Welcome to the Q&A Forum

That was what I was thinking about, give support in exchange for a link in their google + page as the main web address

hi Cyber, EGOL,

I think that you've to be cautious on what you publish. Your focus should be always the final user. If you're focusing on the users you can't do it wrong, if after making the article you see that is not useful (because it is mainly done to attract google bot) avoid it because it won't be adding value to your site.

The division EGOL is proposing makes sense:

• articles to give freshness to your site which are industry related updates. You said that your niche is quite interesting so your users may find interesting to have all the industry news centralized in one site which is reporting them shortly and quick (you can also use that feed to update your social profiles)
• deep diving articles. Guides and helpful content with videos and images to really help your users and which are link/share worthly. One note: beware of how tos and the like. That is  demand media (ehow.com) core business and it was something which google was supposedly going after with the Panda update. Be sure to write good and deep articles without trying to scale it with easy articles written in a bunch by freelancers.

Always have a look at your final result and ask the question "is this adding some value to the user reading is?" if you find that you're losing your time while reading it the user will feel the same

thanks for your answer roger, I generally agree with you, as you can't take the initiative and start spamming glocal with new businesses, but what if I contact the shop owner and give him the support to create that page? we can create it for them and then include a link to our website which is hosting the only available version of that shop online (because they don't ahve a website). So when someone's clicking on the glocal result will go to the google local business entry but thispage will also ahave a link to our website which the user may reach to buy what they want directly online.

every new page you post is additional keywords you're targeting. If you're creating low value content with bad user experience the additional bounces will only hurt your site as a whole but if you encourage creating only high value pages, useful for users you can improve your site. With the contente you manage your site being fresh and updated if you don't create new pages your site will be obsolete and so not so useful for users. It really depends on the market but users always changes their way to search for something an dyou need to be sure to let them find you in different ways. Wikipedia became great because of huge high value content being created on a daily basis, if SeoMoz achieved its position is due to the great care they use when they write new posts on their blog/site.

The general rule is it's worth to add content which is useful, is bad to create unuseful content which will make users enter your site and leave it as soon as they see shallow content.

I don't agree with that. It depends on how much you rely on ppc. If the 90% of your traffic relies on ppc, the entrance of a new player will raise your costs but if you have organic traffic driving money to you you can reinvest it to adwords, this will increase your sales and even if you don't earn more money your achieving additional market share and difficulting the life of your competitors, in the long term alex ben or sara will be able to raise their budget and make the market more difficult for other players to enter. That's how you build sales and brand.

Ebay got other issues based on out of stock products, since they don't own their products they can't be sure that the keywords were they're bidding always get a product to sell. If you have a solid stock you can always bid on that terms. Also bidding in adwords doesn't mean to push only on high volume keywords but on on long tail too which helps you getting the user to the right page in the right moment. Consider that seo is losing visibility due to the new 7 results pack and local listings so any slot available in the serps is an additional business opportunity you can't miss. Adwords may be a waste of money if you're targeting broad keywords but can be highly efficient if you make manual and highly focused actions.

I'll advice to use the hreflang tag on each page to be sure that google know ehich language are you targetin for especially for english and spanish having those languages different variations from one country to another.

maybe you'll see a swap for local search engines for your base language which I suppose is english and gain some additional trafic from other languages. You'll start ranking in languages you disn't have before so extra traffic is highly possible.

I actually have a portal with multiple listings from different users. Every listing is a physical shop with a different address, but more than the half of them doesn't have a website.

I was thinking on creating a local business for them and then add a link to my website in the section where google asks for your web address.

Does anyone already made something similar? does google allows links to inner pages and from multiple domains? Do you have any other and better idea on how to show in local results if you're like an affiliate and not the direct owner of the shop?

With google local listings crowding the serps it should be interesting to know how to fit in there.

Hi Tom, You definitely have a duplciate content issue, it has always been struggling to optimize an https site, but now with the new feature SE gave you can solve them.

Duplication can be solved using canonicals. Teh canonical tag will help bots to understand which page ranks. I recommend to use the http url which is the frendlier one and the easiest to build links, you can leave the https url for the transactions portions of the website which is where the https is really needed.

Read this article though, it helped me a lot while optimizing such a website

Hi Ve, just as a further clarification, remember that when you use the 301 redirection you're passing that value to the new page although you lose something of that value (further reading here) that's why you should schoose wisely whenever perform a redirect or not.

In the case you need to do that consider that you won't be starting from 0 but not even from the same point you were with the other page which was ranking.

try to nofollwo your login link and block your loggedin pages in your robots, so you'll almost prevent google to reach those pages. If you're able you can also noinedx your content.

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.

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!

I think that you'll better merge those 6 pages in two: cat and dog focus. You don't have enough differentiation among those pages, that's why google is changing them. Since they're synonims you may consider canonicaliza the whole value in one page for picture|image|printing dog free printing, I can see how those keywords will fit in just one page.

Hi edison, I'll try with multivariate tests, Google analytics has this functionality so you can make tweaks to your pages and get google to rotate them, It will then give you an answer on which pages performed better based on the goal you give to it: conversions bounce etcetc.

More advanced tools are outside but depending on how deep you want to go I'm sure that for a first try GA will be highly helpful

My two cents here are to not overoptimize urls just for ranking purposes, It's better to have kws in titles and h1-2 to help you rankings I'll choose the url structure based on how the choiche which will give you the highest control on them just for easy analytics study and future re-strucutration of the site. Also having a keyword may be good to have them bolded in serps so whichever choice you made may be good although I'll rely more on the shortest option which can give you both control and keywords in it.

Hi Carolina if that's the ONLY thing you've changed you may consider adding just one line using wildcards in your htaccess and you're done without any plugin.

Something like this may work:

RewriteRule ^201(0-3)/(.+)/(.*) http://www.domain.com/$2 [R=301,L]

Hi CB. I think that keyword are the most important part, they're the base of everything you'll be doing then. So:

1. keyword research: make a huge bucket of keywords looking at adwords keyword tool or whatever tool you have and combine that with your competitors keywords, you can make it by putting the url in the Google keyword tool or better using a service like semrush. Build a huge list of keywords just like if you're building a ppc campaign. Then refine them and prioritize by difficult/volume you want the best relation between efforts traffic achieved.
2. then based on your keywords start creating your contents. at least not copied content in the beginning
3. base d on your keyword look for competitors and build the whole list. Try to imitate what they did good, jsut like social followers, sites bcaklinking to them and try to build a list of highly relevant sites potentially interested in your services. When yuor site will be good enough (the enoguh is defined by how good your competitors sites are)start contacting them after having built a relationship in social media, an d create assets for future backlinks.

Hope this helps!

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.

the old google dance. Normally this used to happen during algorithm changes and tweaks, you were seeing results bumping and dropping during a whole week, but now that's not the case.

As gfiedel said if your site is new, when google first index it, finds it really fresh and new and as all the new contents usually puts it quite high in their rankings, then after a day or so starts to change its position because of it being not so fresh, the parameters of its ranking are different. After a week or so you'll be sure that your site won't move anymore (if you don't change anything else sure )

Hi Ve. A 404 is generated when someone reach a page which doesn't exist, so to have someone reaching such a page you need to give them a path to it. There may be two different paths:

• internal. You can remove this internal path changing all the links pointing to the old url to the new one.
• external. This may be trickier. There may be:

1. external sites pointing with links to the old page. In this case you need to think if it's really worth to change the url. If it is, get in touch with those websites and ask them to change the link.
2. Google having indexed that page and make it rank. That cannot be changed by YOU.

So make all the internal and external possible fixes

change your sitemap and submit that to google webmaster tools

and then you'll need to modify your htaccess (if your server is driven by apache, which 90% normally do) and create a rule which redirects from the old page to the new one. In that way even if the external site doesn't change the old link the user won't receive a 404 but will be redirected to the new page, and google will drop the old url (in a week or so it depends on the crawling rate) and then index instead the new one.

For the htaccess rule if you're not experienced with that kind of file leave that to your it guys, because a wrong comma there, may brake the whole site.

Hope this is clear