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Honestly Alexa, Compete or Quantcast all are the estimators and can be seriously wrong at times... I think there is no tool that can give you the exact data of traffic (this is the real beauty of the online marketing) but there are several things like organic rankings, what estimated traffic they can get and how they are performing in PPC and some other data can be found through tools like Keyword Spy and SEM Rush!

ccTLD and Sub directories both are valid but it is preferable to use subdirectory instead of ccTLD.

By the way duplicate content can be a huge issue in that case weather you go for anything ccTLD, sub directory and even the different domain.

I would highly recommend using the sub directory with a unique text in it! Or use the different language (same content under different language won’t be a problem!)

Although it’s not pretty common so I guess you should double check this on Open Site explorer or Majestic SEO and if this is really the case you should look deep in to things to find out what really is going on because this can be serious at times.

Although links does not have a direct impact on rankings because if you are building lousy links then rankings might not get a positive spike but if links are good then sure you can. You said you are seeing good rankings from the last 2 to 3 days so I think you should send some more days before come up to the conclusion and in the mean while continue building great links...

Google test things from time to time and this something causes a fluctuation on few of the key terms and websites that are ranking for those key terms...I think you should be too much possessive about rankings and should not really check tit on regular basis...

I think you should stop thinking about this for few days and then you will notice the rankings stabled at one point... normally fluctuations are the market of the process so don’t take this too seriously.

If you are going to select any particular region, you will never block from all other locations.. in my opinion, if you are going to select a targeted country this will help you with ranking better in that particular location but you will still be appearing in all regions and ranking for the organic terms accordingly.

I never heard that to buy a country level domain you should be the nationalist of that country and this is not true as far as my knowledge goes because I have bought different domains for different locations and never had a problem!

If you r target market is US then i  would prefer you to go for .com domain but if you have any other specific country as a target then going for any ccTLD is a good idea.

hope this helps!

Oh, check this out its Spanish way of abbreviation check this out http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Why_is_US_abbreviated_in_Spanish_EEUU and you might have the better idea of it.

hope this helps!

Nakul, is right but also if you are using the wordpress then instead of going in to .htaccess use the redirection plugin!

I am not exactly sure but I guess its counting the word available in all parts of the page that includes header, sidebar, footer and more...

Also, it’s not only about exact keyword but if you are using the term with other words then it is also countable.

Hope this helps!

It’s always a good practice to have a IP of the same location as it builds the trust over search engine and audience and you can easily rank for keywords you want on that location based search engine.

For example if you have a US ip and want to rank for .com.ec then it will be quite a difficult job but instead of this if you have a IP address from Ecuador and want to rank for .com.ec then its relatively easy!

To be honest, I f i would be at your place I wouldn’t have used that and if it was available I would have delete it till now for few specific reasons...

1. This has no impact from the SEO point of view and search engine is not getting or collecting any information from this...so why write more?
2. If the Meta Keyword tag is smartly inserted then it can be dangerous and this is because you are seriously helping your competitors to see what keywords are you targeting on the page and then he can alter his strategies accordingly to outrank you in search engine from the desired key phrases.

Hope this helps!

Wordpress is indeed a great platform to go for your personal site and you will find tons and tons of resources for building website using wordpress.

I think reading too much will confuse you but this guide that i am dropping here is great as it covers almost all areas ofwordpress.

http://www.makeuseof.com/pages/download-build-your-own-wordpress-site

A little confused question so let me explain what I understand from this and then answer to you accordingly.

I think you mean to say that you have one website that is example.com.au and that is available on zen cart... and you are asking what if you load the same website on a .com domain so will your website get penalized in Google?

If this is exactly what you are asking then let me logically go for it.... duplicate content has no penalty but Google didn’t like it and that is why does not promote the duplicated content against the unique one...

So as far as the penalization is concern, I don’t think so but you might see a fluctuation in rankings and most probably you might not see good rankings for .com version as it will be the copied content!

I am not sure if it is optimism or not but history teach me to respect this BIG G because it evolves and get better with time... I understand as a business it’s a pain and make one frustrates but this is how the world is!

If you have a plan to move with the links then I would prefer to go with links the ethical way that are related to your subject and niche.

Justin, to be honest i am not here with te solution but some tips to you with my personal story...

I have been through this before and to be honest Google does contain the crap on the top for some of the extremely high competitive and business generation keywords.

Let me tell you my story! I was working hard to get the first page rankings for one of the most competitive keywords in my industry and guess what i was there on the 2^nd page and then stuck, and was not moving forward and the most surprising thing is that on the first page there were around 4 to 5 websites that have nothing to do with that keyword but just because they have some advantages like exact match domain and lot of links from Chinese forums they were out ranking me and enjoying the traffic.

The only good deed I did was not to build junk link at that time and this was the only thing that later save us from penguin.

I agree that junk links on some areas are still winning but killing evil by getting evil is no point... i think you should focus on building quality link and you will beat them with the time... Google is constantly getting better so with the time you will out rank them and win the SERP ranking for desired keyphrases...

Hey Stefan,

You didn’t mentioned the version of Joomla you are using at the moment so it’s difficult to come up with the exact solution but why don’t you use URL redirection module

Check this out and this might help! http://www.seoeducation.in/how-to-redirect-url%E2%80%99s-in-joomla-with-sh404sef-module

Thanks!

I always recommend the simplest and shortest URL ideas to all my clients because this way a website user can easily guess what the page is about without getting in to page. The short and easy URLs are good with search engines and links as people can easily link to it and as short and clear URLs are SEO friendly you get the search love from it as well...

In your case i would highly recommend to go for the following URL scheme:

News:

http://www.domain.com/news/what-the-news-topic-is/7543

Download Section:

http://www.domain.com/downloads/file-for-download-8743/

Forum URLs:

http://www.domain.com/forum/whatever-thetheat-name-is/

This way you will get lot of search engine and user love. Remember to plan the redactions before you go for implementation or else you might face a SEO smack that would be hard to recover.

hope this helps...

Ed, I highly agree with Robert that switching from Yahooo site builder to wordpress is a good idea but remember when comes to URL migration and other changes you should have to have a plan before you move on implementation because sometimes small changes can make big differences and you get serious SEO smack which sometimes is not that easy to recover.

Personally i never thought of this but logically there shouldn’t be any preference in it...i think if there is a lot of text available on the page then the page that load quicker will have more preference over the one that take more time than normal in loading the page.

Why shouldn’t be any difference is because either way you are helping user to get more information about the page and subject so it’s doesn’t matter that the text is available as hard coded or coming from the data base until there is no problem in indexing the content and page load time.

#justathought

Chenzo, In my experience if you are using the same anchor text which is also in the domain (like brand name) then its fine because how you will stop people linking to you with your brand name (logically you can’t!) but using the keyword  like ‘SEO widgets’ as an anchor text doesn’t make much sense...

Hope this helps!