Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Personally long term I would work on changing the URL's so they are human readable but for now to "fix" the issue I would advise you use rel=canonical here is a guide... http://www.seomoz.org/blog/complete-guide-to-rel-canonical-how-to-and-why-not

Looks like a 403 permissions problem, that's a server side error... Make sure you have the correct permissions set on the blog folder in IIS Personally I always host on Linux...

Use this:

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

Sitemap: http://nile-cruises-4u.co.uk/sitemap.xml**

Any FYI, you have the following error on your blog:

Warning: is_readable() [function.is-readable]: open_basedir restriction in effect. File(D:\home\nile-cruises-4u.co.uk\wwwroot\blog/wp-content/plugins/D:\home\nile-cruises-4u.co.uk\wwwroot\blog\wp-content\plugins\websitedefender-wordpress-security/languages/WSDWP_SECURITY-en_US.mo) is not within the allowed path(s): (D:\home\nile-cruises-4u.co.uk\wwwroot) in D:\home\nile-cruises-4u.co.uk\wwwroot\blog\wp-includes\l10n.php on line **339 **

Get your web guy to look at that, it appears at the top of every blog page for me...

Hope that helps,

Keith

Fair enough, I would use a combination of brand name and your naked URL.

Optionally chucking in the occasional anchor text link (vary this) is not going to hurt either and it will help your rankings... (providing your back link profile is currently clean).

Hope that helps...

Keith

I gave you an example of a basic robots.txt file that I use on one of my Wordpress sites above, I would suggest using that for now.

I would not bother messing around with crawl delay in robots.txt as Peter said above there are better ways to achieve this... Plus I doubt you need it any way.

Google caches the robots.txt info for about 24hrs normally in my experience... So it's possible the old cached version is still being used by Google.

Are you actually building links to rank for a phrase?

What is your goal from link building??

I have never had much success with these style tools (i live in the UK).

You can attempt to contact the web master of the site you are linked from and request that they remove your link...

How many are we talking about and what kind of site are they on?

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...

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**

Personally I find those forum automated birthday emails annoying, why would you care if a forum (or more specifically a php script) wished you happy birthday?

Happy Birthday any ways...

I would have them under one domain, pref something that is branded and not specific to any of your services...

Lets call it "www.totalservices.co.uk" (probably taken I know...)

I would then structure the main pages like this:

**www.totalservices.co.uk/driveways **

**www.totalservices.co.uk/driveway-cleaning **

**www.totalservices.co.uk/patios **

www.totalservices.co.uk/artificial-grass

(etc etc)

As the guys have already mentioned, any links you earn or build to your site will count towards your domain authority... Also link juice will flow through your site "helping" you rank.

By splitting the sites into 3 you are going to be increasing your work load by 3.

Plus by having a branded domain name you will likely get a higher click through rate from the google search results - keyword heavy domains look spammy and "typically" are trusted far less IME.

Hope that helps...

Keith

If you know you have claimed the google places pages and get listed is saying you haven't - what does it matter?

Get listed just shows you where your business is listed across the web?

Keith

The main problem is, spammy anchor from spammy sites...

It's ok to link to a page or a company using a descriptive anchor text an example would be "I have heard SEOmoz provide some awesome SEO Tools, I would recommend checking them out if you need some simplified SEO software."

You are going to run into problems if all your anchor text is saying "SEO Tools" and there is no diversity in your link profile... Organically, most people link with naked URL's or the name of your site unless they are linking to a specific resource or service you provide...

However if you just build on brand the whole time you are not going to rank for your desired keywords / phrases...

Ok this is in fact two issues, page title and URL length.

To fix the issue with the page title, there is probably a global setting within the Yoast plugin (I don't use it myself) and you have the following title above added in this section.

Failing that it will be in the Site Name section of the wordpress settings.

I would use page name | site name - in some cases I don't even bother with site name (on a blog for example), having just viewed your site it looks like you have fixed the page title issue?

Regarding the long URL's, if you wish to change these Wordpress should automatically 301 the old page to the new URL that you chose (but test this by changing and trying to visit the old URL above and confirm that it redirects).

Hope that helps...

Keith

The domain is keyword heavy think along the lines of "mountainbikes.com" and they are ranking ok for mountain bikes, however on inspection they have a LOT of poor quality back links and a lot of those links are anchor text phrases (and far too much of it!).

A lot of people recommend building on brand in situations like this, however how would I go about doing this for a site without a branded domain name?

In this case their is a company name but it's not the same as the domain name, would you simply build links using the company name "Uber Bikes" or use the domain www.mountainbikes.com.

If the aim is just to build a more varied back link profile then I guess using both would be good?

Thanks in advance!

We all know that exact match anchor text is sill a key factor in ranking well on the engines, but how do you build links for awkward phrases like.

**ppc london **

**architects new york **

**accountants new york **

The Bio Solution

I know one solution might be to include the anchor in your bio after the company name like:

_Luke Skywalker works for DeathStar Accounts New York and often blogs about fishing, playing golf and kissing his sister. _

Are Some Key Phrases Too Spammy

But say for example you want to link in the content, obviously you can phrase things differently and make it sound "ok" and probably "acceptable" but it still sounds a bit rough when it reads like this:

"We performed a review of all the accountants london and found them to have worse Excel skills than my grandma."

Obviously this would read better as:

"We performed a review of all the accountants in london and found them to have worse Excel skills than my grandma."

Possible Options:

1. Just deal with it, the blog owner will let it slide more than likely if the rest of the content is useful / quality.
2. Change the anchor slightly so its not exact match e.g "accountants in london" and optimise the page for "accountants london"
3. Choose another phrase that reads better and has fewer monthly searches

If anyone has any ideas, suggestions or feedback I would love to hear them.

FYI: Opensite explorer (mozbar) is reading the PA wrong for Twitter pages.

Unless my personal twitter page has a Domain Auth of 98

So don't pay too much attention to the PA score on Twitter pages plus it's no follow any way.

To answer the "not showing in site explorer" question, for a start OSE does not crawl every page on the web, it does a good job of trying but SEOmoz don't have the horse power of Google. The more links you have pointing at your Twitter page the more likely Roger will pick it up, but I really would not worry about it.

Also remember that the SEOmoz index only gets updated once a month, so if your page is new that might be why it's not showing yet...

Hope that helps

I have a new domain and I am beating pages with much higher page ranks / DA etc

Typically in the niche I am targeting if I use the Keyword Difficulty tool i get an average of about 50% - I think this tool mainly uses DA / PA to work out the difficulty %.

After I will do a Google search and look on the pages for mentions of the keyword's I am going to target with my pages / posts.

Often I find there are few mentions or 1 exact match mention in the content with the page title being something different / not exact match.

I will then build a page which is targeted specifically for the keyword and optimise for it, I don't over do the optimisation - if the other pages only have 2 mentions of the keyword in the content I would normally build a post with say 3 - 5 mentions. I have noticed when going over 5 keyword (aprox) pages tend to rank poorly or rank badly then crawl back up the SERP's slower - this could be due to the domain on the site being 1 month old.

I also only build quality content that is relevant to the search term, this should prevent the pages dropping from the SERP's (I hope!).

Obviously if your niche has highly optimised pages and a bunch of links pointing at each page then this method is not going to work.

Hope that helps.

It means when you created your campaign you created it as a root domain - e.g domain.com not www.domain.com

It is nothing to worry about.

Hope that helps.