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Google have not used they keyword meta tag since about 2009 IIRC

See here for more details: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html

How that helps,

K

Hi Vjay,

TBH it's probably your back link catalog... It's mainly built from blog comment spam.

If Wendy has a keyword heavy domain why not just build the links to the home page?! I would avoid repeating the keyword again in the URL if the domain already includes them...

I could understand this strategy if the domain was branded and did not include the target keywords, but that's not the case here.

Keith

It depends, if it's a .com you are going to be waiting a month at least probably 2, same for a .co.uk

You can use godaddy to back register domains then as soon as the domain is available it will register it for you, I think it costs around $10 per domain.

I would just add:

rel="canonical" href="http://www.mycompany.com/blah.html" />

No need to add 301's.

This might be useful it's Magento specific: http://www.magentocommerce.com/wiki/adding_canonical_url_to_cms_pages

Hi Todd,

A site can still rank for the keywords you are optimising for with on-page alone - if the area is niche enough (or the other pages have poor on-page SEO).

If you mean that you are appearing on page one and you are not getting people link back to you organically... That's just life

If you mean you have built links and they are not showing up using Open Site Explorer then either Roger has not crawled the site with your links on or the index has not updated (IIRC OSE's site index gets updated once a month).

I would simplify your robots.txt to read something like:

**User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/

Sitemap: http://www.your-domain.com/sitemap.xml**

Hey Ahmad,

OSE (open site explorer) only shows links from the more reputable sites and does not show links from low quality sources another reason could simply be that Roger (the SEOMoz crawler bot) has not yet crawled sites with your links on.

You should attempt to build an organic (looking) link profile... If all your links are anchor text for "engraved wedding glasses" it looks unnatural and spammy.

There is no golden number of links that triggers googles algo, but don't build stupid amounts in one go, a few per day should be fine I'd say no more than 20 and ideally gradually increase more per day as your site authority grows.

If you are asking why your ranking has not increased... My answer would be due to the quality of your inbound links, most are from low quality forums, directories or low authority sites.

The quality of the inbound link matters greatly.

307 Moved Temporarily (HTTP 1.1 Only)

A 307 Redirect is the HTTP 1.1 successor of the 302 redirect. While the major crawlers will treat it like a 302 in some cases, it is best to use a 301 for almost all cases. The exception to this is when content is really moved only temporarily (such as during maintenance) AND the server has already been identified by the search engines as 1.1 compatible. Since determining if the search engines have identified this essentially impossible, it is best to use a 302 redirect.

Source: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection

Hi Diane,

You need to add your blog's RSS feed to FeedBurner, when you create your feed in FeedBurner it should ask you for this information.

FYI, Feedburner is system that enables users to sign up to your blog and be notified when new posts are made, it is not a platform for blogging.

Here is a blog post I wrote a while back explaining how to use FeedBurner with Wordpress, but it's applicable to any website with an RSS / Atom feed http://techspotting.org/how-to-use-feedburner-with-wordpress/

It's a nice step by step post with screen shots

OSE only shows links from the more reputable sites and does not show links from low quality sources.

Majestic index shows more links and has a larger index - this could be better for you, personally I would rather see all link data possible for a domain.

Google Webmaster Tools is always going to show more links, Google for obvious reasons have a lot more power to crawl the Internet and store large link databases (GWMT is typically more complete IME).

That is why there is such a difference in back link figures between these services.

I use all these services + bing webmaster tools link checker (it allows you to check back link profiles of other domains, not just the ones you own like GWMT).

Hope that helps,

Keith

Yes that's normal Google have more power and can crawl more of the web than roger, plus roger chooses to not show low quality stuff (I am pretty sure this is still the case!?). - FYI roger is the bot that crawls the web for OSE.

And yes it is possible for people to point bad links at you, your site is on the internet anyone can link to you.

The best thing you can do is build a strong back link profile, then a few low quality links won't hurt - tbh a few links should be ok any way most people have some spammy stuff in their back link profile...

It looks like this plugin will add the rel="canonical" tag for you automatically: http://yoast.com/tools/magento/canonical/

View the source code after you have installed it to confirm it's working as expected.

Personally I would do the following:

• Set rel="canonical" as Brent says below
• 301 redirect the preferred URL, so if you are using www.example.com redirect example.com, that way if anyone points links at example.com "most" of the juice will pass over (this will probably fix the issue you have posted about)
• Set the referred URL in Google web master tools

If you are using  CMS like Wordpress rel="canonical" will probably already be taken care of for your website, you can check this by viewing the source or using SEO Moz's on-page keyword optimization tool.

The links are still going to exist, they are just not going to pass page rank once they have been no followed.

I personally don't see this making much difference, it might help you hang on to more page rank but the client won't see a benefit IMO.

From Google's prospective it might look a bit spammy having a large number of links from a single domain all at once, but then this start some times works... It is hard to say.

I guess for the client complaining about too many inlinks you could suggest they list in a category that is called something like "Nationwide UK services" then companies that have 1 office but want to provide a service to the whole of the country could list there.

I know this does not answers your question directly, but I don't think there is a definite answer to "will a lot of links from my site to my clients damage there rank" as in some cases it will and in some cases it wont. IMO the best practice would be to try and reduce the amount of multiple links to their site if possible using the suggestions above.

If you are happy with Wordpress why change? I would not load your site up with plugins though, your blog / site will end up slow and insecure.

If you are having a bespoke site built and require a CMS I'v heard good things about MODx from a few dev's

If the pages you are redirecting have links pointing at them and you 301 them to your home page, chances are your home page will rank higher and DA will increase.

Whatever plan you decide on, my advice would be to do it a few pages at a time and see what happens.

I always use rel="canonical"

Perhaps a popular news site based an article around these keywords which led to people google searching the unpopular phrase and got you some traffic...

Personally, I would always try and host the server in the country you are trying to target for a number of reasons - mainly performance (and chances are it's going to be cheaper for me, I live in the UK).

However the video "SEO Executive" posted above is from 2009, since then Google have released the following: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html stating that the server location is irrelevant if you own the ccTLD e.g .fr

Martijn you might also want to check out the following whiteboard Friday video about international SEO: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday