Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Agreed!

Thanks for the feedback.

Hi Shaun,

Already been offered the Custom URL, as you rightly point out it will be good for expanding our brand name.

I just wondered if anyone had evidence or input of any initial perceived or expected SEO benefit. eg. Strengthening of Brand Terms if you have G+ account with the same brand terms as your company pointing at your home page.

Google Plus have just released Custom URLs, see here

So instead of the messy https://plus.google.com/b/012345679 you can have http://www.google.com/+{yourbrandname}.

This would be much better for memorizing.

But any opinions on added or future perceived SEO benefit?

Hi,

Putting together a URL for a product we are selling. We sell IT Training courses and the structure is normally

Top Folder=Main Courses section

Sub Folder=Vendor

Page Specific=Course Name + Term

An example is

courses/microsoft/mcse-training

However I have a product where the vendor and course name are the same. How should I best organise the URL - double mention or single mention

So a)

courses/togaf/togaf-foundation-training

or b)

courses/togaf/foundation-training

Good Morning/Afternoon fellow Mozzers,

I recently created an infographic and am now looking to get it distributed via as many publications as possible. I discovered some great sites with collections of infographics.However I have discovered a multitude of sites offering to review and feature the infographic, or "express" submissions so the graphic features faster for a price..... links below.

http://www.amazinginfographics.com/submit-infographics/

http://infographicjournal.com/submit-infographics/

2 questions

1. Is this considered as buying links? My instincts say Yes.

2. Some sites offer mix of free and "express" paid submissions. If the answer to Q.1 is yes, should I avoid them all together even if my graphic gets picked up free?

Thanks in advance for the feedback.

SEO Keith has pretty much hit it spot on.

I would try and use a combination of all 4 if at all possible.

From my observation GWT accuracy seems to vary dependent on how often your content is crawled..... showing a history of all your links i'm not sure it can be beaten. But accuracy of what is included I am unsure. We have a few external links that were pointing at our site which we know no longer exist. 3 months on they are still in our link profile according to GWT.

I'd dread the answer being the latter rather than the former as we've spent two years building it blog.domain...

However I noticed SEOmoz are domian.tld/blog and it got me thinking....

Cheers.

R.

That was the original email - Google has detected evidence of unnatural link building.

We're still not entirely sure what caused the issue. I assume it was in our last reconsideration request but at that point we were just hoping.

Hi Marie,

Thanks for the feedback. Hopefully it won't be months as we have already been suffering since May.

If there are underlying algorithmic issues related to Penguin...we would have a notice right?

Thanks for the feedback, greatly appreciated.

Forehead slapping moment, I know of this. Just for some reason hadn't thought to give it a go!

Thanks you. I'll keep you posted on the outcome.

Ps. if you don't want more people to know, perhaps take it off the public domain! Ha

Thanks for the 2c.

Keeping my eyes peeled, fingers crossed and working on the good stuff!

Great Video!

As you say, if the manual penalty removal doesn't allow traffic bounce back then I will be looking at any penguin related issues that I need to work on.

At the moment our big focus is on creating high quality unique content for high quality sites. Whilst focussing on all the on page/on site content in our control to make sure everything is up to scratch.

I'll keep you posted.

Howdy Mozzers,

For anyone who has had experience of a manual penalty i'd appreciate your feedback.

How long did it take to recover from a Manual Penalty?

Of course every situation is different and its only been 8 days so perhaps it's to soon.

Below is the email we received, I highlighted "believed" they didn't state we had. We highlighted a bunch of back links we didn't like however most of these remain in our profile in GWT so not sure what was really the problem.

"Previously the webspam team had taken manual action on your site because we believed it violated our quality guidelines. After reviewing your reconsideration request, we have revoked this manual action. It may take some time before our indexing and ranking systems are updated to reflect the new status of your site."

Your feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Sure

Go to your respective google, in the search box type:

site:domainname.com

This should give you a list of most indexed urls...not always right.

Also try checking out your Google Webmaster Tools Account (GWT), in the dashboard on the right hand side labelled sitemaps is a list of submitted and indexed urls.

Hope this helps.

Thanks for responding guys....

After some back and forth and research from the Web Dev team, turns out our hosts messed up when upgrading RAM to our host server.....site was down for 3 hours overnight.

All appears to be fine now but will keep my eyes peeled.

Thanks

Great advice from Stephen....

Speaking from experience, we had a reconsideration accepted....it took 4 re-submissions, get to work ASAP as it can take 2+ weeks per response.

To add to Stephen's advice, one thing we did....extract all linking domains...search each domain in Google Search, any domain that has very few or zero indexed pages is also a red flag. If Google don't index it, then they likely don't like it. I'd send a list of those links to google asking them to ignore them.

Look out for sitewide links with non Brand Term optimised anchor text.

Good luck.

Good Morning/Evening Mozzers,

I arrive at work this morning with 5 emails from GWT for my separate domains reading,

**"Googlebot can't access your site - **Over the last 24 hours, Googlebot encountered 39 errors while attempting to connect to your site. Your site's overall connection failure rate is 15.1%."

I have passed this on to the Web Dev team to resolve ASAP.

My Question, will server connectivity issues harm my rankings? Is there a danger if this continues that URL's could be de-indexed?

Input would be greatly appreciated.

Ha, very true.

Or we're both wrong. However at this stage in SEO, Rand's comments are practicably gospel...so I feel pretty confident.

Great minds think alike!!

In answer to your question, Rand did a great article on this a while back as a follow on to a white board friday session.- http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites

There are also multiple other questions of a similar nature.

http://www.seomoz.org/pages/search_results?q=sub+domain+vs.+subfolder

The general consensus seems to be sub-folder over sub-domain. As Sub Folders tend to get all the benefits from the root domain.

To quote Rand from the top article his advice:

"1 subdomain under 1 root domain (but feel free to use subfolders as it makes sense). Starting a blog? I almost always recommend yoursite.com/blog over blog.yoursite.com. Want to launch a new section of content? Use yoursite.com/newstuff rather than newstuff.yoursite.com."

So both A and B - www.domain.com/keyword

Hope this helps.