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There's a great tool you can get for firefox that gives you the position in the top 200 ranking results for whatever your keyword is... http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/rank-checker/

You can change localisation options and check rankings on demand in all the major search engines. For times when a weekly top 50 check isn't enough then it's a great little tool to have

If I were you I'd start with a new google account just to be sure that nothing negative is carried across... but that may just be my sceptical view.

Being very pre-cautious if I wanted to make sure that nothing negative affected the quality site, I would also probably put the lesser quality sites into a different analytics account. But like Barry says, if they're hosted on the same server dedicated server or in the same IP range than google can make an educated guess that they're linked.

In the longer term, why don't you begin bring the other sites up to the same standard of quality as the best one, then you've got nothing to fear.

You should read this http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=139066#301

Google seem to prefer 301 re-directs where possible, but in your case it may be much more straight forward to use the canonical tag. It was created pretty much for times where you have variations on a product (such as different colour shoes but otherwise identical, each with a separate page)

If you use a server running IIS as an example it's very easy to redirect from the www. subdomain to the root domain or vice versa.

You should probably redirect to the version that currently holds the most authority and rank. The MozBar can help you establish which one this is.

Wahey! Great Stuff Keri. Didn't realise that!

Thanks

I'm a bit dubious about sites like myblogguest.com, but I'll give it a whirl, thanks.

Can anyone recommend any more blog networking sites like this?

In the forum's experience, what have you found the best way to find guest blogging opportunities?

e.g. google search syntax that has worked well and other more diverse methods would be appreciated! Thanks

Generally, I correct the error and then wait until the next crawl if I'm confident that I've fixed the problem.

If I'm unsure then I may run a manual crawl using the crawling tool, however for me the format just isn't as easy to read as the weekly crawl diagnostics.

Fair point Keri - didn't even realise that they had such policies in place. I wonder how well enforced they are...

A similar thing happened to our sites a few months which was blamed on panda - our site shot completely down the rankings, but then came back a couple of weeks later in a better position.. only for it to then drop again!

Have you added any new links or lost any good links recently or has your site gone down recently for any period of time? If G can't access your site when it tries to crawl or has slow load times it may be a contributor.

You can use the crawl test tool to run a 2 crawls per day for up to 3,000 pages, however as far as I'm aware the SEO Tools are moving more towards campaign setups where your sites are crawled once per week (or within 24 hours for a new campaign).

It might be worth referring a request to SEOMoz help to get the team to clarify

Google has a public cache (i.e. what you see in the search results) and it's own private cache which is used to evaluate site rankings.

Although when the public cache is refreshed it more than likely updates several ranking factors, there's also crawling done behind the scenes. Backlinks can and most likely will be picked up before the public cache is refreshed.

I've noticed google is getting quite fast on updating rankings and new back links can have an impact sometimes within a day or so now.

Nice article Barry, thanks. I was thinking it could be useful for gaining twitter use, e.g. increasing twitter followers and getting required links retweeted

Thanks for the response dvtruong, regarding the content, we haven't got anything to put out at the moment because we want to make sure it's worthwhile before kicking it off.

It'll be something loan/finance related, so the creative caps will need to come out.

How did you go about finding the top bloggers in your industry? I'm sure I could round up a few, but I'd love to find more

You might want to add Taxi Knutsford in as a meta keyword as well.

Also, you haven't got any links with the anchor text 'Taxi Knutsford' linking to your desired landing page, just a couple both internally and externally could help up the ranking.

There isn't any text I can see that directly says 'taxi knutsford'. There's plenty of text featuring the words knutsford and taxi separately, but these need to be placed together at some point to create a keyword match.

Like Vitalscom says, you need to make better use of H1, as you currently don't have one. It also may help to make better use of the alt text in your pictures... slipping 'taxi knutsford' as an alt could help.

You may also want to upload a sitemap.

As well as adding to Google local, you may want to add the website listing to business sites such as 118 and Yell if not already done so.

Say I've just created some great content on my site, what does the forum think the best way of promoting this content via. social would be?

e.g. Paid stumbles, tweets, posting on reddit?

We've created some good content in the past, but never really been able to drive traffic to it through social sites and networking with a great deal of success.

Nice. Thanks Anthony, that'll be my day's reading

Surely you need to promote the post though otherwise no one is ever going to find it. What's the best way for doing that?

Paid stumbles, tweets?

ok, granted but how would you drive people to whatever the interesting story is that we post via. social?

I suppose, putting grey hat areas side, I'm looking for the quickest way to boost 'social' visibility.

Anyone used the Mech Turk for SEO purposes?

I've heard and thought of various uses for it ranging from genuine credible uses to greyer areas, but if anyone's got any real experience, suggestions or ideas about it, I'd love to hear them!