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In the post penguin era should I diversify my internal anchor text? I have exact match links throughout my site that point to my important pages so should I look at varying the anchor text?

I also have exact match terms in my sites navigation such as 'london wedding bands', 'edinburgh wedding bands' etc... I read somewhere that I should remove the 'money term' so that they become 'london',  'edinburgh' etc...Is that they case?

If I'm trying to rank for the term 'wedding band' with my url:

http://www.musicliveuk.com/home/wedding-bands

will linking to local pages such as:

http://www.musicliveuk.com/live-acts/hire-wedding-bands/wedding-bands-london

help the main page to rank?

I added the 'local' pages to try and pick up any traffic from long tail search queries but my main focus is on getting the main page to rank as the traffic from long tail queries is so small.

So is it worth me spending time building links to these local pages in order to try and help the main page rank?

Same here - very odd.

Should I change my wordpress permalinks to include the keyword? For examples at the minute my url is http://www.musicliveuk.com/home/wedding-singer. Is it better to be http://www.musicliveuk.com/live-bands/wedding-singer. 'home' is not relevant so surely 'live-bands' would be better? If I change the urls won't I lose 'link juice' as external links will all point to a url that no longer exists? Or will wordpress automatically redirect the old url to the new one?

Finally, if I should change the url as described how do I do it on wordpress? I can only see how to edit the last bit of the url and not the middle bit.

Hi,

I have various pages set up such as http://www.musicliveuk.com/home/wedding-singer. Is there any benefit in SEO terms to changing it to http://www.musicliveuk.com/live-music/wedding-singer? I would presume that a keyword would be better for SEO than 'home' which is irrelevant? Also if I were to change it would all the links external I have on other sites pointing to http://www.musicliveuk.com/home/wedding-singer be lost as the url no longer exists?

I suppose I could set up a manual redirect from http://www.musicliveuk.com/home/wedding-singer to http://www.musicliveuk.com/live-music/wedding-singer or would wordpress automatically redirect from the old to new? By redirecting I understand that some 'link juice' is lost along the way so is including the keyword in the url of enough benefit to warrant losing some link juice?

Finally if I do change the url to include the keyword how do I do it in wordpress? I can only see how to change the page title using the 'edit' button when editing a page?

Hi,

It seems that achor text diversity is hugely important post penguin but what's the best strategy? What kind of anchor text should I be going for? As I understand it more that 60% of  links with the keywords in trigger a google flag. For example are the following good examples for the term 'wedding singer'?

local wedding singer, best wedding singer, wedding singer website, hire wedding singer.

Would these cause triggers in google as all contain the keyword 'wedding singer'?

Or should I be going for:

click here, visit us, listen now, view a profile

Obviously these words don't contain the anchor text 'wedding singer' but with a few exact match #wedding singer' anchor texts and good on page SEO will this mix give better results?

I recently had site downtime of about 10 days for a site I'm working on which is about 6 months old. There were naturally many page not found errors in webmaster tools as google had tried to crawl the site during the downtime but I've noticed that google has now dropped some of the pages. Are they likely to be reindexed? Google has crawled some of my pages today but as yet the ones that have been dropped from the index haven't reappeared. (the site has been live again for a week). Should they reappear when the pages are next crawled?

Yea no messages in there. Totally confused!

Mid April my site www.musicliveuk.com lost almost all its rankings. I'm still non the wiser as to why and it seems a little earlier that the penguin update. I wonder if any of you guys could take a look and offer any suggestions as to what might have happened? I'm relatively new to SEO and have worked on my own site myself? If I've made some mistakes how do I fix it?

I've just set up a wordpress site with a hosting company who only allow you to install your wordpress site in http://www.myurl.com/folder as opposed to the root folder. I now have the problem that the robots.txt file only works in http://www.myurl./com/folder/robots.txt

Of course google is looking for it at http://www.myurl.com/robots.txt and returning a 404 error. How can I get around this? Is there a way to tell google in webmaster tools to use a different path to locate it? I'm stumped?

No messages in webmaster tools.Do google always inform you? All the pages are still in the google index if I enter site:thenmyurl. It's just not showing in the top 100. In terms of link building I've posted in directories, used forum signatures, some reciprocal linking and I have set up blogs on high authority domains and posted content on them however I did post some of the same content on several blogs with links pointing to my site so that could look unnatural. The reason I did this though was I noticed a competitor that was ranking in the top 10 had used that strategy. It seems odd if I have been penalised because of that as they are still in the top 10.

I'm considering entering the online casino arena with an affiliate site. These keywords such as 'online roulette', 'online blackjack' are massively competitive with high page and domain authority sites on page one. Does anyone have any experience of this area and is it possible to compete in it? Apparently long tail keywords don't really convert in this area so I may have to go for these highly competitive keywords. Any thoughts?

I recently set up a site (3 months ago). After a couple of months I was on page 1/2/3 for all my main keywords. However on friday all the keywords except for 3 dropped out of the SERPS. Today only 1 keyword remains in the SERPS!

I'm an amatuer SEO and remember with my 1st site I worked on (this new one is only my second) that it occassionally dissapeared from the SERPS for a few days and came back. It's now been 4 days though and I'm beginning to think I may have been penaslised.

This second site is more of an affiliate site but I do try to include lots of relevant unique content even so. Could it be because it's an affiliate site? All the affiliate links are no follow.

I'm a little confused about the benefits of inviting people to guest post on my site. I've just read http://www.seomoz.org/blog/using-passive-link-building-to-build-links-with-no-budget which suggests that by inviting people to guest post on my site I can build a relationship with them and eventually ask them to post a guest post of mine on their site.

If both posts have a link back to the owners site doesn't this amount to reciprocal linking? Or am I missing something? Is a reciprocal link only classed as such if the link points to the exact page where the article is or can a reciprocal link point to anywhere on the site and still be classed as reciprocal?

I spent 6 months getting top 10 rankings for a site without the keywords in the domain. I've just recently built a site with the exact match keyword in the domain and am stunned to see the site in the top 10 after 2 months and minimal link building in a highly competitive industry. I personally believe that the domain name has played a part in this. My advice is wherever possible include your main keywords in the domain.

Which passes most link juice a text link or an image with the correct 'alt' attribute? Do the pass the same amount or is one more valuable than the other?

I have a new site that has just entered the SERPS so I'm tracking stats pretty carefully using google analytics. Yesterday according to my affiliate stats I had 10 unique visits with 2 sign ups for one of my products but google analytics only shows a total of 5 visitors yesterday on my site? ( A 20% conversion rate 2 out of 5 also seems ridiculously high). I'm guessing there were also a number of users that visited my site but didn't click through one of the affiliate links and just browsed the site so the visitor number could be higher? I'm not sure where this huge discrepancy comes from?

My site has some good google SERPS but yahoo and bing don't rank it well at all. I know of course they have different algorithms to google but I would expect there to be some correlation. Why does google appear to consider my site valuable and return it for search queries and yahoo/bing don't?

I'm considering the following in order to get users to stay on my site and make it more useful to visitors. At the minute we list live bands for hire and have a blog - that's it. I'm looking to build a sense of community where users can build a profile, chat, list their gigs, upload demos and chat in forums.

Firstly I want improve the user experience and gain dedicated members but my second reason for doing so it to gain backlinks. My theory is that if the site is more useful it will gain more links. Does anyone have any info on how implementing 'community' features on a website helps with backlinks and whether this strategy works?

These changes would mean my site has evolved considerably but i don't see that as a problem. My long term aim is to monetise the site through classifed ads and spot ads. Would anyone advise against adding advertising to a site and if so why?

I have a soft 404 problem in webmaster tools for http://www.musicliveuk.com/about/feed and I'm not sure why. I read on here that if it is a main content page it should be fixed but I don't know how. I've tried to 301 redirect the page to http://www.musicliveuk.com/about/ but the redirect doesn't appear to be working? how do I fix this?