Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Yes thanks Andy, got the penalty finally removed at xmas but no real uplift since apart from what I can only assume is seasonal search variation.

Have kept away from link building over the last 6 months , just concentrated on citations and doing a lot of content, housekeeping and generally tidying the site up. Will see whether my efforts have been in vain or not, when the new Panda gets rolled out anytime now.

I may look at some freelance link building in the near future if we dont get very far trying it ourselves but it's something I am very wary of , especially considering the mess the last chap caused.

thanks

Pete

Many thanks All,

Some very good points here. I will  take a look at all your suggestions and articles links and see if I can also see find a video out there on how to do it i.e what metrics to look out for etc etc .

We previously had a manual penalty (unnatural links) due to our naivety when we outsourced some link building work and they were using these blog network sites which got us hammered so we are naturally pretty worried on who and how we to get links from .

Many thanks

Pete

Many thanks Patrick,

I will take a look at those points

thanks

Pete

Hi All,

We are having a go at doing our own link building and just wanted some advice on a couple of questions

1. I've found some industry related blog sites which could be good but alot of them only offer a no follow link ?. Is this worth it ? And if ,so what is the advantage of having a no follow link ? as it won't directly help with our DA etc ?

2. I've also noticed some of these sites link to each other or recommend each other (i.e other blog sites) which may be some sort of link network ?.. I take it this is bad ? and could be penalized by google ?

thanks

pete

Hi Matt,

Many thanks for your help .Some good points here.  I  will certainly look to do that

thanks

Peter

Hi All,

We have lots of articles on our news page of our website. Should we add one of us as the author to gain Author Rank points so to speak ?.. Have not done anything previously with this but just wondered if we were missing a trick here

thanks

Pete

Hi Matt,

Many thanks . Glad, it's set up correctly. I will check out the video to.

thanks

Pete

Hi Mozzers,

I've been looking at the View Source on my landing pages , and it looks to me that my H1 Tag etc is not in the head but in the body . My developer says its in the correct place , but can someone please confirm as it looks wrong to me.

short url link - http://goo.gl/vfXeut

Many thanks

Pete

Hi Gary,

Many thanks for assistance and help with this. I will take a look at doing that.

Kind Regards

Pete

Many thanks All , some very good points raised.

thanks

Pete

Many thanks Gary,

Some interesting points ideas here. I didn't realize google would have taken snap shot in advance so yes I could well already missed the boat.

I like the idea of the no index on weaker pages so If I was do that but "Follow" on these weaker pages. Would that still be okay, if any child pages from those pages were left to be indexed ?.

Many thanks

Pete

Hi Mozzers,

I read on SEJ yesterday than apparently the Panda update was due in the 2 - 4 weeks.

I still have a large of my products which I have not got around to rewriting unique product descriptions for. I know these product descriptions are duplicated on other affiliate sites so do it think it in light of the panda update coming , would it wise to put a NO INDEX Meta tag on these product pages until I get around to rewriting the descriptions.  That way, I may not hit my Panda and it will buy me a bit more time.

Just an idea , but thought I'd run it by.

thanks

Pete

Hi ,

These are my category landing pages. The H1 is at the top , then my products, then my content is at the bottom under the H2 - See short url link - http://goo.gl/AdgKjA

You will notice the content is broken up with a few sub headings underlined.

Many thanks

Pete

Hi Mozzers,

My on page content comes under my H2 tag. I have a few subheadings within my content to help break it up etc and currently this is just underlined (not bold or anything) and I am wondering from an SEO perspective, should I be making these sub headings H3 tags.

Otherwise , I just have 500-750 words of content under an H2 tag which is what I am currently doing on my landing pages.

thanks

pete

Many thanks Miriam,

Pete

Many thanks Patrick and Gary,

Very comprehensive and some great tips here with some good articles links to so I will reading these before I proceed.

Many thanks

Pete

.

Hi Mozzers,

I am going through my categories on my eccomerce hire site trying to improve things and just wanted to check this query with you

1. My understanding is that if I have the same H1 and title tag, then that would give more weight for that keyword phrase? Would I also be correct in assuming that the H1 is more important than the title tag or should both be treated as equals in terms of SEO. My dimemla is that for certain products we hire, there's only really one clear winner in terms of keyword phrase. The others I find in keyword planner are way down the volume list , so I have tended to put the H1 and title tag as the same and then have H2 tag and a slightly different heading.

Is that the best philosphy or should I really mix them up , so the the title tag, h1, h2 are different ?

2. Also Currently My on page content mentions the the H1 tag near the beginning of the content. Is this correct or should I really be using the H2 tag phrase near the beginning of the content.

For example - One of the products we hire out is carpet cleaners. Therefore the main keyword phrase is carpet cleaner hire
and for our local pages its' carpet cleaner hire <city name="">.
This is my title tag and H1 tag and then for my h2 tag , I have something like "carpet cleaning equipment" with the content
mentioning carpet cleaner hire near the beginning.</city>

I don't want to look likes its over optimization or mention the word hire to much but being a hire website, it's difficult not to and other keywords that don't mention it in it, are to varied so could increase bounce rates ?.

When I look in GWT against my content keywords - the word hire shows a full bar.

Just wondered what peoples thoughts are if what I am doing it okay?
thanks
Pete

HI Miriam,

Many thanks for the article link. I will take a read

thanks

Pete

Many thanks Donald,

Yes, the branch pages are only 8 months old or so . I will take a look at the things you have suggested. Good point regarding the back to tools link , I could change that to be more localized depending on what branch you are on. The title tags should be picking up the city name in there as well but I will investigate.

My citations go to the main tool page as oppose to the branch pages. I guess , i should link them to the branch page instead or a mixture of both.

Many Thanks

Pete

Hi John

yes all of our branch pahe's have embedded google maps aswell and nap is consistany between  branch page ,google local page and citations

thanks

Pete