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Tags are good for the user experience, but they can be a problem for search engines because of the seemingly duplicated content. I would use the robots.txt file or noindex meta tag (the meta tag is the preferred option) to block search engines from accessing and indexing tag-based pages.
When Moz's spider sees this markup, it should note that the issue has been addressed and the detections of "duplicated content" should disappear. Good luck!
Hello! Thanks for the question. The simple answer is that you should have a different web property (root domain, subdomain, or subdirectory) for each of your target audiences. So, if your main website (home office, perhaps), is in the UK, then the main site should remain .co.uk (or wherever). Then, use a different property for each targeted country. There are three main methods:
**1. Separate root domains.**This would be creating and using example.co.uk and (for the Philippines) example.ph.
2. Separate subdirectory/subfolder. Put the Phillippines at example.co.uk/ph/
3. Separate subdomains. Put the Phillippines at ph.example.com
SEOs and digital marketers will argue forever over which one is best. I'll point out some general differences and points since I don't know your specific situation.
Regardless of what option you choose, you can configure the geographical targeting of each rootdomain, subdomain, or subdirectory in Google Webmaster Tools.
There are additional things you can do regarding language targeting (if you so choose -- sometimes more than one language is spoken in a given country). For more information on all of this, I would review this page of introductory guidelines and the related links. Some more detail from Google. A Webmaster Support question.
For an "international SEO checklist," I'd suggest this post by Moz Associate Aleyda Solís. Good luck!
I still want to use Feedburner, but I'm just trying to figure out how to make it self-update again when a new post is published. 
Just discovered a problem with my company site's RSS feed. I'm a bit embarrassed to ask, but I thought someone in the community might have encountered this -- and I cannot figure it out for the life of me!
We had redirected our Wordpress feed to Feedburner. We publish at least once per week, but no posts after March 18 are in the feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheClineGroup The standard (Wordpress) RSS feed page does not load: http://theclinegroup.com/feed/
Of course, I deactivated all plug-ins to see if one of them was the issue, but the problem(s) still existed.
Thanks so much for any assistance!
When you see a sudden, large drop in traffic, it typically means one of two things:
1. You messed up your website somehow (maybe your home page is taking forever to load or it is returning a 404 for some reason)
2. Google hit you with a penalty
Based on the information here and here, it seems that there was an algorithm update around June 28. There isn't much more specific information.
If you haven't received any notifications of manual penalties, then you probably have an algorithmic one. So, I'd keep checking your website and backlinks for thin or duplicated content, over-optimized anchor text, links from dubious places, keyword spamming, or any other similar things. Good luck!
My marketing strategy has not changed, for several reasons.
1. "Content" is nothing new. "Content" has always been the "stuff" that you put in the hands of potential customers. Yesterday, it was product catalogues, sales brochures, and more. Today, it's blog posts, videos, and more. Both types of content target people at different points in the sales cycle. It's just that one of the bonuses today, among many, is that this "content" can also get found in search results.
Besides, here's how I personally describe communications theory (in the context of marketing or anything else):
Sender --> Message --> Content --> Channel --> Receiver
Basically, the content is what contains a message that is delivered via a channel to a receiver. So, yes, you should still produce content.
2. These essays here and here are great arguments for still keeping and using Google+ authorship.
3. When I was at SMX West, I heard a Google executive imply that Google was looking into some type of "Author Rank" in the future. I can't find a link, but you can Google it. Just because one's picture won't be in the search results anymore does not mean the markup will not help your content in the SERPs.
I'm afraid that there isn't a perfect solution, but there are various options to consider.
1.) The only way to "combine the SEO juice of both pages" is to 301 redirect one of the pages to the other (and add the content from the old page to the remaining one). However, this means that the second page will no longer exist for your website visitors (coming from organic search or not).
2.) You can use a rel=canonical tag pointing from the secondary page to the preferred one to encourage Google to list only the preferred one the pages in search results. In addition, you could use the robots.txt file or noindex meta tag (the meta tag is the preferred option) to block search engines from indexing the page and having it appear in search results. However, this will not "combine the SEO juice."
Assuming that it is crucial that the second page still exist on your website, I would probably not do anything. You appear twice in the first page of results -- great! Why mess with that? I would just focus on doing all the good SEO best practices and earning more links to those two pages to push them higher over time. (Of course, if I knew your exact situation, I would probably have additional suggestions.)
Search Engine Roundtable has an article on the topic here that cites a Google+ discussion with Google's John Muller here.
Some potential issues that are discussed:
I'd also look at past Q&As here and here. I hope this helps -- good luck!
I built blog networks of expired domains and ranked for specific keywords... Unfortunately we failed pretty hard so far.
It's probably because blog networks are quickly found by Google and penalized. See here. Today, after Penguin and more, the goal is not to build links but to earn links.
You're falling into the old trap of thinking that "SEO" is a "bag of tricks" to get you to #1 for a set of keywords. Those tricks worked years ago, but thankfully, they no longer do. "SEO" is not something you do; "SEO" is what happens as the result of good web development and good marketing. "SEO" is a collection of best practices that help you to build an online brand that deserves to rank highly.
Take the search phrase "best London restaurants." Google does not want to list results based on keywords, content, or links. Google wants to list results based what the people living in London actually think are the best restaurants.
Today, the key to "SEO" success is to build an online brand through the following process:
1. Build a great website on a technical SEO level (fast-loading, optimized for mobile, etc.) with a wonderful user experience (UX).
2. Publish original, authoritative content on the topics that would interest your audience.
3. Use public relations and social media to promote both your website as a whole and the content on the website
4. Repeat steps two and three indefinitely, and traffic, links, rankings, and more will grow naturally over time.
It's not easy, and it takes time. But nothing good ever comes quickly.
What I guess I am saying: To be successful today, think less like an "SEO" and more like a "marketer." What makes you special and differentiates you from other similar websites? What is your brand? How will you position the website? What's your messaging? Those questions are more important to answer today than those about keywords and links.
Good luck!
That's a very subjective question, so I'll just list some references that you may want to review: Google's SEO guide (see pages 8-9 for URLs), Ann Smarty's post at SEJ, Moz's guide to URL best practices, and an old Moz post by Rand Fishkin on good URLs. I hope this helps!
Dr. Pete and others answered a similar question here. I agree with their sentiments: no-index any pages that may even come close to seeming "thin" or duplicates of other similar pages. Following Panda, you just don't want to risk it.
First, if you're Italian and have international SEO questions, there's no one better to ask than Gianluca Fiorelli.
But here are some helpful links. First, review this page of introductory guidelines and the related links. Some more detail from Google. A Webmaster Support question. For a checklist type of guide, I'd suggest this post by Moz Associate Aleyda Solís.
Basically, you want to 1.) put the English-language version on either a subdomain or a subdirectory; 2.) insert the appropriate language markup on both the Italian and English versions of pages; and 3.) if applicable, change any target settings for each domain/directory in Google Webmaster Tools.
Good luck!
First, I'd address the "human" part of the question: WHY are the bounce rates for those two sets of pages high? Are you targeting the wrong audience via organic and/or paid search? Are the calls-to-action unattractive? Is the design not user-friendly? Does the form have too many fields? Is the text poorly written? There are countless variables to explore and then test via conversion optimization.
The key to online-marketing success is to think about the human visitors first and Google second because Google is trying to become an algorithm that thinks like a human.
Second, Google officially states that bounce rates do not affect rankings and that Google Analytics data is not used. This makes sense because sometimes a high bounce rate is good. Google wants to provide people with the answers they need as soon as possible. If they search Google, come to your website, find the answer, and go elsewhere within a few seconds, then Google would think it was a job well done.
Third, there could be a lot of problems. Your domain, for example, contains keywords and has two hyphens -- and that looks very sketchy to visitors and probably search engines as well. That's a common characteristic of spam sites. I haven't looked at your site, so I don't know. A lot depends on what your "SEO firm" did and has been doing. Too many firms don't really know what they're doing and can do harmful rather than helpful work. Maybe some bad links were built recently. Maybe a lot of keyword stuffing was done lately. Check your Google Webmaster Tools to see if you've got any penalty messages from Google.
Also, this is a busy time of year for properties and rentals (the summer) so maybe your competitors are going big on PPC ads so that there are fewer organic clicks in general.
One final note: I'd never no-index large portions of a website. I'd think that would be a big red flag to Google that the site is trying to hide something.
Hope that helps!
I would say it depends on whether an entity is detected.
Imagine there is a company named "Real SEO." Google crawls a website that mentions them. Google sees the word "real" and then the word "seo." Normally, Google would see that "real" is an adjective that is modifying the noun "seo." So normally, this would be viewed as two separate, distinct words.
However, in this example, "real seo" is a brand and an "entity." So, even though the two words are first viewed separately, Google has become smart enough to figure out that when those two separate words are found in that order, then they are together referring to a single "thing."
For more on entities in search, I'd read the Moz posts here, here, here, and here.
In general, I would say no -- with a few caveats.
The general rule is that "what is good for the user is good for Google." In other words, "good SEO" is anything that makes your website more helpful to the audience that you want to attract. So, if your list of outbound links and resources are truly helpful for visitors and not some type of advertising or marketing ploy, then you should be fine.
One of my personal websites is a large affiliate website for a certain TV show. All of the pages are quality and helpful for fans of the show. (And it's got a huge social following, too.) The only page (for the most part) with affiliate links is my "merchandise store." And I've got probably close to 100 links to Amazon on that page.
At first, I blocked Google from indexing it because I thought a page full of Amazon links would hurt the site as a whole. Later, I did an experiment: I opened the page for indexing, and it ranks 3-4 for its main keyword target. Even though that page is selling something directly, it is still very helpful for my niche audience -- as is the website as a whole.
Now, that being said, there are other opinions. I'll post some links to Moz and elsewhere for your reference:
Some thoughts from Matt Cutts (but back in 2009 -- might be outdated)
There are some who state that having more than X number of backlinks on a page will drain the page's "PageRank." But personally, I wouldn't worry about that. I'd gladly lose some "PageRank" (if it even exists anymore) in order to have a comprehensive resource for my audience.
A double hyphen may too subtle of an element in a URL for Google to "pick up." I would try changing the unique identifier to a special word or a short series of numbers. Then, I would think that your site: inurl: process would work.
For the background, I'd take a look at Google's page here. "While the anchor, or hash, portion of the URL is sent to Google Analytics, the value is processed out and will not show up in the page value within the final reports. To preserve the anchor, you must override the default page value." You may need a Javascript expert to parcel it out.
Stat Story seems to have an easier workaround here. I cannot vouch for the information because I have not done this myself, but I just thought it might point you in the right direction. Good luck!
Here's what I mean. When you are deciding whether to do something, if your first question is, "How will this affect PageRank?" then you are asking the wrong questions.
For example: If you want to know whether to try to get a link from a website, don't worry so much about its PageRank. Ask yourself whether this is a link you would want even if Google did not exist, whether it is topically relevant to your website, whether you will get quality referral traffic, whether you will be "earning" or "building" the link, and a lot more.
All of those things matter more than a number that is increasing arbitrary and rarely updated by Google anymore. The point: Google is thinking more like a human and less like a machine. Digital marketers need to catch up (if they weren't there already).