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Aaron,

Change any links pointing to index.html to the root domain ie. /

You can use the 'top pages' tab on OSE to see the shares of all the top pages on a particular site. You could then download this data to csv and sort by the shares column to rank it by the most shares.

EDIT - Scratch that, just looked it only gives you the top 25 pages with shares

Come on SEOMoz! We want all pages included.

It doesn't really make much difference. Relative is useful for navigating when your web site is off line in the design stage, but it makes little difference.

If you were to put links in content, it's probably best to use absolute links, incase anyone scrapes your articles to replicate on their own site. Then at least you might gain an extra link back to your own site.

Please be aware that if you use several different types of links to navigate to your home page such as;

http://www.mysite.com/index.html

http://www.mysite.com/

Google and other search engines would count this as 2 different links and cause some duplication issues. So in that respect, I wouldn't refer to your home page's actual page my name. Just use the / either in an absolute or a relative sense.

Tim,

You can download the above platforms and install them on your own site in a sub folder; you're right that installing in sub folder is the best thing to do. What you're talking about is hosting a blog on the blog's own website (or a subdomain of it).

If you want to install wordpress on your own site for example, you can download it and follow the instructions here;

http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress#Famous_5-Minute_Install

On your server you may have a control panel that has the ability to install wordpress for you, otherwise it's simply a case of uploading the files to a sub folder as shown in the guide and then logging into your new blog. It's pretty straight forward.

If you still want to setup blogs on the blog's own website, you can, and this can generate some extra links for you, but as you say, you won't benefit from the new blog content being on your own website.

Mercreece

SEOMoz do a weekly introduction webinar. It's every Friday and you'll get shown around the tools and be able to ask questions relating to it.

Check here and you can reserve your spot

http://www.seomoz.org/webinars

interlinking like crazy isn't going to help with your seo results too much. You can certainly interlink 20,30 between pages, but only if it's helpful from a user perspective.

Don't litter your pages with internal links for no reason, it's unlikely to aid your seo efforts and may in fact look spammy and hinder them.

Create a good navigational structure so that users and crawl bots can navigate round your site easily and quickly. Things like bread crumbs help so that the users can see where they've navigated from and can easily get back to where they've been.

I'm not sure why you'd want to interlink lots on a 1 year old legitimate site, but if it's performing well as it is then why would you want to?

Atul,

To start with, I would direct you to the following resource;

http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo

It contains surprisingly good tips for people beginning SEO and some gems for experts alike.

Looking at your site, I would suggest the following;

1. Reduce the number of links on your home page. The big 'blob' of links of the tops looks incredibly spammy on first glance and you need to categorise these. Perhaps under a 'New Essays' category and then maybe just include a few 'featured' new additions at the top. Adding an image and a short description for each of these may also help with the look and feel of the site.

2. Get rid of the ' in FAQ'S at the bottom and replace it with a small s. Not a big one, but it's bad grammar.

3. Your H1 tag is too long. It should concentrate on a particular keyword or brand you are targeting for your home page. Perhaps 'All Kind Of Essays'

4. The alt text for your images could be better utilised. Put some more appropriate and keyword rich alt text.

5. The page is missing a meta description. Although not a big impact on SEO, it's useful to show in the search engines so that users have an idea of what the site is about

6. You need to start building some quality inbound links to the site. The beginners guide above has a good section on this. Make sure the links are high quality, perhaps guest blogging. You could also submit the site once it's cleaned up to some quality directories such as Yahoo Directory and Best of the Web. Avoid spammy directories.

7. Is there an incentive to donate a paper? I can't see one at the moment. Maybe you want to be creative and award users points or something similar to attract paper submissions.

8. There's no text on the home page describing what your site is about. You need to have an informative and eye catching blurb to describe the page. You can then drop the odd keyword in here and use it to hook people in so they don't just bounce straight back off your site.

9. Create an XML sitemap

10. If you want to restrict Google's bots to access certain sections, create a robots.txt file in the root directory.

I would definitely consult the guide at the top of this response, it should help no end; it also contains useful links to other useful articles on how to optimise a page well and build links effectively.

I hope this helps

If it was me and the site structure allowed it, I would create a single page per product and then use a drop down or similar to dynamically change the colour/style of the product using java within the same page.

Therefore removing the need for separate pages or tags.

You could just use the canonical tag to point the other colours to your most popular colour. So if product-green was the most popular the canonical tags for yellow and red would point to green.

This would effect the search engine rankings for yellow and red, so if you get traffic for these, it's probably not a good idea, but they would still be visible pages on your site.

I've signed up as well, apparently they're working through the invites and it should take a couple of weeks. I've done the get 3+ of your friends to sign up too which apparently speeds it up, but who knows, they're an Amsterdam company after all, so with their laid back attitude, could take months!

Anchor filled footers are a traditional SEO strategy usually to create links with the anchor text that the site owner is seeking to boost rankings for various site pages, although their effect is questionable now-days. They're also used for navigation purposes, but I think the key here is relevancy; if the links are relevant and add to the user experience, then thumbs up, otherwise, small links tucked away at the bottom of the page look a bit dodgy, to us and the search engines.

The links pass juice internally (or externally if they're not nofollowed) and they probably won't have as much weight as a link higher up the page used in a relevant sentence.

Try reading this article by Rand on the subject, I got some good tips from it;

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/footer-link-optimization-for-search-engines-user-experience

Here's my opinion;

Google's spiders will have more difficulty interpreting and following affiliate links using the onclick="window.open... method, but that doesn't mean that they can't. To my knowledge they can follow these links and even pass juice between them. Although I'm not sure that it would affect your rankings and so whether changing the links would do anything; after all, they're outbound links. If you were to nofollow them, then you would still loose the same amount of link juice, it just wouldn't flow to the trading sites.

On a separate note, as you know; Google's problem seems to be that you're acting as a 'middle man' from the sites who are actually selling the treadmills. From the odd story I've heard, unless your site is bringing something 'unique' to the equation then they don't like to have it promoted in their advertising space, they prefer to have the actual seller paying for the advertising. One way I've heard to get around this is to have a PPC specific landing page that concentrates purely on the review side of things, however I'm not sure whether your site would be flagged by them now or not.

As long as the blog is connected to the website in question; I would make the blog part of your current domain, preferably in a sub folder rather than a separate sub domain. This method then allows you to add fresh content onto your blog that will also have a positive effect on the site as a whole.

By putting the blog on a separate domain, you're moving the positive effect of having the blog away from your website, and therefore your website won't benefit. Sure you can create links from the blog to your website, but if it's a new domain this won't carry any authority and if the blog is on the same server/registratio details as the website then Google will be able to pick up on this and possibly devalue them anyway.

So, unless the blog isn't connected to the website or you're looking for long term gain in building the blog up as a separate domain then keep it on the website.

It's not as bad as it sounds

I doubt very much that it's an actual penalty. You may find that it bounces back up if you build a couple of good links

You can fairly easily check what sort of penalty has been applied by checking the below;

1. Does your site appear on google's first page for your domain name? If no then you may have had a penalty

2. Does your site appear if you search for an exact phrase of about 5-6 words? If no then you probably have some sites linking in which have been devalued

You say that you've added a page of links; if these are spammy links then this could have a negative effect on your rankings. If google sees that you are in effect 'voting' for spammy sites it may devalue your sites status in itself (especially if your link profile isn't top notch).

I would work on creating some more, high quality links into your site and you should see the rankings restore to normal.

Google sometimes takes a few weeks to put your site back to where it belongs after something like this happens, and so you may need to wait a bit longer for it to bounce back.

If not you can always send a re-consideration request, even if your site isn't penalised; explain you made a mistake with the low quality links and you've now removed them. and they may restore value to your site

Good shout from Kerian. I would definitely recommend giving it a thorough read. I've just re-read it myself and I learnt some new tips once again.

Yes. I would say that domain authority is a better ranking factor than page authority and as long as the domain authority is suitably high then go for it. The only exception I would make to this is maybe if the page in question was for some reason particularly spammy, but with a high DA site, this shouldn't be the case....

Say I manage to get a link on the bbc's website. Whether the page with the link was a couple of sub pages deep and brand new doesn't really matter. It's still a cracking link as it's from a highly trusted domain.

Also.. If each of your pages is receiving a fair amount of traffic through organic search, then again it's less of a problem. If people are clicking through to your site and landing on those pages (without an excessively high bounce rate) then this should signal to google that those pages are proving relevant to your visitors.

Search engines handle underscores in different ways, so it's best to make them uniform and use hyphens, all being equal - This appears to be best practice in Google's eyes.

I wouldn't worry about it too much thought and I would take vitalscom's advice if you were thinking about moving them over.