Welcome to the Q&A Forum

You will have trouble getting any site listed in DMOZ!

Not saying it's impossible, but the last 5 sites I've tried to get listed have failed miserably despite following their guidelines definitively.

I have gone through this same process recently.

FireBug's NET tab, the page speed plugin and Yahoo YSlow plugins were the way to go.

I had a page load time of about 10 seconds before optimising. I reduced this to about 6 seconds by doing the following:

• Using different domain names (e.g. static.mysite.com, static2.mysite.com, static3.mysite.com) to increase parallel downloads of CSS/images etc.
• Gzip
• Reducing size of all images

I then managed to decrease this further to about 1.5 seconds by changing server hosts.

If the current site is built on asp the credentials to access the database must be stored somewhere within the application. It would usually be in a .config file. There is a small chance that the connection details would be encrypted - but in the days of ASP this was the exception to the rule. If you can find these connection details you will be able to get at least a read only view of the database and export the data.

I find it strange that the owners of the site (whether that be you or a client you're working for) don't have the connection details of the db.

If you really can't get db connection details then yes, scraping the article and importing into the new db would be the best way forward. Screen scraper basic edition should suffice for this (it's free) - http://screen-scraper.com/download/basic_choose_platform.php

If the site was built 7 years ago, and has had no work done on the programming side since, there is a good chance the database is not up to scratch and has lots of dirty data (not for sure, just a good chance).

There is also a good chance that it was created with a custom CMS rather than one of the more popular CMS's so bare that in mind when trying to work out which one was used.

If I was faced with this situation, and I knew little about the old system, I would do the following:

• Investigate the database structure/schema and what data is stored where
• Create a new database and application to support the new website
• Migrate old data across from the old database to the new database using SQL export and import scripts

Once you have the new site up an running (in a test environment) you can think about how are going to redirect pages by using tools like opensiteexplorer to examine the most linked to URLs and then use urlrewriting (rather than redirection) to do the mapping (i assume the new site will be on the same domain).

Given that you've said your ultimate aim is for users to purchase things from your affiliates shop, you are really measuring the wrong thing by measuring page impressions.

Imagine a scenario where all users arrive to your site at an article page. At the end of the article page there is a link to buy a product. This link takes the user to your affiliates shop where he/she then buys a product. The user has visited exactly one page on your site (1 page impression) and earned you £x in revenue.

The above example would be more valuable to your business then say if they landing at the same article page, read 5 other related articles and then purchased nothing.

If the website makes money through selling affiliate products, you probably want to be measuring the number of sale made vs. the total number of unique visitors (conversion rate) or the number of pages a visitor reads before purchasing from you.

Don't measure the wrong statistic. make sure you know what you are trying to achieve and measure that!

Q&A sites tend to be more SEO friendly because of things like "related questions", "tag clouds" etc.

They tend to work more like blogs with comments rather than forums.

As the articel suggests, more people are searching using questions nowadays - e.g. "where can i get an iphone" as opposed to "buy iphone". Q&A sites lend themselves to ranking highly for this type of query.

The article also suggests, and I'm inclined to agree, that Google likes to show content from different data sources in it's top positions. Given the web trends towards Q&A sites, my personal views is that Google are more likely to rank a Q&A site higher than a forum (given all things are equal).

Yes, there is a very good chance that this is negatively affecting you.

I can't answer all of the questions, but I can help you out with some of them:

1. Given that it's  national newspaper, the PR of the site should be fairly high, and this should flow through to the article page. Building up the links to the article page seems like a lot of effort that could be better spent getting more quality links to your site, but i can see that this could have some benefit.

2. The article will certainly end up in the archive. it is unlikely, hwoever, that it will be deleted. Think of it from the newspapers perspective for a second. What benefit would it bring THEM to delete the article? None. These types of sites want great quality content that receives inbound links - deleting pages that could potentially have inbound links would be a terrible SEO strategy.

3. Only if it redirects and forwards properly (see next question)

4. Yes, but you will lose some of the link "juice"

5. I'm not sure on this one. I would like to think this an evolving process, but I don't have any facts to back this up.

6. Seems like it could be a lot of effort if you were to do this for every article you get published that links back to your site. You will only be boosting the PR of the site hsoting your article, only a small proportion of this will eventually get back to your site. You could spend this time and effort getting quality links to your site.

7. You will receive some link juice. You may find conversions are higher after people have read the news article.

Using the erl=canonical will not affect the ranking of the main page, in fact it will boost it. Any links that are generated to any of your country specific landing pages will in fact pass their link juice on to the main page specified in the rel=canonical.

I would recommend you keep your 250+ landing pages. Having these pages will also help optimise your conversion rate as users from those countries will be able to identify easier (after seeing their countries flag etc.). If the paegs are not optimised for country specific terms, I would also recommend you look at doing this as well, not necessarily for SEO benefit, but for CRO benefit.

In terms of SEO, they carry little weight and in my experience they're not really worth the time you need to spend writing them.

However, if you're planning on submitting your site to any link directories, it is worth noting that meta keywords are sometimes used by the directories to help them organise and rank your site.

Google will not penalise you from getting links from different niches. The links will not carry as much weight as if they were from relevent content.

Google will penalise you if this is done in a spammy way. For example, if you all of a sudden receive hundreds of links from restaurant sites, where there is no context to your content, Googlebot is going to find this strange and potentially raise a flag against your site.

I've not tried this myself but maybe you could do this using a Google Alert?

No it is not necessary. I like to add it just in case the .htaccess rules break at any time (e.g. when something else gets updated)

Yeah, add a rel="canonical" to show what page you want (e.g. www.domain.co.uk") and then setup your .htaccess like:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index.(htm|html|php) http://www.domain.co.uk/ [R=301,L]

Why are you 302 redirecting in the first place? Doesn't make much sense to me.

Why aren't your filter links simple hyperlinks?

The correct way to do this would be:

• Set urlrewrite's that match your filter expressions (e.g. /category1/brand, or /category3/xxl)
• In your category results page have hyperlinks that point at the rewritten urls (you build these dynamically)

This will avoid 302's completely and stop any redirects.

An alternative to this would be to server side filtering of data on page postback and avoid redirects this way.

I'm not sure how correct your SEO consultant is about the link juice being divided amongst all links inlcuding those that are nofollowed. My understanding is that if it is nofollowed, the search engine essentially ignores it.

If you're not a graphic designer (or have good design skills) I would 1005 outsource this to a graphic designer. You could use someone locally ot you could outsource to a designer on the web. Usually outsourcing locally costs more but has the benefit you can meet face to face and discuss ideas, whilst outsourcing over the internet can often be (a lot) cheaper, with comparable (if not better) results, but lacks in the face to face communication side of things.

If you go the internet route, sites like www.elance.com and www.odesk.com are probably good places to start. I have used odesk before and got good results.

Either way, I would recommend ensuring you have a good brief to give the designer.Look at some infographics you like the look of, create a unique theme that fits along the topic of your infographic, and try and find some imagry that you would like to see within the infographic (or at least examples of the types of imagery). All of these will help you get a result in line with what your expecting.

The ODP synchronises data out to sites that use its data periodically. If I remember rightly it can be as long as 6 months between updates ( don't quote me on that though) but it certainly isn't in real time!

They are basically the same. They use the ODP (Open Direcotry Project). The Google directory apparently uses Google's pagerank alogirthm within the categories.

When searching for Google Directory on Google you can see this as the site description:

**_"Google Directory - _**Searchable directory based on the ODP, combined with their own PageRank algorithm within each category."

Agreed with the above two answers. Use an obscure url and use meta tags to noindex/nofollow the pages.

I wouldn't worry too much about people finding your admin pages. You should already have security measures in place that prevent people from hacking your site or "guessing" your admin credentials. If you don't have these types of measures in place then I would recommend concentrating on these.

Some ideas of things to look at:

• Ensure pages do not allow SQL injection attacks
• Use complex usernames and passwords
• Stop people from entering the wrong username and password more than x times within y minutes (e.g. lock out the account either permanently or for a temporary time restriction)
• If someone tries to enter a username and password within a given period of time, prompt them with a captcha check to ensure no bots are trying to access the site
• Ensure passwords are changed regularly
• Set up an alerting system should incorrect credentials be entered
• Plus there are LOADS more things you should do