Questions
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REL prev/next on pages with additional sort parameters
Thanks for the reply Dana. No, a view-all page is not an option, some of the categories have over 11,000 items - so we can rule that out! I've looked at all of the existing resources, and while all of them offer great advice, nothing touches on the subject of multiple sort options - they seem to be only for standard page 1, page 2... etc listings. The link you provided to the YouMoz post we have read through thoroughly and they do it a little differently. In their example, they sort the items on the current page, while our sort options would change the order of the entire category, therefore we can't use canonical... as the page content is 100% different. We want to work with multiple sort options and wanted to know the best way to do this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter2640 -
Optimized page titles post penguin
Peter, Are you saying that every product is an FSX Addon? If so, then you are going to need to think this through and really get clear on Keyword research. Other keywords that get a ton of queries are FSX as a stand alone, FSX Simulator, etc. Also, FSX Download might be a clever one for those where there is a direct download as many who buy software do not wish to wait. So, my thought is this: You could make it start with the FSX piece: FSX Download, FSX Missions, FSX Aircraft, FSX Addon PIPE the specific aircraft PIPE then your Brand Name. So: FSX AddOn | Boeing 747 British Airways | Your Brand I think this will help you and as long as your content is unique (so dont have 90% of FSX Addon on the page and 10% on the plane). There are ways to avoid duplicating the content by potentially using Categories then make the product the individual aircraft download. I would need to see more of the site and think it through to be clear on resolution. Hope this bit helps,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RobertFisher0 -
Optimal URLs for SEO and UX
Hi Peter, Given that the site is 10 years old and that the URLs were already updated once fairly recently. I would leave them as they are exceot for those that have more than 3-5 keywords, or those that contain "stop" words like "and" "the" "of" etc. This would be pretty easy to do if you dumped all your URLs into excel and sorted them accordingly. If you feel very strongly that your search traffic would improve if you changed them, I would suggest picking one section or category of the site and doing those first. Monitor what happens. If you get good results, then go ahead and change the rest. Hope that helps! Dana
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danatanseo0 -
Links to images on a page diluting page value?
Very unusual and I doubt that's your issue: Some quick tips for you: Don't have empty alt tags for your images - fill them out Use an image site map Use microformats and tag each photo Use absolute URL's Add more text to the page Good luck.....
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | irvingw0 -
Tips for Panda-Proofing an Image Gallery
We have not used MTurk. I think that it would be very hard to find a Turker who would have the background knowledge needed to write accurate content for our site and the writing skills needed to pass my picky requirements. I can't share URLs but for the image content we just write detailed explainations of the images. As they say, an image is worth 1000 words. These articles might expand well beyond the single image and have four, five or six by the time we are finished. I know that writing 9000 of these would be very time consuming. Just pick the ones with the highest traffic or the highest traffic potential and start writing articles. I am writing an article for one of my pages today and probably tomorrow and have hundreds more to write.
Web Design | | EGOL0 -
Improving keyword stuffing and site menu
rob is correct, the 15 is only a warning, you can have more if they are natural.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlanMosley0 -
NOINDEX or NOINDEX,FOLLOW
Hello again, They are the same. And I assume that interpretation is the same because default state is: **<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="ALL"> **that means index, follow and you can decompose every tag to parts: <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX"> <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="FOLLOW"> and that tells robot to noindex, but do follow is default so if you don't use this tag robot will follow anyway. Marek:-) http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/03/using-robots-meta-tag.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mad2k0 -
Links directory: is it worth it?
It would depend on whether the sites are related to your subject. If you were linking to whoever would return the link, no matter the subject - penalty. If you were linking to other sites related to your niche, benefit. Think of it from SE's point of view - they want to see sites that are experts on a topic, and that real people link to. So, given these two scenarios the focus is important. Of course, focusing on getting real people to link to you is FAR more important, so I wouldn't do either. Guest blogging for example is a far better use of your time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TellThemEverything0 -
NOFOLLOW in Forum Topic External Links?
I have a blog that gets about six to ten posts per day. Each of those posts has a link to another website. All of these links are do-follow. I do that because the sites that I am linking to are all very high quality and have better content for that subject that I have on my site. I believe that when you are "linking up" to sites better than yours for a topic that the outgoing links are valuable. However, I also believe that if you are "linking down" to trash sites and pages of unrelated content then the links can harm your site. I would never give control of outgoing links on my site to strangers and even when my employees post content I always review the target of every outgoing link myself.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EGOL0 -
NOINDEX listing pages: Page 2, Page 3... etc?
We've taken the approach of adding rel="canonical" to all paginated content with the link pointing to the first page of results. We keep everything indexed and followed. We also help Google identify the URL parameter created for paginated content in our Webmaster Tool settings. This has worked well for us, but another approach would be to add rel="next" and rel="prev" to the paginated links. This is openly supported by Google to handle pagination, but might be a little tricky to setup in your CMS. Good luck! Andrew
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dunklea0 -
Should HTML Heading Tags ALWAYS be in Hierarchical Order?
Good answer by Devin, If you are coding a site from beginning I would put them in order, but if the site already exists and it is a pain to change don't sweat it. If it's a quick global fix in CSS I would take the 30 minutes to do it personally. But like Devin said the most important thing is that you don't use a bunch of H1s on a page and the H1 should of course contain the main keyword phrase in it.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | irvingw0 -
Number of forum posts per topic page
I'd also consider page load time. Do you have people that put 40 pictures in one post? Then you may not want 30 posts displaying, as that could really bog down page load time. My forum usually has only a couple of pictures per post, if any, but I do sometimes get ones that have 20-40 pictures.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KeriMorgret0 -
High number of items per page or low number with more category pages?
In this case I would focus on usability first. You may find that you help SEO but your conversion rates go down. I would do A B testing with both formats and use the one that performs the best. Customer usability is more important in my opinion so find that out first and optimize the best performing layout.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | STPseo0 -
Could Profanity Decrease Google Trust in a Website?
I just dusted off my memory banks (the hardware ones in my brain) and if I am not mistaken (don't know if it still there) there were a paragraph in the Google terms of use that stated that explicit content has to be at least 3 clicks away from the front-page. But on the other hand I just did a quick search on porn and none of them live up to that condition so it doesn't seem like that rule is being enforced if it was ever there. It is interesting but I must admit I have never had a reason to research the subject since I have never had a client that had explicit content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ReneReinholdt0 -
Best SEO META Description for forum topics
Personally I would make it the first post in the thread. When searching and arriving on forums, people are generally looking for a specific bit of information which is answered in that thread. Often the first post is a question, so if you can get that question to appear in the meta description in the SERPS, the user is immediately going tho think "hey, that person has asked the same question I did" and click through.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seanmccauley0 -
Site navigation menu in head of page for SEO
Boxed navigation is becoming pretty common navigation style these days. Many large corporations such as Rackspace, IBM, and Cisco use this format. Best practice is to have on average not more than 150 outbound links on the page so try to maintain your on page links around this number.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ninjamarketer0 -
Can including advertising slots have a negative effect on SEO?
Essentially, keep your site design around the "user experience" as this is a post-panda world. Don't overload it with blocks of advertising, breaking up the page, content, layout and user experience. The Keep It Simple (KIS) strategy usually works best for me when it comes to running ads on sites, within the user interface/design. NEVER use more than 1 block on a site's page as I looks "spammy" and cluttered.. As a user myself, I immoderately click back or out of a site that I find is running more than 1 block of ads. The page just looks terrible. You might also want to consider A/B split testing of different landing or home pages. This will allow you to rey different layouts to get the best results on both, where the ads perform, and as well as the user conversion model for the sites content and lead generation. Another note to keep in mind is to reduce the blocks of ads running relevant to the content of the market/site you are working in. Don't run open Adwords capaigns on sites for just "anything" to generate clicks. If your running a bike store website, keep the AD's targeted people in the "bike" industry. Keep the ads filtered and related on your site's side to the market content you are optimizing for. Remember, in post-Panda, it's the user experience that the quality teams are looking to improve.
Web Design | | RobMay0 -
Does font size affect SEO?
The short answer: in the context of your question, font size has no effect on SEO. You can offer a page in any font-size ranging from 10 - 14 and it would not make any difference. As the others suggested, your site's readability will impact the user experience. As long as your site is properly coded, browsers have the ability to change font-size to larger/smaller. It would be a nice feature to offer users a widget to allow them to change font-size to their preference. The font-size may affect factors such as click-through rate, time on site and so forth. It does not directly affect SEO but could indirectly affect it through the user experience.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RyanKent0