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And can you show me the screen/section when you're editing the homepage text?

(we will get to the bottom of this one, it's just taking time).

Can you take some screenshots so I can see what you're seeing?

Can you post firstly the page you see when you are editing the home page content? (not the layout/design).

Don't open up the Yoast SEO on it's own. Go edit the home page text as you would do normally. It will be under 'Pages' or 'Posts' depending on which way you created your home page.

Then edit the page/post in the normal way and then the Yoast box is under the normal editing window.

If it's not there make sure you're running the most up-to-date version of Wordpress and Yoast SEO and re-try

In which case I suggest you do the following:-

• Edit your home page as normal through the WP back end
• In the 'Wordpress SEO by Yoast' box under the editor select the 'Advanced' tab
• Enter your Canonical URL without the backslash there.

Publish and refresh the 'live' page and it all should marry up.

You're still probably not losing out with or without the trailing backslash, but it definitely makes it cleaner if your incoming links are precisely the same as your canonical definition.

Let me know if this works out for you.

Hi C,

Thanks for posting - broadening your keyword scope to break into a local area as well is something you need to carefully manage. Here's some pointers

• If your business is US-wide, then not limiting the appeal of your home page is a good idea
• Therefore a dedicated page is definitely the way forward.
• On your Phoenix page you want to be talking about the area and what makes you great as a local web design agency - maybe special offers, for example. Maybe you want to tell people of local events you plan on attending so people can meet you face-to-face. In short, creating new content that is not anywhere else on your website that appeals to your local audience.
• Make sure your Google Maps/Google+ Business page (!) lists your new targeted page for the local area, because people who are searching locally want to see local content. So don't just put your homepage in, put your Phoenix page in.
• Get people to review your business on Google Places and publish reviews from local customers on your new local page - this encouraged new potential locals that you are not only local but you are meeting the local market.
• Consider using microformats on your web page with your business address (which will obviously be the same as your Google Places address).
• Submit a geositemap.xml through Google Webmaster Tools.
• Get your new page out onto social media and publicise any local offer to encourage visitors/referrals.
• And finally when looking at link building, look for local resources or sites that promote local businesses, or blogs that write about things to do with Phoenix and get in on the action. And ensure any links you get point directly to your new Phoenix page... again visitors from a local website want to land on a page that is local, so is the most relevant page for them.

That's a lot - I forget sometimes how many aspects to local SEO there can be! Any questions, just yell and good luck with it!

I think for a start you need to not worry about percentages or nit-picking over calculations. Here are some basic principles

• Firstly make sure your website itself is great and that your content reads well for human beings, then perform your on-site optimisation to make sure the site is primed for your choice of keywords. In my view, if you've selected your keywords, your on-page optimisation has to be the next step - because any visitors you are bringing into your site from search must be engaged and interested. Get some colleagues/friends to read it through.
• Then begin your link-building. Make sure you have a range of type of link - editorial posts, reviews or relevant articles you've written, some directories maybe, get engaged into some relevant communities to what you do - have you exhibited at a wedding fair? Then see if the venue organisers list their exhibiters and get listed.
• You will need to have a good proportion of links with your target anchor text - but they must be in-context, so worry about that aspect on the sites you have the most control over - i.e. doing an article on a wedding blog about selecting the right music for your wedding. If link building is done 'naturally' then the range of anchor texts will come as different sites will link to you in different ways.
  • Some may allow keyword-rich anchors
  • Some will be business name
  • Some will be 'Website'
  • Some will be your website URL etc etc
• Google in particular likes brand value - so ensure you are building awareness of your brand through all your marketing activities, through online and offline means.

So build a strategy for your link building but make sure the keyword range is broad and steer clear of 'best wedding singer' unless you've got sufficient awards or something that merits the title.

Oh and one final thing might be to grow your own website with relevant information or helpful articles, or even different styles of singing you do. Some couples may want a romantic wedding singer or a 'fun, jazzy' one. You could easily broaden your keyword appeal by not limiting all your keywords to 'wedding singer'-oriented ones.

Hope this helps.

I'm not sure what others think, but I think you're actually going to be better off doing the redirect. If there's one thing a site shouldn't be is a doorway page to another site.

So, what I suggest is to do the 301 redirect to capture any people who visit it and bring them into your 'real site'.

Before you do this do a download of all your existing links into ese.co.uk and then methodically go through them and ensure they point directly to esedirect.co.uk.

That way you get the link juice in the short term, but after the 301 'value' has diminished, the updated links will have the full value for esedirect.co.uk.

If there is any content of value on the old site, maybe bring it up to date and relaunch it on the new site after the 301 redirect as well.

Hope this helps!

Martin

What tool are you using for your on-page analysis?

Have you done a Google search for : site:www.homepage.ca and see if two URLs are listed?

If the source code is only giving you one rel canonical tag then regardless of your analysis there's only one canonical URL so I don't think you have anything to worry about, so long as you agree with the URL given in that tag

Hey Russ,

Thanks for your reply. I will do my best to answer your questions 'back at me'!

1. I was aware that the reconsideration request may have no impact and as the client doesn't recall receiving a penalty notice, I just got it done to ensure we were covering all basis. And for a couple of minutes used, I thought it would be worth checking.

2. I agree we need to do some link removal. One question on the back of that, and ensuring we do what is needed within the client's limited budget is, if the links/websites are no longer listed in Google (which from the partial data we have from the old company, many are not), does removing them hold any value as the links won't be passing signals of any kind if the site's not in the SERPs any more, right?

3. My only concern with this one is the risk of duplicated content. The client has already re-written the home page and is in the process of re-writing the others because of the previous company's spammy SEO approach. To get them to write another version is going to be too much for them. I'm definitely considering getting them on a fresh domain but don't want to inadvertently cause them more problems!

Thanks for the article, that came out during a time of illness so I completely missed it. Thanks!

Hi there,

Quick overview of a client who came to us after having the vast majority of their link value slashed by Penguin.

• Client only has a limited 'recovery budget'
• Client had been outsourcing SEO to a foreign company
• The website was 'keyword stuffed' when we arrived
• Links were of poor quality, the company clearly majoring on quantity rather than quality.
• Client was ranking #4 or  #3 for a keyword which was bringing in sales.
• Post penguin, dropped to page 5 and then out of the top 100 for that keyword, losing 70% of sales.

The client, under our supervision has

• Rewritten spammy content so they work for human beings (so it now reads well)
• Gone through the website and is removing old/duplicate and low-quality content
• De-emphasised other pages for the target keyword so that only one page majors on it.
• After doing the above has submitted a reconsideration request (about 2 weeks ago, so I know there's time).

We are focussing on ensuring her content is written well and on building decent links to the site (i.e. to put some good-uns where the bad ones were).

We're into month 2 of the 'clean-up exercise' and the site is still only ranking #90 for the keyword.

Given the client's budgetary limitation, could it be more beneficial to consider a new brand identity and domain name to start afresh (without a 301 redirect) or should we just continue along the track we are doing with this client?

Thanks!

Thanks for adding that Cyrus... I have to say I was assuming Douglas wasn't hiding the actual content, but that was an assumption, so I'm glad you checked.

No problem, glad I could help - and I agree the Yoast plugin is a good one but if you're a paying member of SEOmoz, follow up using it with the on-page optimiser so you have a variety of angles covered.

Well, no, because the assumption is that a page won't be linking to itself (except maybe in a navigation system) so your links should be going to other pages anyway.

Just bear in mind that cannibalization doesn't just apply to internal links (though that's how it often happens). You also don't want to be linking to outside resources with your own target keywords.

But yes, it's the anchor text that needs changing.

Maybe for now then, use the Description you can provide via the theme you're using and use Yoast for the other bits?

Hmmm. Which URLs is SEOmoz saying are containing the duplicate meta description?

And have a look in Wordpress under 'plugins' and see if there are two 'SEO' plugins, as you might be able to disable one if one has shipped with the theme you're using.

Another experiment might be to temporarily apply a different theme and re-run the SEOmoz tool and see if you still have duplicate META DESCRIPTIONs as that would help you to see if it is the theme causing the problem.

My actual conclusion then would be to maybe do a guest post for your friend's site talking about how surf school could benefit from considering their marketing and get a valid in-context link rather than just a link in  a footer, which Lee above quite rightly points out could be seen as spammy.

That way you're contributing positively to the development of your friends site and the in-context link appears just on one page (not site-wide) and actually means the page is a relevant, but highly targeted/specialist page which validly links to your site.

Should get you a bit more targeted referrals, rather than you 100% bouncing ones too

My first three questions would be

1. Why did they put the link there in the first place?
2. Does that link have any 'value' to your SEO campaign (maybe do a quick analysis of the URL in Open Site Explorer)
3. Are you getting any visitors through the link?

If the world was free of SEO's I think a 'natural web' would have links between unrelated resources as different people find things relevant or interesting. If the site linking is not generally spammy, and you get the odd visitor through then so long as you are checking it's not doing you any harm then leave it (especially as it seems to have occurred without you asking).

If the surfing site is poor quality then that could reflect badly on you - then get them to remove it.

If the surfing site has little link value and/or you're not getting any visitors through it and/or those that are do not stick around for long, then again get them to remove it.

So do a bit of digging on the page linking up first and see what you find and make your decision based on the data available

How your internal links (links on your website's pages to other pages on your website) are worded makes a difference to how effective the keyword targeting of a page is.

So if I have a page selling 'Purple Elephants' there should not be links to other pages with the text 'purple elephants'. On the flip side, on other pages, links to this product should contain 'purple elephants'.

So you fix it by looking at your page which should focus on purple elephants and finding links to other pages containing this phrase and changing the wording.

Remember what it says above that 'partial matches' may not have such a negative effect so purple ride-on elephants would still probably be okay. What you want to ensure that the links going out from that page are not precisely the keyword you're targeting. (i.e. exact-match).

Okay... two main points I think here

1. Yes, which domain/sub-domain the links are pointing to makes a difference - so if you have a www version and your links point to the non-www version then it's not quite as great. (Still has value for your site, though, it's important to remember). So you need to decide which is the most important and keep the canonicalisation (is that a word?) consistent throughout.
2. In Wordpress you should be able to change the direction of the redirect, have a shuffle around the 'settings' section and you should be able to find it.

Hope this is helpful.

Try this - http://www.internetofficer.com/seo-tool/redirect-check/

Another great free tool is the Screaming Frog SEO Spider.

Hope this helps!