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The social media icons in your footer are passing PageRank.

I guess my question is. Why?

I recently had one of my personal affiliate sites drop from the SERPs. It's relatively new so it's hard to tell if it's been sandboxed or penalised but I have done some things to correct this.

The reason for your site dropping is almost certainly because it was perceived as a 'thin' affiliate site. i.e. low quality/duplicate content that was geared towards squeezing people through affiliate links. Google is coming down on these guys harder than ever - I wrote my own content based on research, but my possible problem was that there were only 10-15 pages at the time.

Since then I have quadrupled the content and the reason I didn't switch sites is because I had an exact match domain that I didn't want to lose. I would say, in your case, start again - get all your content indexed first without affiliate links and then add them to places that you see are most appropriate.

Don't just throw affiliate links everywhere, the links work far better in some spots than others; take your time to add them and be careful not to go overboard.

Unfortunately you'll have to update your XML sitemap when you add new pages (there are technical ways of automating the update). Unless of course, you use the WordPress plugin - in which case it does this for you automatically. It's a bit of a pain but there are free XML sitemap generators that will reproduce a new file - but I would wait until the site is pretty much complete before creating the first.

As for visualising link juice, take a look at the MozRank of the homepage using the tool bar and then have a look at 1st and 2nd tier. You can see that MozRank splits up evenly between pages (unless skewed by other links). Although if the pages are new and SEOmoz hasn't crawled them yet, then this won't show.

Just remember that if you have 1 internal link on your homepage then all available PageRank will pass through it, the more you have the more diluted this PageRank will be.

You should definitely not be hiding the sub categories. This could land you with a nasty penalty.

It's a case of PageRank flow and what pages you want to prioritise. If you add more links to the home page, the PageRank that is passed to the deeper pages is weakened. A good rule to follow is to make it possible for a user to reach any page on your website within 3 clicks of the mouse i.e. Category > Sub Category > Product. If it took much longer you may want to think about giving the option of a shorter journey to the user from the home page.

Linking to sub categories from the home page totally depends on your conversion and SEO objectives. Personally, I almost exclusively link to 1st tier pages from the homepage and expand from there - that way I have the most PageRank passing to the pages I want to rank. Deeper pages will still get some juice but generally speaking they're not as important for me.

If you want to allow Google to crawl and index your pages easily - create a HTML sitemap (WordPress plugin does the trick in seconds) and submit your XML sitemap to GWT and BWT.

Hope this helps

Google wants the user to have the best possible experience when reading content, watching videos or looking at images. Think about the following variables:

• File size
• Video length
• Bit rate
• Frame rate
• Title
• Decsription
• Tags
• Reviews
• Embeds (speculative)

There's more. You just need to think of what's best for the user and run with it. You can experiment as much as you like! I know far more about image ranking than video ranking but if you need any more details feel free to PM me.

Great idea Donnie. This comment may well have changed our initial SEO strategy. I'm guessing you've got experience in this area - can I be nosey and ask what your testing process is?

Many thanks!

I guess there's a fairly fundamental issue:

There are 110 Global searches for 'diamond mens jewelry'. Is there any reason in particular why you're targeting this phrase? (referring to title element)

Header tag issues too. You want to include keywords in the H1 (unless you're going straight for "mens jewelry" but this isn't consistent with your title element) and you ought to have H2 tags in there too. Alt attributes for your images wouldn't hurt either... And you nofollow'd your navigation links??!?!

You can merge Magento and WordPress together, there's almost nothing you can't do with WP. Your comment about noindex is a fair one, but if you wanted to noindex useless pages on another platform, you'd have to do more than just tick a box (Yoast robots meta - http://yoast.com/wordpress/meta-robots-wordpress-plugin/)

My personal opinion is that WP's growth is going to explode during 2011 when small businesses start clocking on to how great it is. It's just a matter of educating them about it!

That's an incredibly tough question and all I can think of right now is that you can't sell a WordPress web design as a bespoke CMS. A lot of businesses want a bespoke CMS that costs infinitely more than WordPress and with less functionality. There really is nothing to dislike about WordPress unless you hate using MySQL.

There won't be a penalty. But the question of whether or not the text is visible to search engines depends on how it pops up i.e. title attribute? JavaScript? AJAX?

'Post response' deleted my answer. I'll try and remember what I said!

I think Rand's WBF was focusing largely on new websites with link portfolios that consisted almost entirely of 1000s of 'dogdy links'. Provided that your website is aged (and it sounds like it definitely is) and that you have a mix of natural and 'artificial' links then you have nothing to worry about.

While I don't know, I would imagine that Google takes far more kindly to image links than text links; simply because text links have much more weight and therefore more power to manipulate.

Anyway, you have a totally legitimate link building strategy and I would suggest that even if your site was brand new there wouldn't be an issue.

It's a coincidence Korgo. There are so many millions of people using Google that if it were true it would of been stastistically proven already.

To be honest, if they shifted "at the exact same time" then it's even more unlikely! Google doesn't make changes to rank instantly - if it did then we'd all be able to suss out metrics a lot faster.

Million dollar question.

However, I've found (quite unsurprisingly) that text-based content is at the bottom of the pile. Imagery and videos are the best way to get people linking and talking about you. Create or embed interesting/funny/shocking video and imagery to attract links and follow it up with content for the SEs to read and appreciate!

Nick

Hi Gianni,

There are a ton of reasons why your website might have slipped down the SERPs or dropped rankings. It's almost certainly not because of your image.

If you want, you can PM me your URL and I'll have a look.

Nick

Hi EndeR,

This might be the article you're looking for? http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-strategy-predicting-yearly-site-traffic

I always list the root domain URL for Google Places. If Google decides that another URL is more appropriate then they will change it.

How long have you had Google Places set up? It does take some time to rank. You may also want to consider changing the title element of your home page to reflect 'self storage toronto' rather than 'toronto storage'. If you would prefer that Google ranked /toronto-self-storage for 'self storage toronto' then there are ways to try to trigger this.

It's an interesting topic. I work with a range of local companies who we have generated large amounts of traffic through local listings. In many cases we have two results ranking on the first page of Google. However what you say about it being more difficult does appear to be true from my experience.

If you like, PM me your website URL. I'll take a look at it and give you some suggestions. It may simply be that you haven't been listed in Google Places for long enough - it does take Places considerable time to get its head around new listings!

Reducing the weighting towards exact match domains was always going to be inevitable given that it has been so incredibly overpowered for organic ranking. However I can't foresee an instance where an exact match domain would not be telling of the relevance of that domain's content. i.e. I'm sure Google & Bing will always take into account domain keywords when calculating rank.

Personally I think Mr Cutts sums it up incredibly well. It's branding vs SEO. And, as an SEO, I want to build a website that is getting as much organic traffic as possible and therefore I will always purchase EMDs. It's a serious question of long term goals and how you want to develop the website. Anyway, if you go with an EMD in the first instance there's no harm in 301ing to the new domain if you change your mind in the future!

Just want to clarify that completing your Google Places profile (on its own) does not effect ranking. Going from 91% complete to 100% complete will not have any direct benefit on results - however, by doing this you may be adding more relevant information that could potentially boost rankings.

Set up your Google Places page with whatever info is useful to a user - follow the guidelines and then build your associated URL as an authority. Sure, there are optimisation techniques on-places but a large chunk of ranking (from my experience) comes from your website's authority.

But I've subscribed to questions that I haven't answered...