Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hey Jeroen,

If you are going down the ccTLD route I would host each sites it's respected country, it's possible Google will apply some weight to the geo location of the IP address (you should also set the location in WMT).

But more importantly hosting in the same country is going to improve site load times which will help out (a tiny bit atm) with google and improve the user experience.

Hosting in another country is not going to get you "penalised" by Google but it's not going to send a signal (from the geo location of the IP address) that you are located in Germany - this may or may not affect your rankings.

I recommend you watch this video: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday

Hope that helps...

Keith

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

The short answer is yes, google have reduced the weight of this (apparently) if i was picking a brand I would probably try to include a partial match for one of the head terms without it looking spammy if possible... (like SEOMoz.org).

Spammy keyword match domains (no1-cheap-car-insurance.com) don't look as pro a branded domain IMO.

Obviously this is only one ranking factor out of many...

Hope that helps,

Keith

If the bot is in another country and you have blocked the range it's pretty obvious... What kind of "backup" are you looking for?

If you are asking me if I have a geographical list of bots for each search engine then no, I don't. But this might be of some use to you http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/TbpNyFiJvjs

Good luck with the whole site design / copyright issue, any chance you could PM me a link I would like to see what they have done... (just curious).

If you have paid then contact customer care http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/ysm/ll/contact/contact-01.html?last_url=http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/ysm/ll/basics/basics-08.html

Hi Claudio,

See here: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=yahoo+listing+pending&l=1

For a basic listing please allow up to 20 days...

Hope that helps...

Keith

Well if those external links coming in passed link juice and they no long link due to a 404... Then you will lose link juice... So this could potentially affect rankings.

I would either 301 the broken links to the new most relevant page or better still contract the external sites web host and ask them to change the link to the new address (depending on the amount of links).

By blocking large ranges of IP address you could end up restricting access to legitimate users, bots etc.

For a start how do you even know what site is harvesting your data is in the said country, sure they might be hosting there but the boxes that are ripping your content might be in the US they could then have some web heads in some other random countries serving up the content.

People copying / stealing / cloning your content is pretty common it happens to a lot of my sites - it's just the way it is your not going to be able to stop it you might as well just focus on making your site more authoritative.

No worries Pip, glad you found your answer - can you mark this question as answered?

Thanks

Keith

This is because the .htaccess file you lost contained rewrite rules for Apache.

Solution:

Create another site using "Fresh Store Builder" and copy the .htaccess it generates to your existing site.

Failing that contact their support and ask them for the .htaccess file.

Moving forward, always take a backup of your websites to prevent this happening again.

Keith

I use Screaming frog for this http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/ crawl your site > generate a site map from the menu, call it sitemap.xml and upload it to the root of your website. Log into Webmaster Tools and submit the new sitemap. Job done, hope this helps. Keith

IME crap links still rank if everyone else in that niche has a tone of bad links as well (remember google need relevant search results for its users), but chances are little or no value will be flowing from thiose links. This is just my opinion... I have no evidence to back it up. Build some good links and see what happens....

Well put the rest of the content in a different directory then and disallow that, thats the only other solution I can think of...

Also this might be useful: http://www.distilled.net/training/video-marketing-guide/

I would not use YoutTube personally, check out what google have to say here https://developers.google.com/webmasters/videosearch/ 

And this is also a decent guide on how to get video into search(also explains about securing your video content): http://www.distilled.net/blog/video/getting-video-results-in-google/ 

Hope that helps,

Keith

Name the page you want indexing something and you can use the following:

Disallow: /en/

Allow: /en/index.html

Always test robots.txt in google webmaster tools.

Hope that helps,

Keith

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

I would go with a custom design if you can afford it, maybe a template will cover you for now...

http://bit.ly/QbjrQ3

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...