Welcome to the Q&A Forum

To be honest though, I think my example above is a bit too excessive. Somewhere in the middle would be more accurate (100/50/25) with a steep drop off after that.

To be honest though, I think my example above is a bit too excessive. Somewhere in the middle would be more accurate (100/50/25) with a steep drop off after that.

Yes, sadly it diminishes a lot steeper than that, I will have a dig around and see if I can find some study data.

Sadly, only the boffins at Google HQ know the exact figures.

Cheers

So this isn't the exact maths, but for arugments sake:

The first link gives you 100% SEO benefit

The second link gives you 25% SEO benefit

The third link gives you 5% SEO benefit

The fourth link gives you <1% SEO benefit

After that, there is no additional SEO benefit of received links from that page.

I'm not taking about link juice distribution, I'm talking about the actual SEO benefit each link with provide you. That's why you will always here SEO's tell you the first link is the most important, and why people only tend to put a couple of links in a guest post or article, as there is really very little value after that.

Looking at it from a purely SEO point of view (so not consideration for branding, advertising or other general marketing), you want to be getting links from lots of unique domains rather than lots of links from a single domain.

Of course if you had 50 links coming from say the BBC there would be other benefits such as the amount of traffic you'd get and the brand association, but if you're looking at it from purely an SEO link juice point of view then there is no real value after getting a couple of links from the same domain.

Cheers

David

Ah sorry, I see what you mean.

The amount of links you place on a single page will have diminishing returns, so the first is valuable, the second less so, the third less so. After a while there is no additional value at all.

Personally, in that scenario again I would look to use 2 or 3 links, one branded in the footer and one or two in the article body (again, only if they made sense and fitted in naturally.

The main thing to consider in that scenario is the wishes of the Webmaster you're working with. Some only want you to use a single link in guest content, other are of a 'more the merrier' philosophy (although you still don't want to go link crazy).

2-3 is good for the user, good for the Webmaster, and good for your SEO

Cheers

David

Hi Gary,

Just so I'm clear, you mean if you had xcompany.com and then xcompany.blogspot.com, how many links per blog post would you send to the main domain?

If that's the case, yes I'd recommend using the same rules and treating it as an internal blog.

If you don't mind me saying, I'd never recommend hosting a blog externally from your main site unless it's completely unavoidable. Is there no way to integrate both? The easiest way is to just host Wordpress in the subfolder of your main site, and match the theme to your main brand.

Thanks

David

Hi Matthew,

Sorry to hear about the problems you've been having.

On top of what you have already tried, I would reccomend these three actions:

1. Share some of your content on G+, it get's indexed really quickly and will get the crawlers back on your site

2. Use blog ping to send some of your top pages to Google. By doing this and step 1, you will usually get content indexed within 24 hours

3. Create a list of all the bad URL's (using the Chrome scraper extension will make this easy), and submit them to be removed via Google Webmaster Tools (GWMT > Optimization > Remove URL's). In my experience this gets URL's removed within a couple of days, although I am led to believe that this varies dependant on the site.

Good luck

David

Hi Gary,

I tend to use 2-3 internal links in a 400 word article as a rule of thumb, although there is going to be no harm in using more if the article calls for it (i.e you genuinely need to reference several sources on your site)

On the other hand, you don't want to be forcing links into articles just to meet a 3 link quota. If there is genuinely no relevant reference or keyword uses that sensibly links to another site, then don't try to force the issue.

Try to think of it from a users point of view, i.e when reading this article does the link make sense, and would it be a logical and positive path for a visitor to follow.

Cheers

David

Hi Caru,

Firstly, paying for advertising space isn't a problem with Google, it's what funds most web businesses, including theirs. The issue they have is with people purchasing links with the sole purpose of passing PageRank to manipulate the search results.

So in your scenario; paying for a premium classified ad to be seen first is just good business, and most sites will make these links 'no follow' anyway to give a clear indication to Google that it is an advertisement. Even if they don't no-follow, it will be pretty clear on any kind of manual inspection that you are paying for advertising rather than PageRank.

That's the gauge you need to use really, as without seeing each site you are talking about it's difficult to say. Have a look at each site subjectively, and ask yourself if you'd be comfortable in having a member of the Google Webspam team manually inspecting your link there.

If, like you say, it's purely for PageRank, then you might be setting yourself up for trouble.

It's a similar situation to directories. It's far too simplistic to say all web directories are dangerous, as some of them are genuinely great links from hand curated niche enthusiasts. It is the same with classifieds, there will be some great ones to be on for both marketing and SEO purposes, but there will be a great deal that exist solely for SEO manipulation and these are the ones you want to avoid.

In a way, I think you answered your own question when you said 'some sites send us clients, many of them never do. We keep putting ads there because of their PR'

So when you ask what is the worth of these links, I would say very little. They are unlikely to pass any PR, and they could potentially land you in hot water in the future. How could you explain in a reconsideration request to Google that you advertised on a platform that you knew no one visited?

Another quick thing to remember is that there's diminishing returns on links from any single domain. So once you have got a link or two from a domain, whether great or spammy, there is very little value from a purely SEO point of view from achieving future links.

Thanks

David

Hi Asaf,

If the core content is going to be unique (i.e the product descriptions), then you wouldn't  need to worry about duplication issues, and I would definitely recommend unique English url's to match the content.

From both a customer and a search engine point of view, it makes sense to have the url's in English, and to a unique destination that can be indexed.

If there are large amounts of duplication, you can always use the canonical tag, although it doesn't sound like it would be necessary in this scenario.

Cheers

David

Hi Tony,

Depends how you wanted to do it. There are two simple ways of doing it:

1. Submit the new pages as Posts, and give them a category (ES,DE), then set your permalink structure to /category/post-name

This might mess with your existing URL structure set up though.

2. The alternative way around this is using custom post types, so creating a custom post type called 'es', and any post submitted in it will automatically have the structure /es

There are other ways to do go about it, including multiple Wordpress installs, although it all starts to get a bit messy.

Cheers

Hi Tony,

In that case you definitely wouldn't want to be using a translation plugin, as you want to have permanent static pages that can be indexed by the search engines.

If you want to geo-target specific countries with the multi-language content, then personally I would  suggest using mirror sites on localised TLD's.

However if you wanted to keep everything on the same site to leverage the domain authority, then I would suggest sub-folders rather than subdomains so yoursite.com, yoursite.com/es etc etc

Cheers

David

Hi Tony,

There are a few ways of going about this.

The big question to ask up front though, is what is your aim of having the multiple languages? Is it simply to provide your content in an alternative language to assist your existing visitors, or are you hoping the new language pages will attract visitors from foreign language search?

Depending on your intent, the method I would recommend would be vastly different.

Thanks,

David

Hi William,

I've put some thoughts on the on-page issues below, however I should say that I don't think you're going to find the answer to your question by lining up metrics.

If it was that simple, we call all reverse-engineer Google's algorithym and retire to the Bahalmas

Looking at metrics is a good starting point, however to really see why a search result is sorted in a particular order, you've got to look a little deeper and delve into the content.

Thanks

David

Sorry, I've not actively answered the question;

In theory, site 6 needs to become more relevant to the keyword. So start by looking at the usual on page factors (page title, H1 tags, alt image descriptions), and then move on to the page content itself. Ask yourself a few questions:

• What is the user looking for when they use the keyword, does my site provide the best answer?
• Can the content on the page be considered the definitive answer/guide/resource for that query?
• Would the grammar, style and format pass professional Editorial standards?

When site 6 could (honestly) answer yes to these three questions, they would see their ranking for this term improved.

Cheers

Hi William,

The issue here is that these metrics only take into account a sites authority, they do not look at how relevent the page is to the users query.

So for example; if the user searches 'where is the best place to eat in Seattle?', the results in 2 and 4 might not be particularly powerful domains, but they may have pages containing great articles on the best restaurants in Seattle. On the other hand, site 6 might be a page on a powerful and well known domain, however the page may only have a loose reference to dining in Seattle.

Google wants to answer the users query in the best way possible, and sometimes the best answers come from pages and sites that haven't been around long or haven't done any active link building.

Building up trust and authority through links is only half of the battle, if your page isn't relevant for the search query it will struggle to break the top spots.

Thanks,

DAvid

Hi Samuel,

Link building to the localized pages won't help your pursuit of ranking the main page for the term 'wedding bands', however it will help the individual pages rank for the localized terms (Manchester Wedding Bands etc), which in turn will lead to more targeted traffic coming into the site (which I assume is the ultimate goal?)

In terms of the localized link building; try and 'think local' when you come to picking your targets. Of course, you want the links to be coming from authoritative domains, however relevancy also plays a big part, so getting a link from a Manchester lifestyle blog to your Manchester wedding bands page will be a great signal.

If you are looking to rank the local pages, the first thing I would suggest is putting in a suitable navigational structure to get to them. From first glance at your site, it seems you can only get to these pages using a site search, which isn't great for users or the search engines.

Best of luck with the site, let me know if you want any advice.

Thanks,

David

Hi Sander,

Sitewide links, although not hugely popular with Google, do appear naturally in the link profile of quite a large number of sites, and you're not going to suffer any spam issues if these types of links only appear in moderation.

If one referring domain is sending links from hundreds of pages, then you're not going to have any problems. It would only become an issue if an unnatural proportion of your overall link profile was being made up of these site-wide links, as that's not natural.

It also depends on the type of site you're running, it's quite natural for Bloggers to have a higher % of site-wide links as they tend to be linked to via blogrolls, however this same % would look unusual for an ecommerce site.

In terms of benefits; sadly you won't receive the same link benefit of receiving 100's of unique links, in fact you'll receive no-where near this benefit. Essentially, as the anchor text, placement and style of the link is the same across the site, I would treat them as a single link.

Hope that all makes sense.

David

Hi Cyril,

I've not seen any specific case studies or statements that figure out how much replication is considered duplication, although I'd be as interested in you in this information if anyone out there knows of some?

Personally, I have been working on a 50% minimum basis (e.g at least 50% of the pages written content should be unique), and it's been working well for me.

You might get away with less.

In regards to making sites an authority within their specific countries, whilst using duplicate content and the canonical tag, it's all down to links. Even though you're telling Google that this isn't the original source of the content, it's still possible to build up authority on the domain by acquiring links from strong sites that share the TLD.

But again, without unique content you're not going to see the full strength of these links.

David

It goes in the .htaccess file on the old site.

Thanks

David