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I agree with Dunamis but would like to add a few things I noticed.

• you are missing a canonicalization tag on your pages. You do have issues with duplicate pages. http://www.allianceconcretepumps.com/ and http://allianceconcretepumps.com/ both lead to the same page, which Google will see as duplicate content. You can fix the issue by deciding which version of the page you prefer (the www or non www version) then adding a canonical tag to all pages.

• meta keywords are no longer used by Google. I suggest you remove that line of code.

• Your Alliance Customer Testimonials block is great. When you click on it to play the video, it takes the user to a new page that is completely blank except for the video player. It would be much better to just go ahead and let the video play on your landing page. If you were to move a visitor to another page, at least provide your normal page container (header, footer, etc) along with a button the user can click to navigate to other pages.

• Your Featured Concrete Pump image shows a javascript on mouseover, but when you click on the image nothing happens.

Do any of these help or would this directory be a waste of time.

Do not spend any money for links, period.

There are a few, highly recognized sites which charge for site reviews. If your site passes the review, then your site will be added to their directory. The main examples are: Yahoo, Business.com, BOTW. A good list can be found here: http://www.seomoz.org/directories

Link exchanges and paying for links are otherwise a waste of time, effort and money. Focus on earning links through quality content and solid relationships.

I agree with Steve but wanted to add a bit.

You don't see your true PR. Google updates PR internally on a frequent (?daily) basis, but we do not see it. They update the toolbar that we see 3 or 4 times each year.

The PR number you see is truncated. Your prior PR may have been 40 and showed as 4. Your PR may now be 39 and show as 3. So a 1 point drop may be extremely minor.

Some details from Matt Cutts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3Jup5R1MGY

@Panu, I believe you might be missing the relevancy of the Panda affected sites' links and their impact on PR. Most of the sites negatively affected by Panda have links to other sites. The value of those links are now devalued, so the PR of the pages receiving those links would also be impacted.

Hi Zack.

I will offer some candid feedback with the thought it will help you do better on your next try. I know you worked hard on this article so brace yourself for some tough love here.

Some questions which come to mind when I look at your article:

1. What part of this article is "linkbait". This appears to be a random article as opposed to something compelling.

2. Who is your target audience? I can't tell from reading the article. Is this supposed to be of interest to retailers? Consumers? It seems more like a random story.

3. How did you come up with this topic? What led you to believe this was a topic people want to read about?

4. You offer a disclaimer at the end of the article. "This post was written by Cassie Tweten Delaney, Zack Notes and Nina Mozes, without any academic peer review or serious fact-checking." What I am trying to figure out is how your article offers value to readers? Many articles offer value due to unique research being offered. Other articles compile research from several sources and offer a unique compilation of data. Your disclaimer basically says you do not stand behind the numbers (i.e. "no serious fact checking") so no one can rely upon your data.

Some suggestions:

• the first 2 sentences need to connect with your readers better, otherwise you will likely loose them. You need to reach out and grab them.

• You offer a facebook sharing opportunity at the bottom of the article. First, engage more social networks. Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn should be included at a minimum and several others such as StumbleUpon and Reddit would be helpful. Also, include these sharing links at the top and bottom of your article. Social sharing is very impulsive.

• Do research into what topics are current and of interest to readers. I noticed you worked to tie in your topic to the holiday season, but the topic itself doesn't seem current or viral in any way. I don't have any specific suggestions but an idea like "Holiday Shopping in America: Best and Worst Cities" would likely generate more interest then your current topic.

• The site itself seems to lack any standing. There are no trust symbols offered, no site logo, etc. Improve the presentation of your site.

• The site has some design shortcomings. For example, in the upper right corner you offer a RSS feed. The normal practice is to click the icon to add the feed. Your RSS feed icon is just an image. It took me a few seconds to realize only the word "email" offered a link. Examine your site in detail for any flaws.

• Your article offers 2 charts and 2 images. They are nice but not compelling in any way. They definitely don't rise to what I would call link bait.

A better example of an article all around, which is great but doesn't rise to the level of linkbait in my opinion: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/4-graphics-to-help-illustrate-onpage-optimization

1155 tweets, 300 likes, 181 +1s and 129 thumbs up.

Like your article, there isn't a specific time frame involved but it is very helpful. The graphics aren't difficult or exceptional quality, but I would suggest they read better then the charts you shared. The target audience is clear: all webmasters, website developers and SEOs.

I strongly agree with Albin and Joe. Check to see what your user's think. I'll take the user experience over a group of SEO experts. What do SEO's know?

Your footer links are very well presented and represent your site well. It is a best practice to minimize your links. If you discovered your links are not actually being used then the feedback from your users is basically those unused links are not helpful and you can consider removing them OR possibly altering the anchor text to something that users may find more helpful.

I will disagree with Albin about the sitemaps. I usually recommend an HTML sitemap but I would not recommend placing a link to a XML sitemap on your page. Offering two sitemaps to users does not make sense to me, and a HTML sitemap is clearly the more useful way to present a sitemap. In your case, I probably wouldn't offer a HTML sitemap either. You mentioned that you already offer links to almost all of the pages on your site. If the couple pages you do not offer links to are not very popular and you have other links to those pages, you may be better of as-is.

I have the impression many SEOs blindly follow certain "rules" such as eliminate footer links and always go xyz. It's important to view standards as guidelines which need to be flexible and adjusted for each site's needs.

Based on the site names, my impression is the links offer no value. I looked at the first site and it is a free directory. I looked at the last site and it seems to be a below average blog. These links are unlikely to add any value to your site. On the negative side, these links will increase your DA giving you the impression they have value, and it makes any link analysis of your site more difficult because you need to sort through all these extra links.

A couple link tests you can perform to consider their value:

• Ask yourself what if Google did not exist. Would the link have any value?

• Will this link offer any direct traffic at all?

• Can anyone get this link? If a competitor looks at your site and sees you have a link from coukdirectory.com, and then they can acquire the same link in 5 minutes, the link likely has no value at all. The links you want are the ones which need to be earned. When you read a great SEOmoz article about a SEO topic and then you tweet it, share it or link to it THAT is the type of link which has value.

Hi Justin.

Footer links are read last as web crawlers read your page. Anchor text is associated with the first link that is found on a given page. This is important to know as links are often found in your navigation bar, side bars and content so the anchor text in the footer does not get applied.

Footer links are also devalued from a SEO point of view. They do not have the same weight as other links on the page. Search engines understand footer links are the least visible and least used links on a page. You should review some analytics to determine if any of your footer links are actually used.

It can be useful to offer a handful of footer links. Stuffing 30+ links in your footer is not helpful for SEO nor your users. Take a look at the SEOmoz footer links for a reasonable example.

In summary, you are not penalized for having many footer links unless they get to the point where they appear spammy. But you are algorithmically disadvantaged by adding any unnecessary links as you are taking away PR from flowing to the more important links on your site.

Kane's answer is solid and gets a thumbs up from me. I would add a bit more detail to directly respond to your inquiry.

I've heard that when a site is new, the sources from which it gets its first back links are very important -- that the early links are more important for ranking than later links.

The primary concern is the first links are authentic, quality links. If your site has 100 quality links and then gathers 50 junk links, your link ratio of quality links vs spam show 66% quality links. If the first links to your sites were free directories, spam blog articles and other inorganic links then you can quickly show a link profile with 100% spam links which can cause ranking issues.

Your profile is not complete so I cannot tell what industry your site focuses. Let's say you sell watches. Some suggested first links you could acquire:

BBB (Better Business Bureau)

DMOZ / Yahoo / Business.com - other high quality directories

MasterCard SecureCode, Verified by Visa - programs offering secure shopping sites

Authorized retailer links from Seiko, Rolex, Casio, etc.

Share a couple "best on the web" quality articles on other sites discussing topics of interest such as "Watches - Does the Brand Matter?", "Watches of James Bond", etc.

Write top-quality reviews of specific watches and share them

Create short videos showing watches in detail and people using them

Distribute high quality images of the watches

Offer discounts to certain groups. For examples, 20% off all watches to graduates of (insert local university name) for 90 days after graduation. The university may provide a link to your site.

The list goes on. This is the point where I would suggest reaching out to the links Kane shared.

My first suggestion is to drop the ".html" extension at the end of your URLs. It offers no value to you nor your site's users. It just makes the URLs longer and less readable.

My next suggestion is to separate words with hyphens. Use /home-furniture not /homefurniture

With respect to a part number, that is a disadvantage many larger sites have which smaller sites don't experience. Do you NEED to have a part number in the URL? Does it help your employees or customers? Or can you do well with just the product name? If a part number is required, I would at least recommend keeping it down to one number. Your example of "93630" seems fine but your other example of "slpt758-f13" is not desirable.

I would also try to work on your category and product names to ensure they don't duplicate each other. /market-umbrellas/california-umbrella seems unnecessary.

To sum it all up, I would suggest the following for your URLs based on the examples above:

www.vistastores.com/market-umbrellas/california-red

www.vistastores.com/home-furniture/winsome-wood

If product ids are required then add them as -93630

Link building is a rather deep topic which takes both training and experience to truly develop.

At a high level, you want to EARN links, not build them. If you provide a website which is based upon solid architecture and is well designed for a great user experience, then add well-written, authoritative, engaging, and current content to that site then others will WANT to link to your site.

For example, take a look at Rand's latest article: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/phoenix-rising-bings-new-webmaster-tools-whiteboard-friday. As of this moment the article has almost 1000 tweets not to mention 160+ likes and 85 +1s. Clearly this article will earn many additional links as well.

What makes this article, and many similar articles on SEOmoz rank well, is they are topical (i.e. related to SEO), authoritative (Rand is a recognized expert in the field of SEO and he is interviewing Duane Forrester, Sr. Product Manager @ Bing), the article is very well written and current (the changes have just been made). This combination of factors helps make a great article.

When you build your own links in forums and blog comments, many of them are tagged as "nofollow" meaning they are not directly helpful for search engine ranking. Take a look at your "Joy" and "dyslexia" links above which are "nofollow" as well.

You should also know Google values some sites and pages much higher then others. For example, if you obtain a link from the New York Times it will likely be discovered in under an hour. If you obtain a link from a random forum which is not popular the link may take a month or never be discovered.

I am working on such a big eCommerce website with 7000+ products. Website is live since more than 3 months. But, Google have indexed only 94 URLs.

It is important to determine the root issue which is causing your pages not to be indexed. It is not going to be your URLs. Check the following:

1. Have you submitted a sitemap to Google? If not, do so as there are clearly some issues.

2. Have you performed a test crawl of your site? Use the SEOmoz crawler. You don't need a 100% complete report. You are trying to review your site for crawl errors which impact your whole site.

3. I would suggest examining your site's navigation. With only 1% of your site getting indexed, there may be a problem.

4. Do you have any content on your product pages? If you just throw up an image with a product name, the page will likely not be indexed.

5. Ensure your robots.txt file is not blocking pages which should be indexed.

6. Thoroughly examine your Google WMT for errors and issues.

How many back links per day is too many?

Too many for what exactly? The only limit to how many links you can earn in a day are based upon your budget and creativity.

**How many high quality directory submission back links per day is too many for a new website with zero back links ? **

How do you define "high quality directory"? There are very few directories which comply with Google Guidelines and would not be viewed as manipulative. The primary general directories meeting this criteria are DMOZ, Business.com, Yahoo.com, botw.org, joeant.com. There will be a very few others along with some specific niche directories.

Additionally, there are a select few quality membership directories. For example, if you join the Better Business Bureau, you would be listed in their member directory. If you use McAfee for site security, you may be included in their directory.

or is there never too many when it comes to high domain authority back links ?

Domain authority can only be used to determine a link's quality if you are proceeding under the assumption the site involved is not penalized for manipulative links and the majority of sites linking in are likewise not penalized. DA, like most SEO metrics, can be manipulated.

In summary, if you are receiving links from quality, legitimate sources, then you are free to earn as many links as you desire. Google likely has a threshhold where if a new site earns a large number of links in a short time frame it will set off an alert causing the site to be reviewed, but if the links are of a quality nature then there is no problem. There are major companies opening new sites all the time and those sites receive massive amounts of links in short periods of time.

If nofollow keeps link juice from leaking from a site, why not use nofollow on all external links?

An excellent question Christopher. The responses which come to mind are:

1. Some external pages are under your control and you will directly benefit from link juice flowing to them. Your social account pages (facebook, twitter, etc.), company profile pages (linkedin, etc.) or other author pages.

2. Some external links are to partner sites who may not appreciate a nofollow link or could take offense as nofollow links are generally to untrusted sites.

3. There is always the "do onto others as you would have done to you" idea. Along these links you can generate goodwill.

4. Sometimes it is required. You may be presenting an image, video or excerpt from another site. In order to use the content a followed link could be required.

5. It's often the right thing to do. If a site is worthy of mentioning, they are often worthy of being linked to as well.

I imagine a percentage of people read reasons # 1 - 5 and are still of the mindset to nofollow most external links. Well reason #6 will probably convince most of those site owners otherwise.

6. All else aside, you should be clear you are not "saving" link juice for your site by nofollowing external links. The way link juice flows on a page is the value will flow to every link on the page whether it is followed or not. The difference is, the juice to a followed link flows through to the target, where the link juice to a nofollowed link simply "evaporates".

Using a simple example lets say your page has 100 links and all of which are followed. Each link will receive 1% of the page's PR value (I don't wish to complicate this example with a dampening factor, let's keep to simple math).

Using the same example of a page with 100 links but this time let's assume 10 of the links are nofollowed. Each of the 90 followed links would still receive 1% of the page's link juice. Many people assume 100/90 followed links = 1.1 so each link would receive 1.1% and that is not the case. One good aspect of this method is it prevents most site owners from simply nofollowing all external links in the manner you are asking about.

It can be as little as a few hours to as much as a couple months. It depends on the popularity of the specific page which contains the link, along with the number and quality of links pointed to that page.

There is not any intrinsic value to those domains at all. If those were my domains, I would park them and offer them for sale and hope someone is interested.

The solid SEO approach to take when you own a site is to place all your content on your site. You don't see quality sites buying up other domains. It's a poor tactic. In order for it to pay off you need to add quality content to the domain. At best, you can write a very solid 1-page site. You then need to obtain separate hosting for this one page site. The content needs to be good and then you link it to your site. In the end, you would likely be far better off if the quality content was on your main site, and you didn't spend the time and effort on this manipulation tactic.

If you want to buy a bunch of domains, try buying the ones which are similar to your own brand. This is done as a means of protection. If you are Google.com, buy Gogle.com, Google.net, along with any variations you can think of and 301 them all to your site.

Walter,

I understand what you are trying to do, and why you are trying to do it. It's a form of Doorway page for your site. You wish to capture traffic searches for "apache monitoring" and other key phrases. You have purchased some domains which are an exact match for the phrases and wish to understand how you can best use these domains to drive traffic to your site.

The answer you are looking for is as follows:

• Most people who take this approach wish to use the site to improve their main site's PR or DA. It doesn't work because Google would recognize the same owner as the site it links to and discount the links.

How does Google make the connection? Well one way is to check the domain registration information. Google is a domain registrar so they have direct access to all the information. Other simple steps are to check the IP of the domain (c-block), the code structure, the content and more. In short, most people who attempt this approach either are not successful or enjoy success only for a short time before having the links devalued. Many do not even realize when they are penalized.

• Some people who use this approach are more focused on the actual traffic and don't care about the links so much. If you had a domain name such as "car insurance" which offers millions of searches each month and is highly competitive, then this approach has value. "Apache monitoring" only has 6600 searches per month and is considering a low competition phrase.

If you optimized a page on your own site for "apache monitoring" and had the benefit of your site's DA, you may be able to rank #1 for the search term anyway. If you spent any time and focus on quality SEO, you should be able to if it is an important term for your site.

The site "apache-monitor.com" presently ranks as #3 for the search. Their page is optimized for the phase with "apache monitoring" in the title, H1 tag and text. Their DA is 37 and PA 46. Your one-page site wont have the benefit of DA/PA so it wont rank as well. If you are going to the trouble of an EMD for a very low traffic phrase, at the very least you want to capture the #1 rank for the term. You wont even be #3 without tremendous resources and effort.

The practice of what you are doing is called Doorway Pages. It's a black hat SEO tactic. You are attempting to drive traffic to your site by creating fake micro websites. The problem is this tactic does not improve the user experience nor search quality. It is designed to manipulate search results and is therefore a violation of search quality. You can read more about it here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66355

Doorway pages were more popular in the past when the practice wasn't as clearly understood and defined. Feel free to correct me if I am mistaken. Your question is very common, but it is based on historical information and times have changed.

It sounds like you are not actually changing your domain name, but instead moving your content within your domain.

A domain change would be if you moved your content from www.ready2spark.com to www.newdomain.com.

Normally, if you move content within your website you simply wish to redirect the old URLs to the new ones. In this instance, you will be re-using your home URL. There are two options for the home URL:

1. Re-direct your current home URL to the /blog page. This method allows users who expect to find your current blog to still find it. You would then use a new home page URL. If your existing home page URL is www.ready2spark.com your new URL could be www.ready2spark.com/ (with the trailing slash).

The positives of this method is it allows current users to find the content they expect. The downside is it complicates your home page a bit as users will expect to find your home page and not realize the slash actually brings up a different page.

2. Move your content as you wish, 301 redirect all URLs which will no longer be used to their new pages. On the re-used pages (I think only your home page) you can put a friendly note like "Are you looking for my blog? If so, click HERE"

I would recommend the second option but wanted to explain both possibilities in case there are any needs you haven't outlined.

"Best" can be interpreted many ways.

The best for beginners to learn SEO? The best reference manual? The best pro tips?

In my opinion the best SEO book, hands-down is Beginners Guide to SEO. It has lots of great information which answers a good percentage of the questions asked on this site daily.

You asked about this site before. What specifically would you like to know?

• I notice you made some improvements since your last inquiry. The non-working navigation tab has been removed, among other changes. That is a good move.

• Your RSS feed link is partly hidden. It moves and reveals more of itself on hover, but still remains party hidden. There is nothing directly wrong with it, but it would get more value if you simply displayed it fully so visitors would recognize it.

• The page still overuses the phrase "Filme Online Gratis" repeating it 8 times directly, which doesn't include numerous phrase variations such as "Filme Gratis" and "Filme Online".

• You offer links for "Filme online" and "filme online" with the only anchor difference being the capitalized first letter. These links go to different sites. Will your users understand the difference between the anchor text?

• your page title and description seem fine. You can remove the meta keywords tag if you wish.

As a fast review the page seems ok. You can improve it a bit by focusing on your over-use of phrases and try to step back and look at your header, footer and sidebar words from a visitor's point of view.

A few thoughts I would share from my experiences in England:

• England has VAT which is a tax on goods and services. The laws surrounding VAT are quite different then what we are accustomed to for taxation in the US. You may want to gain a high level understanding of how VAT works depending on your role in the SEO process.

• "British" English can be quite different from American English. I had serious communication problems when I first began speaking to people from England. One example is "Prices here are much dearer". I guessed that either meant more expensive or cheaper, but had no idea which. You may want to read a quick guide such as: http://www.effingpot.com/slang.shtml

• Do not just treat England as if it was another US state. The culture is quite a bit different.

There isn't any other more direct advice I have to offer.