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Obviously ads look pretty distinct to you and me 
We look at them all the time. As Internet-savvy users I think we tend to overestimate though what's "obvious" to others. It keeps surprising me when looking over the shoulder of non-tech savvy people using Google how often they don't realise the difference between organic and paid, especially when a paid listing is shown at the top of the page.
In general search engines are able to identify keywords in the URL even if they are i.e. a parameter that follows a "?" or other non-alphanumeric character. They might not treat it as an equally strong signal as when the keyword is a part of the file name, subdomain or domain name though. Hope that answers your question.
Don't worry. Site-wide links happen, and having a couple here or there won't harm you. What matters more than the raw number of links pointing to your website is the number of unique sites (domains) that link to it.
Just to add to what EGOL has written. In the early stage of your site you really need to be proactive about marketing your content. Get involved in communities where you can promote (in an non-invasive way) your content. Don't be afraid to contact webmasters to let them know about your content. And don't be afraid of the occasional link "exchange".
Check in the Adwords Keywords Tool. Be sure to check the box "Exact" instead of "Broad".
There are some phrases where there is a significant difference in traffic between plur./sing. Be aware though that sometimes there is a slightly different intent for sing./plur. searches.
Don't rely on the ALT tag too much. Normal text and standard anchor text in links have more influence than ALT text does. If you've deleted the keywords and substituted them with images with ALT text, it's never going to be as good.
You should be pretty safe with putting it there twice. I don't think it will help, but it shouldn't hurt.
Using different keywords (like in your examples) might not actually be a bad idea. Personally though, I don't rely on putting keywords in URL too much as being an "optimizing" factor. Actually, I'm a believer that if you get the URL, Title, Heading & internal links identical, you're actually trying too hard.
There could be a variety of issues:
Try and back-track what you have done lately. It's probably also worth checking if you have any messages in your Google Webmaster Tools account.
UK.com provides subdomains, so there is a lot going on there - site:uk.com
It's a bit weird the way OSE counts linking root domains to the domain:
At least that's how I think it works
I think it looks pretty OK.
I guess UK.com is a pretty popular website and that's the data you're getting.
Could you give us the URL where this is happening?
The way I like to work with Open Site Explorer is to group the link data (after downloading it in a spreadsheet) by site types.
This is done partially by searching from certain strings within the URLs, page titles or even anchor text, and partially by manual review.A typical way of grouping the links would be into:
I also like to sort the links by country, especially if I'm trying doing SEO for a local version of Google.
I don't really look at how much juice a page passes, I haven't found the MozRank to be too useful when sorting out through the link data.
Cheers
Hi Supriya,
You can copy the website to .au/.sg domains and it won't cause duplicate issues, as since you don't rank in Google.com.au or Google Singapore currently, there is nothing the "duplicate content" could threaten the.
The Singapore/Australian domain names will have a bit easier time ranking in their respective Google versions, but... you still need links to those website, especially links from Australian/Singapore websites.
And this is the second strategy you can use - build Singapore/Australian links to your current website. They will help you rank in Singapore/Australian and at the same time you'll leverage any authority your website already has.
Yes, you're basically right. With the PR of any given page it's not that it gets divided by the amount of outbound links on the page, but it's generally believed that the PR decreases (leaks) with the increasing number of outgoing links.
I suppose even Facebook and Twitter don't get crawled deeply enough to get fully index by the SEOmoz bots. Profile pages that have more links pointing to them (even nofollow) have a larger chance of getting found by a robot.
Hi Bodie,
a spike like that can happen due to either a temporary change in Google's algorithm that happens to favour your website, or (more likely) a temporary change in the signals Google is using to rank your site.
The direct cause could be i.e. a good link that your website got in early December and which then disappeared sometime after. Google would reward you with a higher ranking, because of the link, but when it noticed the link disappeared, your rankings returned to previous levels.
The remedy - keep increasing the authority of your website by acquiring more links.
Don't look at the competitiveness score in the Google Adwords Keyword tool. Use it to check the traffic volumes and once you have the best keywords, check which are least competitive by measuring the strenght of websites competing for them - you can use Open Site Explorer for this.
Duplicate content issues? I don't think an uppercase page title could cause that?
I like to use DDG from time to time. Just for comparison purposes mainly. And I like the name
Lately PageRank is even worse. As far as I remember the last update was in Jan/Feb this year while the previous one probably in March. Unless I missed something, that means 9 months of no updates.