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Chris,

So far as I know this is not an issue. If I'm not mistaken, you have it set-up so that the registrar is pointing multiple domains to your host IP and you're maintaining all of your sites within one cPanel (or one parent directory).

If that's the case, it's OK. I asked a similar question several months back and the general consensus seems to have been that it's not going to effect rankings as long as a majority of the links are not coming from the same IP block. I think this kind of piggybacks on the whole 'link farming' problem that was popular amongst Black Hat SEOs back in 2009-2010.

For some additional insight, check out the discussion here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/managing-multiple-websites-via-add-on-domain.

Dan, thankfully, we're at a good point, since the owner only recently went live and since then, hasn't really invested too much time in the creation of content just yet.

After hearing what you said though, I'm thinking more and more that it would work to the business' greatest advantage to use the '.co.uk' extension.

Like I said, I don't think he has any ambitions to expand into a national/international enterprise.

All things considered, I think I'm going to direct 'mydomain.com' to 'mydomain.co.uk'. Do you think that would be a wise suggestion?

Dan, thankfully, we're at a good point, since the owner only recently went live and since then, hasn't really invested too much time in the creation of content just yet.

After hearing what you said though, I'm thinking more and more that it would work to the business' greatest advantage to use the '.co.uk' extension.

Like I said, I don't think he has any ambitions to expand into a national/international enterprise.

All things considered, I think I'm going to direct 'mydomain.com' to 'mydomain.co.uk'. Do you think that would be a wise suggestion?

So do you think it might be more advantageous for me to implement a permanent 301 so that the 'yourdomain.co.uk' gets pushed to 'yourdomain.com'.

Likewise, would doing that hurt me on local search rankings for the UK?

What's up Mozzers,

I am currently doing some work for a local business in the UK and they've asked me to set-up Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools profiles for them.

The site is currently accessible at the following domain extension, 'mydomain.com' and 'mydomain.co.uk'.

What is the best way to set this up in Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools so I get the most accurate measurement of traffic coming to my website?

Hello Mozzers,

A colleague and I have been collectively managing about 12 brands for the past several months and we have recently received a number of messages in the sites' webmaster tools instructing us that 'Googlebot was not able to access our site due to some errors with our robots.txt file'

My colleague and I, in turn, created new robots.txt files with the intention of preventing the spider from crawling our 'cgi-bin' directory as follows:

---

User-agent: *

Disallow: /cgi-bin/

---

After creating the robots and manually re-submitting it in Webmaster Tools (and receiving the green checkbox), I received the same message about Googlebot not being able to access the site, only difference being that this time it was for a different site that I manage.

I repeated the process and everything, aesthetically looked correct, however, I continued receiving these messages for each of the other sites I manage on a daily-basis for roughly a 10-day period.

Do any of you know why I may be receiving this error? is it not possible for me to block the Googlebot from crawling the 'cgi-bin'?

Any and all advice/insight is very much welcome, I hope I'm being descriptive enough!

Hello Mozzers,

Two of the sites I manage are currently in the process of merging into one site and as a result, many of the URLs are changing.

Nevertheless (and I've shared this with my team), I was under the impression that after a certain point, Google starts to discount the validity of URLs that are too long.

With that, if I were to have a URL that was structured as follows, would that be considered 'too long' if I'm trying to get the content indexed highly within Google?

Here's an example: yourdomain.com/content/content-directory/article

and in some cases, it can go as deep as:

yourdomain.com/content/content-directory/organization/article.

Albeit there is no current way for me to shorten these URLs is there anything I can do to make sure the content residing on a similar path is still eligible to rank highly on Google? How would I go about achieving this?

Hey MOZers,

I currently work for a company with several other offices in other countries.

Is it possible to set-up Google 'Business' and Google 'Maps' pages so when a user in a given country queries 'our business' on either Google 'Search' or Google 'Maps' they will receive the relevant business information for that country.

For example, if an internet user in Canada enters a query for 'our business' in Canada (and we have an office in Canada) is there anyway to set up our Google Business page and Google Maps page so that user receives the contact information for the Canada office, rather than the US office?

Conversely, if someone in the United States enters a search query for 'our business' is there a way to set it up so that the user receives our address in the states?

Another nice thing about Textbroker is your ability as a 'client' to re-use the author if you like the content they're producing for you. Therefore, rather than having to continuously re-iterate instructions and 'break-in' a new writer, you can continue building your relationship with someone who has a little more insight into what it is that you do.

Another route you can consider is: www.textbroker.com. I've worked on both the 'client' and 'writer' side and one of the nicest perks as a 'client' is that you can create instructions for the writer to focus on a specific topic, include keywords, links and more. Additionally, if the author fails to meet any of the criteria outlined in the job description, you can request Textbroker to have the author 'revise' their article.

As far as pricing is concerned, the articles are generally priced between $10-12(US) for a quality entry created by a 4/5 or 5/5 ('star') writer.

Agreed, this is a great way to 'strike while the iron is hot'. The only way to make this more 'pronounced/clear' would be to create a sense of urgency, i.e.'Click Here Now!' vs. 'Please Click Here to See All the Great Offers'.

http://www.ehow.com/how_8368542_make-website-phone-numbers-clickable.html

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find an old resource that was really great for showing you how to set-up categories in Wordpress, but here's a new one I found that may be able to help you out:

http://www.gnc-web-creations.com/wordpress-categories.htm

Did you already try changing the URL path using the 'edit' function next to the 'Title field' on the 'WYSIWYG' editor where you edit posts? That may be a good place to start.

If you continue to have issues, it might not be a bad idea to go and investigate the architecture to see how your categories and pages are configured.

Good Morning MOZers,

Quick question for the community: when creating an RSS feed for one of your websites, how do you title your RSS feed?

Currently, the sites I'm managing use the 'rss.xml' for the file name, but I was curious to know whether or not it would, in any way, benefit my SERP if I were to add my domain to precede the 'rss.xml', i.e. 'my-sites-rss.xml' or something of that nature.

Beyond that, are there any 'best practices' for creating RSS feed page titles or is there a preferred method of implementation?

Anybody have any solutions

Good Morning Mozers,

I am currently working with a developer on a new website and they've recently sent me some mock-ups. When I viewed the source, however, the  order of the 'META' attributes was much different than any web page I've seen before.

From what it appears, the developer had placed 'mobile', 'cache expiration' and a number of other attributes much more highly than what I'm used to seeing the portion lead with, i.e. META description, META keywords, etc.

With that, my question for the community is: does the order of the META 'attributes' matter when developing a new website?

If you have (what appear to be) less important attributes placed closer to the beginning tag, does it make (what were previously considered the most 'relevant attributes) less important to the spiders when they come crawl the site?

Finally, what are the best META attributes and best method for constructing the meta portion of the code on a web page?

Hello community!

I have a quick question for you regarding preserving my SERPs once I switch a development site to replace the current production site.

Basically, we are switching to a new CMS and will be featuring the same content, architectural layout, URL structure, etc. Again, the only difference is that it's going to be on a new CMS.

Upon switching to the new version of the  site, what would be the best strategy for making sure we preserve our rankings for content already ranking highly within the search engines?

Likewise, is there anything additional we may be able to do right-off-the-bat in order to assist content that may not be ranking highly in the SERPs, rank more highly?

I wouldn't recommend adding it in the signature section.

And, if you're referring to adding links back to the home page as hyperlinks within the content, I would not recommend that either.

I'm sorry if it sounds redundant, but you want to rank to link to sites that appear at the top of the search results for the keyword your trying to rank for or sites that link back to you.

Have you considered adding it in the navigation menu, pending your site has one or perhaps some sort of slider with a link back to the home page.

I'm not positively sure what you're asking, but tried to give you some clarification (and cover all my bases). If you can be a little more specific, I'd be more than willing to help you more.

Hey SEOMOZ community,

I've always been curious about whether or not hosting multiple websites through an 'add-on' domain has positive/negative effects on SEO for websites.

Currently, I'm hosting 5 sites through an add-on domain at Hostgator.com. Is this a poor way to set-up my sites or is this OK?

Vistage,

I can appreciate this and understand that this listing is probably in the recommended searches because of the query's popularity. Likewise, logic led me to believe the only way to get rid of this from the related searches was to create more highly relevant searches for the brand.

Sometimes - as I'm sure you know- SEOs can implement a bit of voodoo to either 1.) eliminate, or 2.) expedite the removal of such unwanted information. I was just hoping that there was something I could either do in Webmaster Tools or another one of Google's products to accelerate this process.

With reputation monitoring being as big of a discussion topic as it has been in 2012, though, I was confident that someone may've discovered some sort of work-around or other means of getting these unwanted queries out of the 'recommended searches' list.

Regardless, thank you for your input. I still believe there has to be another way to 'bury' unwanted recommended search queries and if I find anything out, I will definitely let you know.

Currently, when I run a search for my company's website, one of the listings in my
"searches related to <my search="" query="">" is:</my>

<my company="">scam</my>

Does anyone know how to change the queries that appear in the 'related searches' section of the search results page?