Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Megan,

Thanks for your reply. I'll run a crawl now and hopefully all will be okay.

Sam.

Thanks for your reply. The Robots.txt reads:

User-agent: *Disallow: /wp-admin/Disallow: /wp-includes/ Sitemap: http://www.top-10-dating-reviews.com/sitemap.xml.gz

As fas as I'm aware this is okay?

Sam.

I've just run a SEOMOZ crawl report and it tells me that the category pages on my site such as http://www.top-10-dating-reviews.com/category/online-dating/ are blocked by meta robots and have the meta robots tag noindex,follow.

This was the case a couple of days ago as I run wordpress and am using the SEO Category updater plugin. By default it appears it makes categories noindex, follow. Therefore I edited the plugin so that the default was index, follow as I want google to index the category pages so that I can build links to them.

When I open the page in a browser and view source the tags show as index, follow which adds up. Why then is the SEOMOZ report telling me they are still noindex,follow?

Presumably the crawl is in real time and should pick up the new follow tag or is it perhaps because its using data from an old crawl?

As yet these pages aren't indexed by google.

Any help is much appreciated!

Thanks

Sam.

Thanks for your reply. So if I make the category pages indexable by google won't I run into duplicate content problems?

Hi guys,

I'm working on http://www.top-10-dating-reviews.com and planto build links to the category pages - is that the best strategy for a comparison site like this? This is a wordpress site and I read that category pages should be no indexed is that the case? If so then obviously I'd be wasting my time building links to these pages as google wouldn't index them anyway.

Any advice on the best strategy for link building would be much appreciated!

I'm UK based and looking at setting up a site to rank in the USA. As I understand it a .com TLD is best but these are used worldwide so do I simply need to set the geotargeting to USA in webmaster tools? Or is there a better domain to use?

With hosting the site in US and on page content related to US cities (I plan to create a page for each US city I operate in the the city name in the H1 tag) will that be enough for google to understand that the page should rank in the US version of google.

Also how can I view Google USA search results - when I go to google.com it automatically redirects to google.co.uk and I can only change the location on the left hand side to UK cities.

Any help much appreciated!

I totally understand that reciprocal links have their place and it is normal for business to link to each other. What concerns me is that my competitors are reciprocal linking with the ONLY intention of swapping links (I can't see any other value in the backlinks I've examined) and that it appears to be working! These guys are outranking me and I worry that if I don't play the game their way I'll fall behind even further!

Looking at my competitors backlink profiles they all seem to have lots or reciprocal links and banner exchanges etc... I thought that only one way links really had any value. The reciprocal links they do have appear to be pretty spammy but the sites are still ranking well? Should I be adopting reciprocal links and banner exchanges. I know these strategies worked years ago but surely not in 2012?

A few weeks ago I added an image to the top of each page and somehow (I've only just noticed) the image was inside an h1 tag. Presumably this would be the first element google would crawl  and would it consider the image the h1 possibly confusing google about the pages content? My actual h1 further down the page would then possible be disregarded by google? The pages I am talking about have dropped in google and I wonder if this could have been the issue?

Hi Gerry,

Thanks for your reply. It makes sense not to include too many towns so as not to risk diluting the value of the main keyword. Most of the long tail search terms I'm talking about are likely to bring me 2 - 5 clicks a week as an estimate. It does seem, and IS a lot of work to build pages for low traffic keywords so I guess I need to figure out if it's worth my time or if my time is better spent building links and improving domain/page authority. The reason I think building local pages is the best option is simply because the industry is so competitive for the main keyword terms and I think that perhaps highly targeted local terms would convert better anyway.

I think I'll go with the strategy of short but useful content (maybe around 100 words) which might be a good compromise as theses pages wouldn't take too long to build. As the long tail keywords are not competitive (most people don't bother with them at all) hopefully they'll rank page one pretty easily. I could potenitially get a few hundred highly targeted leads this way.

I'm working on creating pages to target local SEO. I've created pages for example 'wedding band london' with useful content and optimised them with title tags, alt tags etc and will continue to do so for major cities and queries where there are significant search volume. However, I also want to pickup longtail local search queries such as 'wedding band camden' etc... Will adding a list of towns somewhere on the page for each city or county help drive traffic to the site from such queries? Is so what's the best way to structure the page?

FYI the urls shown above are just examples and not actual URL's.

Webmaster tools is showing duplicate titles for example:

http://www.musicliveuk.com/lincolnshire/bands-in-lincolnshire/

and:

http://www.musicliveuk.com/lincolnshire%20/bands-in-lincolnshire/

What's the %20 all about? I didn't create that page and it is a duplicate of the first. I'm also getting them for some pages with capitialisation? Eg:

http://www.musicliveuk.com/lincolnshire/bands-in-lincolnshire/

http://www.musicliveuk.com/Lincolnshire/bands-in-lincolnshire/

I have also installed buddypress on another site I work on (I use wordpress) and have since had duplicate title issues for members that have signed up:

/members/admin/activity/friends/

/members/admin/activity/groups/

/members/admin/activity/just-me/

These pages are all showing duplicate titles? How can I fix this?

I use all in one SEO pack and have <a title="Click for Help!">Canonical URLs checked.</a>

Any help much appreciated!

If a site is targeting traffic from around the world should I set the geographic targeting in webmaster tools under 'settings' or leave it? Any help would be much appreciated!

Thanks for your reply guys. That all makes perfect sense. I want the site to be as useful as possible so seperate pages will help that cause.

Can a one page website rank well with the right SEO? I am building a new site so it is best to put the content related to two or three related items on one page or create seperate pages? Surely by creating just one page I can put all my link building efforts into improving the authority of that page as opposed to spreading my time over 3?

I notice today Ihave 2 access denied errors. I checked the help which says:

Googlebot couldn’t access a URL on your site because your site requires users to log in to view all or some of your content. (Tip: You can get around this by removing this requirement for user-agent Googlebot.)

Therefore I think it may be because I have added a login page for users and googlebot can't access it. I'm using wordpress and presume I need to amend the robots.txt to remove the requirement for google to log in but how do I do that?

Unless I'm misunderstanding the problem altogether!

I've found a .gb.net domain with a highly competitive exact match term for sale. Do .gb.net domains rank well within google? Or are they considered not as authorative? Is it worth purchasing one?

If I add pages to my site to cover major cities/towns/counties in the UK where I offer wedding bands and link them from the navigation using drop down menus/categories ( I believe this is the best option to allow users to find what they are looking for) I get a'too many links on page' flag. How can I best get around this problem?

Thanks for your reply. All that makes sense - looks like I have a lot of work to do!