Where are the links embedded? On the actual pages of your site (internal)? On the homepage? In the back-end of Wordpress (as you said it was a virus)??? Provide a little more detail and we may be able to find the right solution. Each of which would be different based on the various types of links going out to his site.

Thanks, Rob

Well, that makes more sense now !! I didn't read it correctly then. Sorry, my mistake. Well, to address your question in that regards then;

1. If I were you, and you have access to their amazon-like site, code and ability to modify, you could very well implement the canonical tag, and redirect all value and links to your clients domain. I wouldn't count on that other site driving any traffic at later points though once the value shift takes place. Those product pages will become mute.

2. Option 2 -> By keeping both sites open (amazon and client site), you have the possibility of driving multiple sources of traffic for the client domain and products, and building the main client site out to out perform the amazon-like site.

Still, following the steps above will help you plan a good solid strategy going forward and will help support the sites performance, user experience to ultimately improve sales conversions and revenue

Cheers!

Hey Bob,

This might be an older post from 2011, but Cyrus does a great job getting to the root of what you are searching for. I don't want to rewrite his suggestions, but let's say I have this page bookmarked to reference whenever I need it Understanding Google's freshness factor and how it affects search rankings

Oh, and read Justin's post on this as well! Great insight into the technical Google patents and breakdown.

Hi Guillermo,

First, do not place or run canonical tags from your site to the amazon like site. This would be telling Google that their site is in fact the authority source for the products which are for sale. Doing this in the long run would untimately kill your clients web traffic and site in time.

Next, look at both your site and amazon-like product site. Is it pulling in the product descriptions dynamically or do you have to update them manually between both sites (your client and the amazon site)? This is an important step when trying to strategize how to best implement the tactics you will use.

Next, look at the client site. If you really want to build this site up, it's going to take some work. Here are a few things you can do to improve the client site information and

1. Write ALL NEW content descriptions about each product (this can take time, but it's worth every second). Make them fun and detailed providing unique approaches to the products being sold.

2. If you can, provide video reviews of the products, or use video to showcase the product in a way that will help people searching and researching it. Don't let this slide. It can also help your 'time on site' and time on page metrics which we know improve the overall success of a site online within the SERP results (Google).

3. Provide numerous images of the product. Realign this with improving the gallery function of the site to showcase products. Use at least 5-6 images per product from numerous angles and allow for clear visibility of the product. Make sure to offer both small thumbnails and when clicked on - clear large images that users can see. This again will help with product showcase.

4. Implement a feed which will allow users and visitors to comment on products (after purchase), thus offering some user feedback to visitors about each one sold, experiences, etc. This also helps improve sales conversion ratios and can also help the company identify trouble areas that need attention (customer service, shipping, the product itself, sales funnel and process, etc). If monitored, these can be invaluable info to help improve conversions and increase ROI.

5. Offer a blog on the site which reviews products to start. Use this tool to promote various products and offer in depth information about them. You can then move to develop a content strategy to improve the long tail search. Look to find keywords that revolve around clients 'searching' for the product using questions. Use these questions to develop content which provide answers. This is a key element now in search and should be leveraged to the best of your ability.

6. Implement a full social media strategy for the client site. Line up all the social media accounts to accurately reflect each other and unify them in the way they look and feel (descriptions, picture, info, phone #'s, etc). Make it all uniform. Next ensure you have the key elements and pages ready (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest). Line these up so that the client can use these to not only promote their products, content, etc, but to improve brand development and especially customer service. These platforms can be leveraged to so much more now than just 'sharing' good content and the client needs to understand this. Embed all these through social media 'share' buttons on each product page to improve the 'sharability' of these products online.

7. Research both the local and global search markets and align yourself with building each profile out (store location, local search, etc) Work to build and drive traffic on both levels using all the strategy.

8. Run A/B tests on the pages once all this is done. Look at your analytics data to identify things that need improvement. Funnel, descriptions, pages, added video, user feedback and reviews, etc. It will all help provide the depth you need to surpass the amazon-like site Ultimately, work to make the pages unique in every way. See what this amazon site is NOT doing and work to improve the user experience.

Also - (but you should already know this ensure that each page has clear and concise meta data, product descriptions, titles, image ALT tags, etc. This will also require some work, but is very key move. Not only will adjusting the content on the page

Taking the time to develop out a strategy like this, in the long run, will help improve the user experience by offering a superior site, customer services and sales!

Cheers!

Of course. BING data is for BING search and Google Data for Google. I should have clarified that to make sure they understood, but at the same time. BING is just doing some kick ass stuff that Google should have been paying attention too in the last year

It doesn't actually help. All this does is bookmark your information for users quickly so they can access pages quickly that they want. I do this quite often when I have a site or page that I want to get to quickly - just a regular bookmark. NO impact on SEO/SEM what-so-ever (but it could in the future if Google added another feature metric/variable to track!)

Bing has great search and keyword data in the BWMT section of the site. You can also explore the data for your sites. I'm very impressed with what BING has done in the last 1-2 years and their webmaster tools central is really great. I've just started using Jaxxy and have a full 30 day test account running now. It's only free for the 1st 30 days, and I'm not sure yet where they are pulling there data from.

Google dropped the ball on changing up their KW tool. I don't think they took the time to work with and poll SEO's as BING did. Duane Forrester was really involved with making sure the data we get, KW data etc, and the UX on it was what SEO's really needed when working on sites. Check out this Duane Forrester WBF from a while back. I'm sure he would have even more to share on top of that!

Yes! I actually find it very frustrating. I'm not happy with the new tool by Google, and with the new tool, we will be losing more valuable search data to make decisions from the old Keyword Tool. I'm currently use Jaxxy (testing it out) and Bing. I'm still using the old Google keyword tool, until the take it out of commission in the coming months.

You generally want to have the

tag at the top of the page, above the content paragraph. Keep it close in relation to the content that is below it also for correlation. Typically, you don't place a

inside the HEADER of the page, but rather the of the site.

Make sure to limit your use of the

to only 1 time on a page. Use other elements of <h2-h4>throughout the page, but again, only use each element for various sections 1 time on the site page. I've worked on clients sites that had 5

tags, 10

tags, 15

and so on. The pages focus was a real mess. It gets a little stretched out, the engines have trouble determining /or narrowing down what and where the importance of what you are trying to say on the page is, thus affecting you negatively in the SERP results because they can't figure it out.

Keep it clean, watch the code on your site, use elements carefully and do not overuse them. Keep this in mind, and you should be good to go!

Cheers and good luck!</h2-h4>

Yes, it looks spammy too and really isn't helpful to users and visitors who are reading the information you are writing and sharing. Don't scare your users away with spammy looking links. It's probably affecting the on page elements as well as constantly reproducing the same (internal or external links) on all these blogs posts. These type of 'footer' links at the bottom of all the posts also look spammy to the engines. If you do keep them there, select only 1-2 that are of importance and rel=nofollow the others. I

My recommendation if to link naturally inside the site and blog. Don't just link to yourself., your products, or your pages. Be bigger than that Link to other outside sources as well. Don't be afraid to expand on the type of links you use inside your content. Most people are, but when you link intelligently, and for the benefit of the user, the page's performance, click through, time on page/site, etc will improve. It's a win/win for you and your users experience. Not only will you see in time that you are linking to other really valuable sources for your clients, those sites will be watching who is linking to them, and might garner the attention of the staff there for a natural link mention on their site, or request for a 'quest post'.

Hope some of that helps! Cheers

Are these FORUM posts/page URL's part of the primary root domain? Are they in a separate FOLDER or DIR within the ROOT of the site? How is it structured? Are they still being crawled and indexed? Are they still indexed?

My bet is that you could map out these old post/URL's and possibly 301 them to more relevant information on your site, that deals with, or discusses the topic at hand. You don't want to flat out remove them, have a pile of 404 error's show up and then have to worry about salvaging the damage later. Map out the pages you want to dump - see if there is relevant more up to date conversations that are within the same topic and 301 redirect them to those locations.

You might want to considering removing the one's you can't 301 to more up to date relevant information, if there is no page to do so. You could map these out and possibly create content on the site or BLOG that answers the forum's post, but that might take time and money? That way, future people would find information to handle that very question and not be posting a question about it in the Forum

Unfortunately, in my experience, FORUM's have this issue and I think will continue to have this issue. There is no once recipe to fix the problem of outdated forum posts, or outdated URL's  - but you can leverage some of that and turn it back into traffic for the site - and traffic that is still valuable if it has a purposes (redirect). If not - you can remove the old URL's/posts, let them 404 and remove them through GWMT systematically as they begin to populate your crawl reports from Google.

Either way, it's an option to look at to clean up the site and site pages/depth if you feel those pages have little to offer UX or visiting customers Remember, Google has confirmed that pages that hurt your overall site score, can pull down your natural rankings in the SERP's if pages that are of low-quality don't help the site, users or the user/customer-visitor experience.

Hope that helps a little! Cheers

No trouble! Glad I could help out

First, Google doesn't do this for an entire site, at any given time, so it's best you take the time to work on client sites/pages and optimize the TITLES and DESCRIPTION you want to use. If Google uses /or changes anything for pages you have written descriptions, titles or page content, they won't advise you either.

Google's updates of these page titles, is very common when they feel the title they use for the SERP index to be more useful or accurate of the page's content. Watch for very long titles, as they are more prone to being identified by them, and rewritten

Yes, it can be quite frustrating, but it's not a total loss when working on sites.

Even if Google does change something, you can still make changes to the client site pages that might have been rewritten by Google, and hope that your new updated page info is taken over the Google TITLE rewrite..

This was a good post on BLOG. SEOmofo had a really good posting as well about this very topic.

Barry had a small but good to the point post on Google Title Rewrites at SE Round Table too

Hope some of this helps point you in the right direction!

Cheers,

It could be noted that depending on the DMOZ listing you are going after, in the vertical or niche you focus on, it could be months to get a listing approved depending on the moderator watching that category. Just a little something to consider after you submit the site, if you haven't already. Don't submit multiple times

Also - if you are using the DMOZ listing (after it's live and approved), and have a specific "description" or "title" for the site or page you are using, and don't want to use it across Google's search index, make sure to use the META field on your page. NOTE: This will only apply after your listing if/when is approved in the DMOZ directory. I took a small piece of the content from Google's product support page below and pasted it in right here:

One source Google uses to generate snippets is the Open Directory Project. You can direct us not to use this as a source by adding a meta tag to your pages.

To prevent all search engines (that support the meta tag) from using this information for the page's description, use the following:

To specifically prevent Google from using this information for a page's description, use the following:

If you use the robots meta tag for other directives, you can combine those. For instance:

This is a good Google Product Support page to visit about TITLES and DESCRIPTIONS and how they handle sometimes overriding the TITLE or DESCRIPTION field based on your DMOZ directory listing.

Cheers and good luck!

Hi Patri!

OK, don't get frustrated too easily, it's really not that difficult but I could understand how it might look confusing to a newer client with the site redesign.

NOTE: MOZ doesn't work like Screaming Frog, with instant results upon crawling a domain, this you need to take into account first and understand. You need to setup a profile (campaign) for the website you want to crawl for data. With each PRO account, you get 5 campaigns to build and track while working on them.

First, sign into your account from the homepage

Second, click the MOZ logo and go to the site's main homepage. Look to the far RIGHT MARGIN at the TOP and click the button saying CAMPAIGNS & TOOLS. Once you are on this page, you will see a BUTTON in Blue titled SETUP A CAMPAIGN. Follow the steps to enter the URL, search engines to track, a few keywords to get you started and possibly the Google Analytics profile, to start gathering the information. This will create a CAMPAIGN for the site you are trying to crawl. It will start automatically and email you when the report is ready to be viewed. It's not automatic and might take some time, depending on how big the site is to get your crawl and data report.

You can access all the Products MOZ offers at this URL: http://moz.com/products and from here, click on the old disk (looks like an old 8" floppy disk), titled TOOLS and DATA. In this section, you can get to all the various tools we use as SEO's to analyze and get work done

Hope this helps! Cheers

Just to touch on Chris point, (great point too!!) for your content production, make sure everyone on your staff contributing to the blog and/or content (or any Guest Author for that matter,/have Google+ profiles setup), so you can use the rel=author tag Here's a great step by step guide on it. It's an awesome way to get your content noticed in search results and helps people identify with the production. This will in turn, help your staff build a reputation and authority in the niche you are building and contributing too!

Cheers!

Hey Ruben,

Are you looking to build out content for your own blog as you mention in paragraph 1, or for other blogs and media sources, that would be hosted on alternate sites/blogs etc? I found this to be slightly confusing, but not in a bad manner.

Creating content is the first part of the puzzle You then need to figure out how to best get that content out to the world, and 'shared' across the web and in front of people to view, read, share and share more!

I would look Rand's recent WBF posting and figure out where you fit and into which path. Of course, you want to provide great content, that's the ultimate goal, but at the same time you are in the long run hoping for inbound links to be sourcing your content as an authority, right? This was a great Link Building vs Content Marketing post. It'll be very useful and help you identify which path you need to take or which one works best for your firm's resources. As you will handling your content development or content calendar, you will essentially be working as an SEO to get that content created around target keywords you have or research and topics you want to cover in the legal industry - while also trying to engage users and readers to read and share it across the web with other groups.

I would consider, if you haven't already, creating a LinkedIn page for the Law Firm. I researched it quickly and couldn't find the firm itself, but did find 2 of the people/attorney's that work there now. By creating your firms page, you will have a place to publicly share your content to build a following of readers. LinkedIn is a great resource for networking as well - and building that trust there is a key factor. Having your blog setup with RSS will help move the content into the media stream, which could potentially share the feed across other sites looking to pull in RSS links to their blogs or sites of similar niche markets. Don't forget all the social media profiles you should have, FB, Twitter mainly. Perhaps if you wanted to start doing video and media marketing a YouTube channel for the firm? Remember, you have think about the ways to get your content out to the marketplace, to share Tie any social media accounts to tour site, law firm online and the LinkedIn profile so people can find you quickly and easily. Maintain consistency among all the profiles (descriptions, pictures, info, phone numbers, etc) to keep everything lined up too.

This was also a great resource in Link Building and Growing Popularity by Moz. It's part of the Beginners Guide to SEO series, but should also help you wrap your head around the processes involved. The 2013 Link Building Survey by Moz offers some great up to date insight as well. Read that here.

Doing reverse search might also help you. Find legal firms that are ranking in positions you want to try to achieve. Research and profile their back-links and see if there are sites/blogs/sources/news or sites that you should be getting links from, or want links from Then it's about 'outreach' and contenting them to see if they might be interested in allowing you to guest post on their media sources. It's a long process, but worth the effort and time. You really identify some sites that you want to set as goals to start ranking against. If time isn't an issue - this is a perfect avenue to take. They might even be interested later in guest posting on your site/blog. If you want your blog to be a source for valuable content, don't always assume you should have the posting done in house of by your staff. Find sources that might help you build a valuable community with information that matters, and work to build that community into the best blog about legal information/etc ever!! Keep them coming back - and that might mean working with guest postings, guest authors, professors, other lawyers, etc, etc.

You might want to consider running an analysis of your site now (back-links)- see if you have broken links in your profile that you can repair and reuse. A great way to fix possibly 404 inbound errors that might be driving traffic nowhere!

NOTE: Do watch how you handle the anchor text now though going forward. Really work to keep a totally organic and not 'indexing footprint' with overused anchor text. This should and will keep you in the good graces of Google Ross Hudgens had a great post I just linked to for you above

You might also want to consider reading the following article on Scalable Content Production. It's got some really great insights on building content and scaling it out. This will help you plan going forward as you start producing content for the web.

Do you have a program to start tracking projects, and processes going out for content creation? I have been using Trello for some time and it's great for SEO or content writing project tracking. Try it out, it's free and a great source you can tie into anyone involved with your ongoing projects.

Anyways, don't want to keep you forever and a day! Hope some of this helps you out and gets you started. All the best.

Cheers!

Make a list of each site you want to look for guest blogging and posting opportunities. You are geo-located in the UK, so I would even segment those lists into 2, .com and .co.uk sites. Then look at the domain profiles, DA/PA and back-link structures. Map out all the data to profile each site you can (use Moz! tools) and list out all the data.

I would then start to prioritize them in each category. I would certainly look to use the .co.uk sites over the .com, unless the .com sites are heavily authority related. That's about that. The .com's aren't a total loss, and consider using them when the domain profiles you gather show that they are themselves authorities in their niche markets.

Cheers!

Both Lance and CleverPhD have some good points. Really go page by page and map out the entire domain. Both on the PR4 and PR5 sites. Create excel spreadsheets to align up the location and destination of your 301 redirects.

Then, calculate the # of pages you have listed on the PR4 site that need redirecting but really don't have a home. IF the number is small enough, just redirect those pages/URL's for visitors to the homepage. Google doesn't like mass 301 redirects to the homepage, but if those pages have small inbound links, and some value - that will get pushed back to the main index URL.

You could also let it 404 as CleverPhD said, but what I would map out, is a kick-ass 404 redirect page. Include elements like a search function for people to look for new content, add a link to a form that people can fill out to advise of the 404 error. Offer up alternatives and/or pages-URL's that might offer something similar. Have fun with it and add some creativity to help convert those almost lost users to possibly visitors and then clients. Don't just let the 404 page be the end all of the site visit. I have found by really focusing on 404 error page improvements, you can improve both the bounce and exit rates of said pages, and as a result retain users that become clients in the end - all because you were able to take the time to build something that caught their attention, and thus - kept them inside the site Some great examples of creative 404 errors might include this or some creatively funny ones like that. This is another one I liked here.

Hope some of that helps Cheers!

Don'worry! It will take time. Google isn't lightning quick with drop requests or URL removals. They take time to filter out. Give it time and monitor it weekly to see they start to diminish

Cheers!