Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I was on the free trial for Raven when the AdWords API was removed, so I decided to wait on subscribing long-term until I looked into how this would affect the link research. It appears that the link building side of Raven tools won't really be impacted by the loss of this API, is this correct? I want to move from Excel spreadsheets full of link building research and management tables into one tool, and I think Raven is the most recommended tool for this. I don't necessarily need the PPC side of it.

I heard multiple people talk about AHREFS during an SES conference that I recently attended, so I want to learn more about that too. What more can AHREFS provide if I already use OpenSiteExplorer and Raven tools? Do you find yourself using all of these tools every month, or does it make sense to only pay to get the data AHREFS provides a couple times a year?

Thanks for your help!

What are the advantages & disadvantages of letting Google crawl site search results? We currently have them blocked via robots.txt, so I'm not sure if we're missing out on potential traffic.

Thanks!

Thanks for your response! I don't want to take big risks, but I do want to diversify our incoming links. Would a few links from blog networks be harmful if we had a lot more "white hat" links to offset them?

One of the products my company offers is business cards, and if "Round corner business cards" is a good keyword for our business card page, should I still avoid an anchor text link from the first paragraph of this page: http://www.tutorialchip.com/inspiration/20-most-famous-round-corner-business-cards-designs/

I found a group of similar websites that offer anchor text links with good to great domain and page authority (30 to 75), but I'm not sure how "safe" they are. Most of their posts are compilations of images/logos and there are a lot of ads on the page.

Would links from sites like TutorialChip.com help or would Google discount them because of the nature of the site?

Thanks!

All of the following URL's take me to the same page on my site:

1. www.mysite.com/category1/subcategory.aspx

2. www.mysite.com/subcategory.aspx

3. www.mysite.com/category1/category1/category1/subcategory.aspx

All of those pages are canonicalized to #1, so is that okay?

I was told the following my a company trying to make our sitemap: "the site's platform dynamically creates URLs  that resolve as 200 and should be 404. This is a huge spider trap for any search engine and will make them wary of crawling the site."

What would I need to do to fix this?

Thanks!

My company is purchasing www.boughtsite.com. This new site has multiple sub-domain sites: customsite1.boughtsite.com, customsite2.boughtsite.com, etc.

1. Is it possible to redirect everything from www.boughtsite.com to www.mycompanysite.com while leaving the other sub-domain sites active? These other sites have different audiences than our main site.

2. Would it be an okay solution to just place a link on boughtsite.com to mycompanysite.com telling visitors "We have been re-branded to  My Company"

3. Can I use an i-frame to move customsite1.boughtsite.com to www.mycompanysite.com/customsite1 instead?

Thanks for your input!

Thanks Chas!

1. If I give a sales rep a unique tag to put at the end of a URL for tracking purposes, will Google index the "www.mysite.com/service.html?unique-tag" version of a page and display it in search results?

2. Would a tool like Xenu be able to find that version of a URL?

Reason for questions: If I give my sales people tags with their names in them, I don't want competitors poaching my sales people by search for all URLs on my domain.

Follow up: are there any other potential issues that I should think about?

Thanks!

We had our developers install Wordpress in the www.ourmainsite.com/blog directory. Our site is .NET based. Now we asked them to customize the blog's appearance to look like our main site.

Here is the proposal from our developers to avoid lots of PHP coding:

"In this approach we will create a custom page which will contain an iFrame in the body section. This iFrame will be solely responsible for showing all the blog pages.

The template for Blog Pages will be designed in php (except the Header and Footer section). In Short, We will run the wordpress site (Blog) in our [main] Site"

My Questions

1. Do the URLs have to stay the same for every page on the blog when using an iframe? (we want unique URLs for every page/post)

2. What are the SEO implications of this method? Will internal linking in the blog help pass all of the link juice throughout the main site and the blog?

3. How difficult is it to match the header, footer, and CSS (font/style/colors) of our main site in the Wordpress installation given that the site is .Net and Wordpress is PHP? Does spending some more time/money now to build everything in PHP without an iframe make sense in the long run?

Thanks!

We have an old meta description that advertises an old offer (FREE X if you Buy Y) that we are no longer running on the site. I changed the meta description, now what is the fastest way I can get Google to update their SERP with the new description?

An article (http://www.websitemagazine.com/content/blogs/posts/archive/2011/11/18/step-up-your-e-commerce-seo-game-with-product-microdata.aspx?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter) is claiming that using this product micro data (http://schema.org/Product) might help product pages rank better.

Do you have any experience using these tags and would it be worth the time to implement these on a site with 1000's of products? Would it make sense to selectively implement them on specific products that actually have a good chance of ranking high instead?

When your keywords match the search query they are bolded on the SERPs. That can potentially increase the CTR if it catches the searchers' eyes. If every site in the results is doing the same thing and they all have the bolded keyword in the beginning of the result, you may stand out more if it's in the middle. Just keep it in the first 150 - 160 characters or else it won't make it onto the SERP.

Thinking about what Zsolt said about answering the searcher's questions is more important than the exact placement of the keywords though.

is it too late to request a copy? thanks in advance!

Thanks for the info! It will really help us decide how to proceed.

This is what I had concluded, but I don't know if the technology issues outweigh the SEO cons. What Sha Menz guessed is correct.