex the non canonical article. Remember that the noindex tag will prevent indexation not crawling because google will need to crawl your page to know that it should not index it. So you may add meta "noindex,nocache,follow" in the header and be sure that the juice is still flowing in your site.

To enhance your domain authority you'll need them to link to you not the opposite. You may want to earn the links they have or just have them linking to you.

However if they're related and as Jesse said linking to them may enhance the UX, it's always a good idea to link to official and authoritative sites, it makes your website more natural because the nature of the web is a "web" of sites interlinked among them.

Summarizing it won't help your authority directly but it will help you look better to both your users and I think to bots too.

there are several things you could do on your site in order to improve it, SEO is a matter of details so start working on them

• internal links. Many of them have a blank anchor, ensure to put your keywords in there
• content. Add relevant content together with images, show 2 or 3 projects in each area and describe them with a nice attractive text
• Internal architecture. Ensure you're not just linking from the homepage down but also interlink your internal pages among them. Example: http://www.pokudesign.com/services/ why not linking to those services? Give a two lines snippet each and then link to a page for each of them.
• Backlinks. This is painful but rewarding. Get them, a bunch of quality links is fine, don't overdue this a be clean. I don't know your competitors backlinks profile but you want to ensure that you're going high quality.
• blogs. i assume those pages are yours. http://www.pokudesign.com/blogs/ why don't you integrate them in your site? Again add content, be catchy and descriptive, I'm sure you can say a lot of things about the nice things you've done, show people you care google will reward you.

that would be a starting point

As Tom, and webmaster central blog states 404s are a natural part of any website. They don't hurt you directly.

Redirect to home is not always a good idea, don't forget the real meaning of redirect: "a content which is permanently/temporary moved to another address.

If the content you are redirecting has just disappeared try to enhance the user experince: what is the advantage for an user looking for a product to reach your homepage? it will only raise your bounce, try to create a customized 404 which give to the users good alternatives to what thhey were looking for, like related products or the category where the product was.

I don't think there is a real penalty for having realted sites in a same hosting. Another thing is that you have plenty of websites built using scraped content.

What I mean is that if you create 5-10 hand made domains you should have problems, it really depends on the quality of your content and how much you care of your website, but this applies to them even if you plan putting them on different servers.

Hey Circa, this may be negative seo from a competitor it may be spammers or fishers and so on, it's difficult to know.

Your drop may depend on that depending on how much those links are part of your whole backlinks portfolio, as generalzod said, if you have a 75% of your links like those one they could have hit you if they're kind of 10% you may  have different issues there, since every site has some porn or spam links pointing to them and google knows that.

If I were you I'll buy a subscription to ahrefs or majestic seo, get all your links, find the crappy ones, and ask for removal. then the ones which remains can be disavowed.

After that wait for a couple of days and submit a reconsideration request to google saying them you've also submitted a link disavow. Explain them what happened in details.

To prevent this in the future you can use ahrefs/majestic new/lost links feature so you can watch which links you're acquiring everyday and if there's something wrong you can ask for removal /disavow them.

Hope that helps!

I'm glad it helped, it will be good to have a look at your website in a while and see how are you doing after receiving so many feedbacks

Hi Trish, it really depends on what your site is about. If you're a news website google will expect many daily updates but if you're a less dynamic market it may be probably fine for you to make changes in longer periods. However to add freshness to a more stable website you may also:

• build a blog or an article sections which always attracts new users and helps feeding your social profiles
• change the order of your listings weekly so they may seem more dynamic than they are(not under google eyes but for users)