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When I visit WhitbyJet.com it shows the domain name is for sale for $300. If you are serious about starting a new business and can obtain a perfect match .com for $300 I would jump on it!

Hi Akram,

You are confusing one of the mechanisms used to detect manipulative links with the message.

Google and Bing's policy on this topic are quite clear. Do not build manipulative links to websites. Period.

Building links using naked URLs and varied anchor text is just as manipulative as building links with perfect match anchor text. The only difference is you are addressing one of the methods Google uses to detect manipulative links.

The clear message....stop building links, start earning them.

If you add the redirect correctly, the old web page does not need to exist any longer.

Can I simply edit the URL and create a redirect after the fact, essentially killing the old URL?

Yes.

Be sure to always test any redirects after they are made.

Will this help?

It can, but the better approach would be creating pages on your existing site optimized for your key phrase. If you wish to purchase the domain "best-sunglasses.com" why not just creating a page on your existing domain? http://mydomain.com/best-sunglasses

Is this ok, or against some Google policy?

What you describe is ok, no policies are violated.

Can this hurt the main site rankings?

As long as you don't do violate any rules or offer spam, then no.

I noticed that sites ranking above me on the first page for some keywords...

There are over 200 factors considered in determining a search result's location. If the pages which outrank you appear as you describe, then you should be easily able to outrank them if you optimize your site better.

In short, learn more about SEO. Improve your site and you will outrank the others easily, and without purchasing exact match domain names. An excellent place to start is this guide: http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo

Good Luck

Advantages of hosting videos on YouTube:

• YouTube is owned by Google so you have the maximum SEO benefit for the content itself. If the video is designed to promote your website, you will definitely get the maximum exposure on YouTube.

• Video hosting takes a lot of disk space. If you are using VPS or other hosting with limited storage, then space is an issue.

• Videos use a lot of bandwidth. Same issues as above.

• YouTube highly optimizes videos for viewers in two ways. First, the video is offered in formats ranging from 240 to 1080HD. YouTube creates versions of your video in 240, 360, 480, 720 HD and 1080 HD if you upload a 1080 HD video. This allows users to chose the right balance of quality vs size for their connection speed. If you locally host your video, most likely you will only provide one format which will leave many users unhappy with your choice.

Also, YouTube uses a fantastic Content Delivery Network. If you offer the video on your site and do not have a CDN, the playback will be significantly slower for most users.

The advantage to hosting your video locally is that you will have complete control over your content. If anyone wishes to watch your video, they need to visit your site.

If you have a great video, you can share it on YouTube, grab attention and then mention your site and gain traffic that way. Alternatively, you can host it on your site which forces anyone who wants to see the content to visit you. In order for the latter to work well, the video needs to be compelling, unique and you need to ensure it ranks well so people find it.

A subdomain is viewed as a separate domain. A subfolder is viewed as your existing domain.

If you owned "domain.com" you could sell a subdomain to others for any and all possible combinations. This is basically what wordpress.com does, for example. When you make yoursite.wordpress.com, you don't get any the benefits of wordpress' domain authority.

From a SEO perspective, there isn't much difference between yoursite.wordpress.com and www.yoursite.com. It's a different domain. It's really difficult to say if Google has any extremely minor boost in any way to a subdomain, but I am not aware of any.

When you offer a blog in a subfolder, it is part of your site. It inherits your DA, and any links to the blog can add to your site's overall DA.

The bottom line is, if this blog is directly related to your site and will be focused on the same topics as your site, you would most likely prefer it to be a subfolder. If this blog is not related to your site, or will discuss off-topic issues, then you would prefer it as a subdomain.

This topic has been discussed many times and Google is your friend (in this case). You can take a look at the SEOmoz article: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites or use Google to search the many articles on this topic: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=blog+subdomain+vs+subfolder

Do you get ranked more quickly with a subfolder?

Your site's ranking would be based on your DA factors. The higher your DA, the more important your site's content is to Google, the more often you should be crawled. The subdomain would be seen as a brand new site. Even to submit a sitemap for it you would have to first verify it as a new site with Google. Based on these factors I would say Yes, if you had an established site your blog would be ranked faster as a folder on the existing site as opposed to a new subdomain.

Do you see X% more lift?

That is the definition of DA. How likely pages on your existing site are likely to rank well. If you have an established site with good DA, and you add a blog then yes your pages should rank better on the main site when compared to the same article on a newly created subdomain.

Hi Conrad.

I have researched this topic quite a bit recently. The consensus for the best approach is:

• Use www.natureshop.com as your main site

• Use geo-targeted folders for your country-based sites such as www.natureshop.com/au

• Treat the folder pages as home pages for each country. Each of those pages should receive local links from their respective countries.

• Re-direct traffic from the old sites to the same pages on the new sites. Do not take the easy way out and simply 301 all pages to the home page for their country.

• Build your site for each COUNTRY, not language. For example, the US pages should use American spellings such as "center", and American measurements such as Dollars.

• Use the meta language tag to indicate the language used on each page. EN = US, GB = England, etc.

• Use country flags in a prominent location to allow users to find their country's pages. The flags are much more identifiable then letters.

can we deploy the same pages and content on the different geo targeted sub folders (with some subtle regional variations of spelling and language) or will this result in a duplicate content penalty?

You should not have any issues with duplicate content by following the above process. Google will understand your pages are specific to languages and countries based on your meta tags, folder structure, and Google WMT settings.

For the UK site, I would work to resolve all Panda issues and confirm the penalty is gone prior to moving that site. I would be interested to hear from others on this topic as I lack experience in this area. If the UK site was merged into the main site, would the Panda penalty only apply from Google.co.uk? Or could Google.com apply the penalty as well?

PS. I really love your business model. Free shipping, 1 year return policy, etc. shows a tremendous amount of confidence in your products. I would recommend adding some trust symbols. The BBB symbol, TrustE and Verisign or McAfee are the ones I prefer.

I like some aspects of your site, but I don't believe you earned a 2nd page ranking for the target phrase. There is seemingly a lot of competition for the keyword. Many developers from around the world might create a "web design greenville" page and attempt to compete with you. Here are some suggestions:

1. Your home page title and header presently target two keywords: "Website Design & Graphic Design Greenville, SC". If you perform a Google.com search for "Website Design & Graphic Design Greenville, SC" you are the #2 result. Your title and header represent the phrase for which you wish to rank.

If the most important phrase is "Web Design Greenville SC" then change your title and header to match. You will likely notice an immediately improvement in ranking once the change is made and crawled by Google.

2. You do not have a single backlink to your site using the phrase as anchor text. While you don't want all your backlinks to use the phrase, some of them definitely should.

3. Add your physical address and phone number to your page. Saying you are providing service for Greenville in your header is not enough. There are tons of companies in Los Angeles, NY, Miami, India and the rest of the world who are offering similar pages. You have the advantage of being authentic. Leverage that advantage by publishing your information on both your home page and the About page.

4. Use your target phrase at least once in your content. "I have been providing Web Design to Greenville residents for 5 years". There are many other ways to present the phrase but it needs to be there on your page. Preferably 2-3 times.

There are other changes you can made but these four changes alone have a great shot at bumping you to the first page of results. At the very least, you will dramatically improve your ranking.

With a single keyword drop on a new site there are many possibilities to investigate. A few ideas:

• Any change on the page can affect the rankings. For example a title change alone can lead to a major climb or fall in rankings.

• Any change to the site can affect a keyword's rankings. Many sites use common navigation, footers and sidebars throughout the site. Changes impact how PR flows throughout the site and can have a large impact on rankings.

• You mentioned the site is about 90 days old. New web pages receive a boost in rankings. Google rewards fresh content in that manner. After a brief period, the boost is removed and the page settles down to it's normal ranking position.

• I suggest checking the rankings from another pc and/or browser you do not normally use. Google offers personalized rankings when you are logged in. Even when you log out, your browser has a lot of information such as your location and browsing history which can be used to customize search results. You can add &pws=0 to the end of your query, but another option is using another pc. The bottom line, the search results you are viewing may be quite different from the results others see.

• Google may adjust your rankings based on numerous factors such as the statistics they have collected on your site. Bounce rate, time on page / site, click-through-rate and other factors measure how users interact with your site. If Google feels users are not happy with the result for the keyword, they may adjust accordingly.

I hope these ideas offer you a few things to investigation.

PS. "The site is big, with around 60 pages..." As an fyi, a site with 60 pages is generally considered a small site. When you say "big" site, I think of 10k+ page sites.

Generally speaking, one line of duplicate content will not negatively impact the SERP performance of a web page.

A couple instances where a page could be affected:

• the duplicated sentence is the first sentence of the article

• the article is very short (i.e. <100 words)

It is common practice for a single sentence to be duplicated elsewhere.

Is buying a domain with a high PR and redirecting it to your site considered black hat?

Yes

At this point I sense an angry mob is waiting for me with their fingers hovered over the thumbs down button.

In brief, when you take actions to improve the user experience, you are practicing white hat SEO. When you are taking actions to manipulate search engine rankings, you are practicing black hat SEO.

If you own the site "chocolate.com" and you decide to purchase "fudge.com", "whitechocolate.net" or any site related to your niche, then redirect the traffic, that is perfectly fine. You have a legitimate business reason for doing such. When you purchase "acme-comics.com" and redirect the domain to your chocolate site in an effort to raise PR and manipulate your rankings, that is black hat SEO.

A debate can begin on what Google can and cannot detect, but that is irrelevant. Even if Google does not enforce a particular policy does not make it any less black hat.

As a final note, the effectiveness of such tactics has greatly diminished over time. Many sites have a great deal of spam links which have been devalued by Google. If you redirect a site from another niche, those links will not offer you a lot of value since the links are not relevant to your site. Some things to think about.

I would suggest 99% of directories do not offer any SEO value. Most paid directories violate Google Guidelines and can lead to a penalty.

The major paid directories which comply with Google Guidelines are: Yahoo, Business.com, BOTW.org and JoeAnt.com. There may be a couple others out there. The could also be some niche directories.

When evaluating a paid directory the most important thing to understand is what you are paying for. In order to comply with Google Guidelines the fee must be for a review of your site, not entry into the directory. This distinction is important. If the directory offers refunds to applicants who do not get in to the directory, they violate Google Guidelines.

Linkscape, the data source for Open Site Explorer, was just updated on November 2nd. It is normally updated once/month but the SEOmoz team is working to enhance the process which can affect the update timeline.

The crawler sees the top 25% of webpages. It does not crawl 100% of the internet. For the most part, if the SEOmoz crawler does not see the link, it does not have much (if any) value. If you built the links prior to November, then they should be visible in the next update.

Bookmarking can be very valuable if the bookmark is used and visible. For example, if you get your bookmark to the front page of a site and it is promoted in any way. If you simply add a bookmark which is otherwise not used and located on a buried page, it likely has no value.

A Press Release which is offered by PRWeb or other reputable companies and is picked up has value. Some press releases are simply not seen or valued.

If you can earn links from quality, reputable sites then those links will be quickly found by Linkscape, and even faster by Google. Links from a site's home page, or links from a strongly reputable site from a popular web page are helpful. One strong link is often worth more then 100 random links. Go for quality.

Forgive me if this is too blunt, but your writing here is quite bad. It is difficult to believe someone who represents a quality writing service could write with poor spelling and grammar.

I took a look at your website and there are grammar errors throughout your content. If you cannot even write properly at your own site, how can you write well for others?

1500 word articles for $42 is a very nice price though! The problem is, for that amount of money it is simply not possible to write anything remotely close to a quality article.

You claim to be a "UK based writing service" but your About Us page offers no physical address. I could go on but all indications are your services are not for anyone who cares about SEO or the quality of their site.

I can't speak to what caused your rankings to drop, but I definitely see opportunities in your on-page factors which can improve your ranking.

Each page on your site should be optimized for about 2 keywords or phrases. For each page you need to determine "what keyword searches do I want this page to attract?" Be careful with your choices. You want to think of things from a user's perspective. What type of information do users want to find when they type in "radiators" or any given term in their search criteria. If you grab search traffic that you shouldn't, your bounce rate will be high and search engines may take that as an indicator your site is not a good result for the given query.

Your home page's title is "Heat and Plumb | Heating and Plumbing Supplies, Materials and Plumbing Fittings". That title seems to be a bit broad, as if you are trying to capture too much. I would suggest using a title more along the lines of "Heating and Plumbing Supplies | Heat and Plumb". The keywords first, then your company name. The shorter the title, the more weight each word or phrase will have.

Your home page seems to cover too many keywords. You use "radiators" 8 times on the home page. The first use is great as it is a single term link to another page which can send the signal that your home page is not the proper landing page for "radiators", but then you use the term 7 more times on the page. Perhaps you can scale back a bit, otherwise you may be cannibalizing your own site's ranking.

Your best page for the "radiator" keyword seems to be: http://www.heatandplumb.com/acatalog/Radiators_and_Towel_Rails.html. You have a link from your home page to this page. Your current title is "Radiators For Sale BIG Range with Price Match Guarantee!". I would suggest keeping the extra text in your meta description. As a title I would recommend either "Radiators" or "Radiators | HeatandPlumb.com". By removing the extra "fluff" words you are focusing your title power on the keyword.

I confirmed you show as the 9th result for radiators in google.co.uk. All of the results above yours either have shorter titles, or repeat the "radiator" term. Some also have the term in their main URL.

I don't want to paint the picture that these changes will propel you to #1, but they can definitely make a difference in what is clearly a highly competitive term.

Steven, it sounds like you joined to learn the secret handshake. If that is the case then, from your point of view, you will be disappointed.

EGOL and Marcus both shared excellent perspectives on the SEOmoz site's offerings. You have also looked around the site. Based on your replies I think you have examined the site and have not missed any major components.

What SEOmoz does offer members is:

• Tools: Site Explorer, MOZbar and other tools to examine websites. Yes, there are similar tools out there and also some of these tools can be improved. I would like to see all of SEOmoz's tools improved to be the best in the industry. They aren't there yet.

• Original interviews: you mentioned Whiteboard Fridays. The recent interview with Duane Forrester from Bing offered fantastic insight into upcoming changes at Bing. Being part of a network which talks to industry leaders and asks the right questions is very rewarding.

• Active community: if you do get stuck or otherwise have a question, SEOmoz offers a place you can go to for help. From what I have seen, other communities are not very active nor do they offer the quality of feedback these forums provide.

The idea seems to be centered around providing a place for those interested in SEO the tools, information and discussion area to do their job better. If that is not what you are looking for, then I would suggest you simply enjoy your free month then try something else.

By actively sharing your knowledge and responding to user questions you can quickly earn MozPoints. If you check-in frequently, you can earn bonus points which are available for responses offered within 4 hours. There are other methods to earn points such as responding to blog articles. The link Brent shared is quite helpful.

What I could do about the potential hackers?

A few tips:

• If you are using any software on your site, ensure you keep up with the latest version. Normally you do not have to run out and update the moment a new release comes out, but you should have a plan in place to always update within 90 days of any release.

• Ensure you share any passwords with the fewest number of people possible. You, your web developer and possibly your SEO consultant are the only ones which may need access to your web server. If anyone with a password changes (i.e. employee leaves, developer changes, etc) then change your password.

• Do not use an easy to guess password such as "admin1" or "password1". Actually, both your username and password should be difficult to guess.

• Do not use shared server hosting. If you are paying $10 or less per month for hosting, you are on a shared server. Upgrade to VPS or better. VPS hosting starts at around $35 but there are numerous advantages over shared hosting.

• Use a service such as Verisign (now Symantec) to perform daily malware scans. If you purchase a Verisign SSL certificate, the service comes with the package.

• Each type of hosting (Apache, nginx, Microsoft, etc) and website will have its own security recommendations. Make sure they are followed. On my dedicated server, there are some security scripts which have been written by my web host to enhance security. Additionally, there is code I add to the htaccess file on all sites which block common attacks.

With all of the above in mind, nothing can beat a thorough security check from an expert. There are companies that focus web security as their business. Such inspections are very expensive but they offer a lot of value. Also know that even the biggest companies in the world suffer security breaches. By following all of the above steps, you will clearly be a more difficult target then many other sites whereas right now it sounds like you are an easy target.

Good Luck.

The best information I can find on the subject is 3 years old and from Yahoo.

My understanding is do a 301 if you can, if not do a meta refresh preferably with 0.

http://www.webproworld.com/webmaster-forum/threads/62909-Is-a-Meta-Refresh-Safe-When-You-Can-t-Do-a-301

Also in 2007, Matt Cutts said this:

Matt Cutts:  In general, Google does a relatively good job of following the 301s, and 302s, and even Meta Refreshes and JavaScript. Typically what we don't do would be to follow a chain of redirects that goes through a robots.txt that is itself forbidden.

http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-matt-cutts.shtml

Based on that discussion it is inferred that value is passed along.

The index.html file name offers no value for SEO nor users. I recommend not using it and directing users to a "clean" URL (eg seomoz.org/ instead of seomoz.org/index.html).

As long as you properly set this up and consistently link to the same URL there are not any duplicate content issues. If you wish to go one step further you can add the canonical tag to your page.