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Prime85

The only ones I would ever suggest to anyone would be BOTW and the Yahoo directory. Many of the others that are listed on Moz are fine IMO, we just do not use directories that often.

Hope that clarifies,

Best

All,

Sorry, but when there is a response to an answer I leave, I get an email, but not to a question. I will check that out.

Omid and Daniel,

I had to go back and read what I had written as I was surprised by "You are asking too much." The only qualifiers I put were: "Does anyone know of a great place to find really top talent that is the kind where the people are constantly stretching and trying new things, etc.," and "We have a position available, but will not fill it with anyone average or above average."

Then I saw the link and realized that you were looking at the post on our site. Within that we are saying "Have an understanding of" for the SEO components, server side, etc. To be excellent, I believe it is necessary to have a broader focus than just our single profession. I am not a developer, but I do understand coding at an elementary level, I understand server side, I am a writer, an SEO, etc. and I have the ability to create conceptually for video, radio, TV, etc. I also possess skills around media buying, etc. But I am in no way a developer, director, SEO, PPC buyer, etc.

So, from this I draw it needs to be better written, and I will do so. Thanks.

Also, Omid, two things I would have an interest in are knowing more about your criteria for "brilliant developers" and, if we agree on that, I would love to know when you could have a cup of coffee or lunch - my treat! Best to each of you.

Thanks

Best

This is always the issue with "We need you to prepay because... blah blah blah." The real reason is, if we did it month to month, it would kill the model.

I think the problem will be that slowly it has no real value. How slowly,who knows, I have never been able to justify the cost for the PR services. I have gotten a lot of emails from them telling me they disagree with me though.

Best

Just because there is a reindex, does not guarantee that the rankings change that quickly. You should watch it and see. One thing to remember, make sure you are using a non personalized search when looking or run the rankings in moz.

I would watch it over a few weeks and see if you see movement.

I am curious if this has happened to others and if so if you were able to resolve it.

Today a client forwarded an email that went to a client account and we were in no way copied on it. This is a client that spends in the 6 figures with us and I was shocked to read (Any bold or italics I have added):

Hi *****,

My name is Jimmy Morrow and I am an Account Strategist at Google on our Agency Team. Your account was recently selected for free dedicated support this quarter and I will be your new point of contact at Google for all things AdWords. We can go over a few housekeeping things I noticed, broader strategy, and some betas that would be a good fit. Please let me know when you have time for a 20-30 minute phone call when we can go over the accounts and make a plan for working together this quarter.

Thanks and just let me know a time that works best for you!

Best,

Jimmy

To me, they have essentially gone around us and with the "housekeeping" and "beta" comments sought to make us look either incapable and/or uninformed.

We are Google Partners, etc. and we have clients in our MCC for Adwords. I have never seen an occasion where Google blatantly tried to steal the client as it appears is happening here. This is a client who heretofore had NEVER used Adwords and they have been in business since before there was a Google or an Internet. We brought them to Adwords about 6 - 8 months ago!!! They are spending 6 figures on Adwords and I am ready to pull them out and spend the money elsewhere.

We sent emails from our UK and our Houston office and no response from lil ole Jimmy. Our UK team has tried calling Google and nothing and then Chatting with them and we can get nothing.

This is a client who has a lot of faith in our abilities based on many things we have done for them that worked and they are the kind of client that let's us know when issues arise. So, they are not going to switch and that is not the issue. The issue is Google acted as if they wanted to embrace agencies and if that is so, why then try to back door them?

I hope to hear from others who are handling PPC with Google. Thanks a ton.

Robert

I think the core of what you say here in the beginning is valid Omid, which is why I gave it a good answer. Unfortunately, I think when you say "all of these things" everyone drew the conclusion each was a requirement as opposed to reading what was actually written.  While some are requirements, this was not a list of requirements.

Frankly, I have been at this a long time, have been in Houston a long time, and do not know quite a few brilliant developers. Yes, I know some good ones and have met a ton who claim to be developers, etc. So, we really should have a coffee sometime - I mean that sincerely.

Best,

Robert

Bryan,

With archives, I would suggest you noindex them. I think you may have misread this a bit and I know that all the initial terminology in WP can get confusing. With categories, you do index them typically. With archived posts, they are more likely to show duplicate content (And Dan points it out in his post).

Hope it helps,

JayBoy,

First, in looking at the site (and we do a bit of real estate in the US), my first concern is the search results are returning duplicate page titles: Daft.ie : Search results. But, then I see more...

You have taken on a daunting first project. This is a massive site and it needs work, so your statement, "...quite new to SEO and must... ...I am working part time with a client on improving their on-site SEO..." is a bit scary to me in that you may have taken a big bite out of a bad sandwich. This is a site that will require tremendous time to fix and a lot of skill. You may want to consider getting a firm to assist you and teach you as they do - and find a way to make the fee structure work. Just out of the group on moz, there are a bunch of great SEO's in the UK overall. That said, on we go.

Whomever originally set this up, did it based on a very old SEO frame of reference around saying as many keywords in as many places as possible as often as is possible. They also included every keyword meta tag in the cms and all of those need to be removed. (Dont start here as there is much more important that must be done).

All title tags have colons instead of Pipes. This needs changing along with the brand is leading and you want keywords leading | Brand. The straight up line is a Pipe. (if you knew that, please understand I do not know where you are in SEO and I am trying to assist).

Being real estate, location is most important. In Houston, TX, USA we would have it like this:

Homes for Sale (in) Neighborhood | Our Company or

Home For Sale 11211 Peden Houston | Our Company (the italics just help show the pipe as opposed to looking like an "I")

The next thing is the meta descriptions are all way too long, full of keywords, and dont address the query. The meta description is to bring the buyer to the page. Seeing how many times you can say County Cork over and over wont and most are truncated.

Once you attack these two daunting tasks you still need to look at each page and how to differentiate from competitors. That said, I likely should have started with: KEYWORD analysis. 
In other words, what kw's do those in Ireland search for? Homes for Sale or houses for sale, etc. This is where you get clear on what KW convention you will follow. Do the research, do not just copy others.

This is a good start, but you need to dig into moz, just start with everything on this page: The Beginner's Guide to SEO

Once you have been through all and can quote them, stay on moz for at least a year or two. When you are totally the bomb at SEO, stay on moz and pass it on.

Hope this helps,

I disagree with your "shitty practice from Google." I personally think it is blatantly unethical.

Edit: by disagree, I mean that unethical is worse than shitty practice.

Daniel,

We will agree to disagree on the "most of your top prospects won't be in that category." I believe anyone worth their salt will do quite a bit of checking something out before they go down the road of applying or inquiring. 
And, again, the post that Omid referred to was on our site and not an outside posting. I have agreed now three or four times it needs to be changed.

Thanks to each for the input though. One thing is for sure, it made me look a bit deeper at what we had posted re positions on the site. Thanks to Omid for that!

Best to all,

Robert

Darcy,

I think Dana makes the best point possible and that is...is the content GOOD? Is it something people are looking for? etc. 
To just add content is not helpful in my opinion. But, we have sites that we add 100's of pages a month to and it is all unique content around specific verticals. It is amazing to watch what happens as you add better and better content and more of it to a site.

Hope this helps. A question would be: Over what period and is the content already created?

Sure, say they have no link or other value and you don't want to use them, if you are using a rewrite rule to do all you will need to go back and hit those afterward.

It really depends on site size and number of pages.If you have a lot it will be more painful, but you are better with the 301's. If the pages are too numerous, i would not worry about having 301 on them. Just do the blanket rewrite so that every url is redirected. (remember, no one will see them).

Hope it helps,

Robert

Alick,

I did use the Adwords community forum and was pleasantly surprised by the input. One person (level 13) stated this had happened to him and gave some good input. Another did as well. Thanks for taking time to send an answer to me.

All the best,

Robert

Moz.com is the best forum I have been a part of. There is a local forum I really like but spend less time on (we have staff who live on it.) I am interested in a forum where everyone is agency related. Does anyone know of a good one? If not, would anyone have an interest?

Here's a question I often ask of our team: What are we spending our time on in terms of time cost vs. benefit? So, if putting in the 30K product pages is taking x amount of time, have you asked yourself - Why? Just to get clicks on some you don't have? Etc. So, if you were to take say the best 3000 and put the reviews, other content, etc. and when that was done then start on the next 3000 in the same way, would your result be improved? Would gaining PA on the ones you had truly optimized get you high enough that you can get more traffic to the site? Do you then keep improving at a rate that is augmenting where you are going?

So, instead of asking is this a good idea (and on the face it is), ask is this the best idea?

Hope it helps

Jan

I will leave it to those who live and work in the UK to suggest a hosting company there. As to do you have to host there to target there, no you do not. You can have a .co.uk domain if available as that is a good indicator for those searching as well and no matter what way you go, you will set your domain to target the UK in GWMT. (Go into Configurations>Settings>Geographic Target and then select UK.

Here is a great place to start if you want to be really clear how to set this up the correct way:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html

It is updated so the material is relevant and quite helpful.

As to the dedicated server, we use dedicated servers as an agency as we want to insure our clients are protected. If I had a single site, that was not huge in traffic, revenues, etc. I would simply find a quality hosting company and get the best backup, recovery, etc. package they have as that is much more cost effective.

Hope this helps,

I am currently perplexed over a client's search results. They are an established company and well known in their field. (Unfortunately, I am not comfortable providing a link or their name.) The company is a consulting firm and let's assume it is an accounting firm, which it is not. When you search on BSC Accounting the results give them the first result but the next 18 results are around education - BSc Accounting. Consider the DA on the site is 34 and the PA for homepage is 39.

Is there a chance that when someone is searching on accounting firms that having the BSC in the name skews what they are able to rank for? Forget about searches for their exact name, I am more interested in thoughts as to how the BSC effects general searches for their specialties.

Thanks Who Wudda Thunk

I agree Webmasterworld is a great forum, it is open to all so is not strictly an agency related forum. I was wanting to do something or find something along the lines of a Vistage but online. I was a Vistage/TEC member for several years and then a member of another CEO forum. Both were very helpful in that you are talking with other business owners and learning from them. Along with that you are teaching them things you know. Home builders have an organization where builders from different cities are in a group (so they are not competing with one another in the same market) and share information, assistance that I have seen be very beneficial to their members. I would love to find something like that for agencies.

Best

aamato,

I don't know how many you had up or how large they are and that would be helpful. Assuming they are smaller there are two things that will help. First, resubmit the sitemaps to Google. In that way you are letting them know you are up and going.

If they are smaller and if you are familiar with Webmaster Tools (WMT), go into WMT and Fetch each url as Google. (per site you can only do up to 1000 per month, but I would not do if sites are hundreds of pages except for home page, etc.)

I have attached a screen shot of the WMT Dashboard, note that Fetch as Google is under Health.

If you have any problems, here is a help link.

Once you are recrawled, you should start to see your rankings rising. Obviously, if you have lost traffic over the time you were down, it will take longer.

Hope that helps,

Robert

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Stephen,

Open Site Explorer does not crawl as "deeply" as Google. It hits roughly the top 25% of the web and therefore will not show everything that you will see in GWMT. Obviously, to have that type of depth would require a lot of bandwidth and servers and that is what makes Google, Google.;)

Also, it would depend on when your links were established as it can take up to 60 days for OSE to show the links. One thing you can do is check when the last crawl was by moz and compare that to when the links were created. I believe the last one was Sept. 12.

Here is a post by Rand regarding the August mozscape crawl  which will give you a lot of info as to what is crawled, etc.

Hope it helps,