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Seems like that's the end of that then. Could it be because of the same pressure from Google applied to Raven regarding their Google SERPs feature?

Yes Tom, thanks that has helped.

I wonder whether a mixed strategy might be more effectiveby:

• Using ccTLD for competivie markets  subdomains

• Subdomains or Folders for non competitive markets that can be swayed by by DA

When a market starts to increas ein competitiveness then a shift to a ccTLD can be done for greater targetting.

Would this make sense from an SEO point of view?

Hi

I know this has been covered in a few questions but seen nothing recent that may take into account changes google may have applied.

We would like to target multiple english speaking counties with a new project and I'm a little unsure as to whether ccTLD, subdomain or subfolders are the best way to publish country specific information.

Can anyone shed some light on this?

Hi,Since Penguin 2.0 we've taken a 20-25% knock but not recieved an unatural link message from Google. After sending a bunch of removal requests, I decided to submit a disavow file anyway two weeks ago and tried to make sure I rooted out some links that were built way back when our site started and link building best practice was a bit shadier.

Analysis of our backlink profile points to about 40-50% links coming from general directories, wondering if perhaps their weight has been adjusted and this is why the drop occured? Having said that we have some high quality links from government sources and highly trusted sites so not too spammy.

Can anyone shed some light or offer suggestions?

Thanx

Any news on a time frame?

Is there any chance you could email me your sitemap as produced by wordpress? info[at]pathfindermedia[dot]co[dot]uk I'll take a closer look at whats being excluded.

Another possibility could be your robots.txt file, is it blocking some directories?

Looks like the only downside is google trying to algorithmically determine a more suitable title, which isn't that bad as these are not really high priority ranking pages.

Thank for the help.

Hi Irina,

• Meta keywords are unlikely to cause a penaly and are simply ignored. So you can do them but it's probably a waste of time.

• news_keywords only works if you are an accepted news source in google news and it's likely that this will only effect news results. This tag was created to give journalist more freedom with their headlines so they don't have to keyword stuff the headline. It's meant to lead to a more natural looking article while still giving an option to give some keyword indication of the theme.

Hope that helps.

Mulith

Yeah I suppose. But what happens when this is on a large scale, would that have a punitive effect?

Might I suggest using screen size or user agent to trigger the option to the user something like:

"We've detected that you may be using a mobile device. Would you like to go to our mobile friendly site instead?"

Research shows giving folks a choice results in a better experience. Nothing more annoying that not having the choice, especially considering the wide array of screen sizes that are now being used. The live site may be more user friendly and you'll also get some valuable feedback on how popular you mobile site is.

Yes I'm afraid they are useless when it comes to incorporating them into your SEO stategy.

Better to take the energy you would have expended tracking down do follow comment opportunities and spend it creating rich content like posts, guides, infographic(high quality only) and useful widgets.

Yes it's harder now than pre Panda but good in a way because the barrier for entry is that little bit higher and that gives you an advantage over new starters who want to cut corners and steal your customers.

Good luck, you're going to rock!

Hi Ovieira,

This is not necessarily an indication that there are pages that are hidden from crawlers and the missing pages could simply be low priority for the moment. Or could have been created after the initial crawl had taken place.

The best way to check is to run a crawler like http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ and that will give you a better idea. If the sitemap generates a complement of your pages then it's probably just a case of waiting until the next Moz crawl.

Mulith

Hi All,

I have a site that has upwards of 40 000 pages and I'm redeveloping it so really want to get some SEO elements spot on for the new development. Hoe do I go about handling the following:

• The user creates a title for their advert which I use as the meta title. The problem is titles are quite often longer that the accepted lengths. How should I handle this? String manipulation down to the desired size, leave it as is or is there another solution?

• The meta descriptionn is pulled from a summary they created as part of their profile. Is this the right way to do it?

Any advice would be appreciated.

Ross

No I meant point them to the competitors site/

Hi All,

One of my competitors doesn't seem to mind collecting links with no relevance and over optimisation of anchor text also leaves me scratching my head as to ho wit's possible for them to still get the rankings they do.

My question is how do I handle them from a competitive point of view? Do I pay for a batch of poor links to topple this competitor? Or do I bide my time?

Thanks

It's so tricky though because on one end of the spectrum you have companies promising the world and on the other end you have companies building 10 - 15 links / month for the same budget.

Is there a good resource somewhere to find a SEO business partner, that sort of insentivised approach is starting to appeal to me more than paying a company with nothing to lose?

Yeah they did ask about target keywords and promised that they can get our site business4sale.co.uk to No.1 for "sell a business" in google uk  within 6 months.

Current number one has huge DA so was also a bit sceptical.

Hi all,

Speaking to an SEO company at the moment about doing some link building for me but I just can't shake this suspicion that they are a bunch of cowboys.

My budget is £1000/month and they are promising 500-1000 high quality links/month. Common sense dictates that  surely that would trigger an unnatural link building pattern and at £1-2 /link doesn't sound like they are going to be quality.

Is there any scenario where these figures might  stack up. Personally I think it's bullshit but thought I'd check it out before telling him to piss off.

Thanx

I recently added about 20 paid links from directories but have since seen a 10% drop in traffic. I did also delete about 1000 pages of content that had no inbound links and were duplicated on other sites on the web and replaced the content with new content supplied by a client but still duplicated on other sites on the web, old URLs no longer valid or linked to, new content on new URLs.

Assuming the drop in traffic had nothing to do with the content change mentioned above, should I remove the paid links in an attempt to recover? I don't think the old content was bringing in much traffic as it appeared elsewhere on more authoritive sites than mine.