Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi,

If I use a template that maybe 50 other websites use but customise it my way will I still rank or will it hurt my ranking because other websites have the same template (even though they are in a different industry).

Thanks,

Thank your your replies but isn't a exact match domain more powerful than a domain with links and history ?

Hello everyone,

I have between reading a lot, watching a lot of video from Rand also been trying many things in  terms of SEO over the last 10 years. I am starting to come to the conclusion that the number one solution to rank is to satisfy the user and give the user an amazing experience.But what does amazing user experience and unique value really mean ? I can’t seem to get a straight answer or example.

I am in the travel industry and I sell bicycle tours. I have tried to write amazing content but I guess I am like 99 % of us on the planet I don’t know how to write … It never changed my ranking whatever I wrote.

I tried to talk to the visitors like google mentioned and not about the features of my product, get a unique selling proposition etc… but so far nothing worked… ( I am currently doing one test and waiting to see if anything changes but so far the content has been indexed quickly with the webmaster tools and no changes after 2 weeks ? Is there a a longer delay once indexed, I don’t know maybe someone can shed some light on that ? I don’t believe so but maybe I am wrong.

Getting back to user experience. From what I understand it needs to answer the questions people have in a unique way. Let’s take the bicycle tours for example. I you type bike tours all my competitors already do what I want to do, which means they present either all their tours on the page or have you select a tour by level, by country, by region, by type, by price, by date etc…

How I can beat them and do better than them, that is what I don’t understand ? I feel like there only a limited number of ways to present a product ?

I conclusion, how can I bring more value to my user, if I have them search a bike tour by level or country, I have the same thing as my competitors  I don’t bring more value do I ? or does bringing value means designing it in a different way ?  If so unless you have a team of graphic designers how can you do that (is the color of a button, the shape of it, the images you have ,the size of your font going to make google tick ? or is it adding information ( to me this 2 nd option not a solution because that means to rank in the future you will need to add more info that your competitors ) ?

If anyone could give me some advice or examples on how they do it that would be great because as off today, the user experience thing and unique value is not clear.

Hello Everyone

I am not new to SEO but new to the forum  !

I am in the travel business selling high end bicycle trips to the US market. I am about to expand my business and sell cheaper bicycle trips to the European market.

1. My company has a got a name in the industry as well as some amazing reviews on google + and other forums. My 1 st question, would you use a totally different domain name see that is a different market and different prices or would you use the same domain name ? If you were to use the same domain would you do fr.mydomain.com or www.mydomain.com/fr.

2. In terms of web domain, is exact match domain still powerful ? My current domain name is not an exact match domain and surfing the web, I feel like it still gives you a major advantage in 2016 ?

3. If I choose an exact match domain, I noticed I can get  www.mydomain.travel or www.mydomain.bike or get a domain for the country I am targeting www.mydomain.co.uk. Do you have advice on which domain is easier to rank ? or doesn't it change anything ?

Is removing the / image /  better in terms of SEO bercause of the lat tags etc... or just people to find my website via the images ?

Hello,

I use joomla for my website and automatically all those files are blocked is that good or bad, so I remove anything and if so why ?

User-agent: *
Disallow: /administrator/
Disallow: /cache/
Disallow: /components/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /installation/
Disallow: /language/
Disallow: /libraries/
Disallow: /media/
Disallow: /modules/
Disallow: /plugins/
Disallow: /templates/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /xmlrpc/

I also added to my robots.txt files my email address ( is that useful, I am afraid google passes PR to the email address  )
and a javascript: void (0) because I have tabs on my webpage  ( is that useful )
as well as a .pdf ( is it also useful )

any comments ? does anything need to be changed or is it ok ?

Thank you,

When I create internal links on my website should I use the keyword or at least a related keyword ( synonym ) every time...

I am asking because on my website it is hard to create links from one sub section to another subsection linking with a anchor text that relates to the other category.

For example in the travel industry it is hard to have a page that talks about Florida and on the page find a way to link the keywords, California , NY and Missouri ( other than listing those next to each other ... ) as they do not belong to my content about Florida but are all different states listed in my " states category "

If I link the words next to each other in the page Florida, such as "you should also check California, NY, Missouri etc... " does it carry any value doing that or does it need to be surrounded by text that is related  ?

Or is it better to list it in a menu on the right or left side on my page ? ( which one caries more value )

Or if I have the word beach in my Florida page and link it to California is it better even though the user doesn't know what he or she is going to find by clicking on beach ?

Thank you,

I have a newsletter module on my website on many of my website and was wondering if google boot see this module a a link or no ?

I noticed this module has its own website that google has when I do site : mywebsite.com

Thank you,

I just used the PR formula for google and noticed that I when I cross link between my categories which are on the same level the juice / PR  of my homepage diminishes...

Is there s way to boast the sub pages and the the homepage at the same time or has google put together some algorithm that does this that I do not know about ?

Hello, Just wondering how google treats the TOp and bottom menu that you see on each page of a website ?

Does it count it on all the pages in terms of link juice, or is it just there for user experience and only what it counts are the links in the content of a page or on the side ?

Thank you,

Davinina,

Thank you for your reply. One more thing, I am trying to understand what you mean when you say " have these links as part of the navigation, or a sub-navigation "  and " a navigation that includes all of the links "

I am not sure I understand the difference, could you give me an example because to me this is exactly the same...

Thank you,

On a website when I link across in the same category should all the categories all pear on each page.

Let's say I have 6 categories and 6 pages should I have the 6 links on all the pages ( such as A, B, C, D, E, on page 1 ( let's imagine this page is page F ), then on page A have link B, C D, E, F and so on for the 6 pages ( meaning all the links appear on all the pages across the category )

or should i just have let's say 3 links on page 1 ( link A, B, C ) , then link ( D, E, F ) on page 2, then A, E, F on page 3, link B, C F on page 4 and so on... ( which means that i vary the links that appear and that it is naturally ( at least I think ) going to boost the link that appears the most of the 6 pages ?

I hope this is not too confusing,

Thank you,

How can I figure out which pages are on the same level on my site ?

I created an automatic sitemap with a software online but it doesn't tell me abc page is on the 1 st level,  xyz page is on the second level etc... and I have a hard time figuring out if my main menu is on the same level as my drop down menu as it is visible on the same page.

Is there anyway to figure what which pages are on the same level ?

Is it useful for SEO to cross link between TOP level categories, let's say I have a Home page and then 2 sub categories, one about green widgets one about red widgets
Should i create a link from the green widget to the red widget or should I leave those are separate silos ?

I know that within a silo i need to cross link ( from green widget 1 to green widget 2 etc... )  but how about about from the main category to the other main category ?

Is it necessary to do internal links between the same categories of a website ( Let's say Ihave a category about shoes and in the category I have a page about boots and one about sandals ( should the page boots be accessible from the page sandals and the other way round or is the back button going back to the section shoes enough ) ?

If internal links between the same category ( sandals to boots ) are needed/recommended is it also a good practice to do site wide links between categories ( shoes and and bags for example )

Because by reading google recommendations "Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link" I am not sure if they are talking about breadcrumbs or text links i am kind of lost ...

Thank you,

Hello,

I was reading this article about website architecture http://www.seomoz.org/blog/site-architecture-for-seo and I have a question about site wide link...

I don't think site wide link are good if you want your homepage to have the most " juice " can someone confirm that to me.

What I mean by site wide link is let's say I have  a page about golf in califorina and I create a link to another page of my website which is about  golf in florida  that a good practicee to do that or not ?

I just used this calculator http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank_calculator.php and and if I do site wide links the juice doesn't go to my most important page ( the homepage ) which is the one I currently want to have the most juice.

However, I noticed that website like amazon do site wide link let's say you are looking at a book and they have lots of links for other books or categories and they still rank very well for the word "textbooks" so I am kind of lost and don't understand why they still rank even though to me their juice goes away by doing site wide links to other books or categories ( even though it is related )

Can someone tell me more about site wide links are they good , bad etc... and is this calculator I use right or wrong ?

Thank you

Google in it guideline recommends to create a sitemap.

Do they means a /sitemap.xml or does it need to be sitemap directly on the website ?

Does it make any difference ?

Thank you,

Google recommends to have static links it in guidelines

Are breadcrumbs and static text link the same ? or in addition to breadcrumbs do I need static links on my page going from page A to B etc...

The issue I have with static links this way is that if I look at the PR paper that would decrease the juice of my homepage ( which is the page I want to give the most juice to )

Thx,

I agree and i don't agree the reason being and is that many months ago I did a internal linking structure change ( without changing anything else ) on my site and my ranking skyrocketed  !!

I then reverted that changed to make the structure even better and since then I have never recovered that ranking , I even reverted to my old ranking...

It is the reason why I believe the issue doesn't come from onepage factors, I just think it is just a matter of when google is going to decide to get the data live ... ( and I guess i was luck enough to do my change last time when they pushed that data live .. )

and according to me they are very slow ... and try to make everything very confusing ... but I think the key to ranking once you have figured " everything out " is to wait and wait and wait...

I have checked everything and tried all the on page factors and I can guarantee they are all good.

The only thing that wrong was a re-direct from my subpages to my homepage ( I just changed that a week ago and I am waiting to see if it will change anything in terms of ranking). Do you think it will ?

So far I saw a change for my homepage on a highly competitive keyword ( in 6 days I went from page 9 to page 6 ) but not my subpages and I am wondering if it will go any further in the next few weeks of if i will be stuck there until google does its " FULL UPDATE ".