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Joel, I am answering this question but to be honest this is a BIG question (I mean it) and I might miss so many points because starting a social media site is not as simple as any other business site (off-course if you need this to be successful.)

I think the question you put on the board are the secondary questions, I think the following should be your primary questions:

• What you social media website is going to do that anyone else is not doing at the moment? In short USPs?
• What niche/audience are you going to target?
• How you are planning your Return on Investment?
• What would be your promotional plan?
• How much are you ready to invest on your marketing and what kind of ROI are you going to expect from that?
• Who are your competitors?
• What you competitors are doing in the market? How successful they are?

I am missing question I know but these questions should come before you should ask for how many staff member you should have what code languages they should know and others…

Above mentioned questions are important because I have seen many social networking websites that go fail because they didn’t plan effectively. I would prefer to solid plan the stuff and then move on the implementation part accordingly.

Best of luck!

Joel, this was a buzz in the bubble that you should register your domain for longer period of time and all that but to be honest research and experiments that i run simply proves me that this is no impact on your rankingss.

I mean if you are doing great on your content and attracting high quality links all ethically there is no way you will get down in SERPs just because your competitor have invest on the domain for 10 years and you did that for a year only.

Plan for today didn’t make sense to me and as far as the URL structure is concern you should have to have ea long term planning for that.

If I would be at your place I would be happy to see the URL structure which is somewhat similar to you. For example I launch a bakery business in Melbourne my ideal URL should be:

• www.mysite.com.au/melbourne/bakery/bakery224/

this way the URLs will be organized and user can easily find where his business can be available, even by looking at the URL.

As far as your idea of 302 redirections is concern I might not support that so if redirection is necessary at any point then go for 301 permanent redirections.

Hope this helps!

It have nothing to do with links but as a whole if you are going to create one piece of content and add that on several places what is going to happen as a whole? You are creating multiple new spots that contain same content.

Google crawls the web and when found 1 piece of content on several different locations the worth of content go down and link didn’t really help you… in some cases link harm your overall reputation.

It is always a best practice to add 1 article on one place only in order to maintain the value of the content. As far as the article directories in specific are concern I would personally recommend you not to spend too much time on this as it contain a very little link value and instead focus on Guest blogging that contain huge return on investment.

I have to agree with Ryan that not much data is available on this but let’s look at the theory for a while...

As far as I know 301 is a redirection that allows visitor to redirect from old page to a new page and pass all its link value to the new page… this means Google knows your old page and the fact that it had a penguin hit.. Chances are that the penalty will transfer to the new domain as well…

I have one of my client website hit by penguin and the problem is that many of links pointing to the website got a hit by penguin…

I think the best idea is the hard way… I mean get in to every link check if this link is not low quality or Spam and in case of yes contact them and do almost every effort to remove links that are coming from SPAM or low quality sites….

This is a good idea to get a control over the pages...

Although i am no smart but in the beginning years i played a lot with osCommerce and i can simply say that is platform is not SEO fitted. Zen cart is even a better option but yes if you give me a open choice i will go for your option!

I have this kind of experience in the past and as per the best of my knowledge you have to be very planed before executing stuff or else you will see some not easily irrecoverable damages that will create a problem.

Here are few things that you should plan

• Plan the redirection

As you said your complete URL structure will be changed this means you have to create and excel sheet to note all your current URLs and set the new URLs in the next column and set 301s accordingly.

• Picking the right eCommerce Platform

This is critical, I have worked with Joomla (I hate it), Wordpress, osCommerce, Zencart and Magneto and I have a good time playing with Magneto and Zencart.

There are actually several things to plan before switching from one platform to other keeping SEO on the safe side!

The best advice is to heir a person with good SEO (eCommerce) experience and he can do the good job for you!

If I would be at your place I would have use the verity of anchor text instead of just one anchor text that is Nike… why not change to set the verity of key phrases like Nike Shoes, Nike with area name, Nike with country name and other that go fit with your website.

Try to get links from different and unique domains instead of getting multiple links from the same domain and this will help you… The kind of decrease sometimes is just the result of fluctuation so check before you actually start implementing massive links on the page.

The idea to run a small promotional activity that is relevant to your category can also help! #justsaying

hope this helps!

Hey Joel,

Although I didn’t have a firsthand experience but I think I can pass my suggestions to you that sounds very actionable…

Targets: target is to get targeted audience to signup and then +1 your page

Target Audience: I am not sure about your target audience but let’s say age group between 25 to 35 years of people is your target audience.

How to go!

Do not just ask them to like the page or add you in circle but instead engage with them in such a way that they get encouraged a get signed up to Google+ and like your page.

For example:

Offer your audience an amazing discount or surprise gift on buying over $150.. this is common but you have to make it different by offering this offer to Google+ users only.

Tell them that if you want to avail the offer you have to be a Google+ user and should added your business in the circle.. this way targeted people will add you in circles… this will attract the people who are not on Google+ and will encourage them to join Google+ +1 your page and avail the discount.

(This is just a rough idea but brainstorming different ideas will make you come up to a good idea that will surly like by your people).

Best of luck!

As far as i know the community of SEomoz.. i don't think they even prefer using content writing software as mostly writing is all manual and need lot of research and analysis instead of some machine to write for you...

Although SEO Gadget have a content generation tool that can help you get lot of ideas for writing content https://seogadget.co.uk/content-strategy-generator-tool-v2-update/

you are right but at time writing two different unique pieces of content takes too much time my suggestion was considering the time factor!

I thought of it too but i don't think this will be a friendly option as he said some of the posts should be on both sites not all! and using RSS for some posts might need alteration in the business blog

Ok, this is find there are two ways of doing it see what sounds easy to you…

1. Why not create two content on the same topic (re warding) the concept of the blog post is same but they will not be duplicated. Personally if you ask me I will not prefer this way as it’s quite lousy…
2. The other way is smarter way… As you are not focused on your personal blog for SERPs so update the same content on both blog but on your personal blog set the canonical URL of your business blog (post URL) and this way Google get to know that what the original version of the content is and will index and act accordingly.

While back I write a post on Search Engine Journal where I talk about whether or not Google passes a link juice on no follow tag… to be honest to me there is no clear answer to that but I follow the best advice by Ross Hudgens that consider it 0 and act accordingly.

Ok I guess you took it a little differently… let me explain it to you.

In order to rank well you need lot of quality back links pointing to your website but if you have lots of back links coming from different websites pointing the same keyword then this is the problem!

There is no problem in keywords having in title, H1 and body but do not stuff it and use verity of anchor text internally and for link building.

Use of anchor text is good but over using the same anchor text will hurt (this is the case for non branded keyword)

For instance if you have a keyword ‘Oakland widget’ it can be use in verity of ways that includes:

• Oakland widget
• Widget Oakland
• Widgets in Oakland

And more long term phrase…

Hope it helps…

I just came up with my new blog, its not live yet but the 1^st landing page is ready, up and running… all is fine but here is the only problem is its not getting indexed in Google and I am not really sure why?

1. .xml sitemap is there
2. Google webmaster and analytics are there
3. Website contain at least that much real social shares that it should get indexed in Google
4. Few Links may be coming from Famous Bloggers and SEOmoz (both sites are very authentic in their respective domains)
5. It’s the 4 day the website is up

I don’t think website is not getting indexed in Google just because it contains 1 landing page and a thank you page! Any clue or help will be appreciated.

www.setalks.com is the domain

Being on number 1 is always better then number 2 but if the 2^nd place is of Google place with the map with it I guess it should attract more eye balls but to be sure why not you play a heat map on SERP results to have an idea! #justsaying

As never used that builder myself so i am not sure but while research over your question... this is something that i find! http://faq.1and1.com/applications/websitebuilder/websitebuilder_design/5.html can be useful for you!

Simple!

download the website (in case of simple html or php website) open it in Dreamweaver and edit the titles to make it unique... if you do not have Dreamweaver you can do this by opening it in a notepad find the tag and edit it to make it unique... upload the files and you are done!

that's it!

I am using Green Geeks but other companies i am comfortable with are Hostgator, Dream Host and Just Host... I don't prefer Godaddy due to their pathetic customer service!