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Try 50 Grove , the Video Production Directory at Video Hosting company Wistia.

Since Wistia put this together for the benefit of customers, the contacts ought to be pretty solid.

They are also listed according to budget (and sortable according to least or most expensive).

Hey Rob,

While I confess that cookies (or biscuits) ROCK my world, I think the reward might be a little the worse for wear by the time it finds me here on Kangaroo Island, but I think the explanation AND the solution is fairly simple. It can be fairly well explained by 3 facts:

1. As you mentioned, the links were previously in existence on the site ... when I checked the source on the page you supplied via Wayback Machine (I love that thing!!), I found that there were actually 8 different links on the page.
2. We know that the most recent update of Mozscape (underlying OSE results), while recently released will contained data which is from crawls anywhere between February & April as explained in this post from Rand about a week ago. So links removed recently may still be seen in OSE.
3. Google WMT is notorious for failing to update link information, 404 errors etc. I have had experience of one site which still showed warnings in WMT almost a year after they were fixed. It happens time and time again, site after site. So once again the data in WMT is quite likely from crawls that occurred when the links were there & the warnings are out of date.

The obvious Solution would be to lodge a Reconsideration Request with Google ASAP and see if you can't alert them to the fact that a lot of remediation work has been done.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Garry,

Sorry to be late to the party, but just caught up with this post and took a look at your site.

Since you talked specifically about bounce rate and conversions, there are a few related issues that jump out at me, so thought I would drop them into the conversation.

• First, the very first sentence of text on your homepage is likely to disengage visitors. (BOUNCE!)
  If you read it carefully, you will see that it is a very impersonal third person statement which reads like a rather detached review. The very next sentence works to engage the reader more, by speaking in the first person and evangelizing your work. Unfortunately I fear that most people will have glazed over before they reach the end of the first sentence. Also, the second sentence has some problems of its own with redundancies like "a wide range of different". I would suggest a rewrite of the intro paragraph. Keep in mind that short, succinct sentences are better for engaging your audience. Also much better for comprehension.

• The majority of the black on white text in your site is in a bold or heavy face font. This is very poor for reading comprehension. Bold or heavy type is great for emphasizing or highlighting, but when used without a break, interferes with the reader's ability to process and understand what they are reading. This is unlikely to help with conversions. I would use a cleaner font and use some bold and italic emphasis to introduce a little light and shade to the content.

• Lastly, your text contains quite a lot of typographical and structural errors. Whilst there seems to be a developing trend toward ignoring this as an SEO issue, I will once again climb on my "word nerd soapbox".
  For some businesses, errors in text may seem trivial, but when you are in a business that is built upon the delivery of information - errors could be the difference between winning a customer and having them bounce before even reading your message.

  I wrote something on this in the first part of another Q&A thread recently. Errors are a conversion issue   I think perhaps it might be of help.

Hope that is of some use.

Sha

Hi Salman,

If you haven't already seen it, there is a great Whiteboard Friday video from Rand about Pagerank and what you should and shouldn't use it for. In the video, Rand talks about the things that Ryan mentioned in his answer, the points you asked about and a few other things.

Here is the link: What is Google's Pagerank Good For?

Hope that helps,

Sha

Thanks Alan,

I will continue to use the server response setting when generating other sitemaps and recommend that our Techs ditch the home grown script that assigns the single date and time in future.

II must say also, it is great to have such clear and reliable advice - very glad to have you around!

Thanks again.

Hi,

Just a few things to start...

• Use your name ... IAC is not automatically known to the world and since your name includes what you do, I would lose the abbreviation in most instances and take advantage of the value inherent in your name.
• rename your page files using targeted keyword phrase for each page
• follow the advice Daniel posted

Hope that helps

Hi Jesse,

Without a little help from a googler in the forums there is only one sure way to determine whether you have a manual penalty or not - a reconsideration request.

BUT with the knowledge that you have of some issues and the absence of an obvious effect, I would not recommend the reconsideration route, as it is likely it may actually GET you a manual penalty which at this stage I am doubtful you have.

I would continue to do good work for your site and at the same time, put some effort into eliminating the most troublesome of the links you know about. Keep a close eye out for any effect (especially when news of the next penguin refresh appears).

also...good on you for taking a proactive approach to this and having the guts to make it an issue that gets dealt with.

Sha

Hi,

I would say that the biggest problem you have is the significant amount of what appears to be duplicate content on the site. Those articles which appear on hundreds of other sites will make it very difficult to achieve decent rankings. If you want to feature the information in them, then you need to write your own original version of the story. Don't just try to change some words to make it different...take a unique approach, find related articles and write something original that talks about the relationship between them...there are lots of options.

Develop good, engaging content. Tweet and Facebook post about the competition on the site, deadlines, prizes, cool entries etc, unknown facts about prototyping, invite questions and provide answers. Let your imagination run wild and build a following.

Hope that helps to get you started,

Sha

Hi again,

I would say that both approaches are valid, as long as you are very strategic about targeting your content.

My personal preference is to work first on building better content on-site (I am a member of the "why help someone else when you can help yourself" movement :), but if there is an opportunity to use the domain authority of another site to improve your own site, then that can obviously be of value too (especially if you are trying to build the strength of your own domain).

The key is to target the content you develop for each and NEVER use the same content for both.

When it comes to targeting, I follow two basic rules - articles on other sites should be aimed at an audience seeking "how to" assistance, while on-site content should be the type that will help to "engage" your audience with your company or brand.

For example:

An article on an external directory might be "How Early Should I Book My Wedding Limo", while a new page of on-site content might be "Why You Can Trust Us To Drive Your Daughter To Her Prom"

Hope that helps,

Sha

Whenever Matt Cutts discusses this subject in the Webmaster Tools videos and elsewhere, there is always a caveat along the lines of "while google mostly take notice of noindex and robots.txt, this may not always be acted upon". The primary reason given for this seems to be if content is indexed via a link from another site, or exists in google cache. In these cases it seems logical that it may continue to appear in the index.

Your question reminded me of Dr Pete's Catastrophic Canonicalization Experiment - it seems his method proved quite effective

Hi Robert,

Search engines seem unwilling to define a specific time period and of course that is reasonable as there are a number of factors that can affect the process.

Am I correct in assuming from your words "used a 301 for the old to the new" that you have used a blanket 301? (to the homepage for example)

If this is the case, I believe it is likely to take longer for search engines to recognize the change as a "move".

If you redirect specific pages on the old domain to relevant or matching pages on the new domain, search engines are more able to recognize that the pages have moved and over time transfer link juice and update indexes. Using a blanket 301 leaves a question mark for the search engine as to whether the old domain may simply be used for its SEO value to feed traffic to a page which may not be relevant to the end user.

Matt Cutts explains his reasoning for using specific page-to-page 301's to move a domain in this video (with a reminder that 301's happen at page level, not domain level).

I'm quite passionate about page-to-page 301's, which drives my Tech people a little nuts, BUT I just bite the bullet and do them myself nowadays. Although it can be a huge amount of work to do this correctly, my goal is to do it in the best way possible and to have some small measure of control over external factors wherever possible.

In the end, I am the person who will have to answer the client's questions about what is happening with the site because right or wrong, "SEO" seems to translate to "responsible for everything" :).  I like to be able to tell my clients that we took the trouble to go the long way around something because it was better for them (and less likely to damage conversions on the new site).

Also - signalling the domain move in Webmaster Tools should help the process along, but I have seen several Googlers, including Matt Cutts qualify this as a "hint', so we shouldn't assume that it solves the problem. (BTW "Webmaster Tools" refers to both Google and Bing)

While this is not a definitive answer, hope it helps

Sha

Hi Matthew,

As Mark suggested, create a spreadsheet in Google Drive and list all of the domains/URLs in the spreadsheet.

Add a single URL in the first field of the Spam Report form (the required field), then in the third field, provide a link to the spreadsheet (300 character max)

Something like: "I believe the sites listed in the googledoc at URL are using manipulative linking practices to influence search engine rankings"

Do be confident though, as Mark warned, that your client's site is able to withstand any scrutiny that might come with a review of sites in the niche.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Garry,

Everybody else pretty much covered the other bits.

As to where I'm coming from - my background is in journalism and advertising. As such, I believe I have a fairly good understanding of how readers interact with text and what affects them both positively and negatively.

Some examples of errors:

"Our Qualified internet marketing experts are available to improve your company's fortune online using many different online based marketing techniques. We have proven results from years of work in Internet marketing and have a wide range of clients in many different industries."

"Our service is geared towards providing small to medium sized UK businesses an affordable solution to SEO."

"Contact us today to gain an insight as to how we would manage your company's SEO campaign."

"Plus more importantly help deliver your company a good return on investment."

There are quite a lot more and a lot of poorly constructed sentences that stop the flow of your message ...every roadblock like this that you put in front of the reader will reduce comprehension. If they don't understand the message they are unlikely to convert.

Hope that helps.

Sha

Glad to help

Just another thought on using video on-site...if it were possible to grab very short video reviews from actual clients while using your services, that could be gold in terms of converting visitors to your site.

Not entirely sure about the detail of how to make it happen, but I'm imagining a happy, smiling bride and groom shooting a 30 second video snippet while in the back of the limo being driven to the reception..."the limo is gorgeous, our day has been wonderful and Joe our driver even brought barley sugar candy to help settle my butterflies on the way to the church!"  these are the type of videos that will engage your audience and tell the story of your business.

Best of luck with it,

Sha

Hi Dan,

There are a couple of simple ways you can deal with this problem. Basically all you need is the ability to edit a .htaccess file. So simple even I can do it!

Our head of programming wrote a blog post to explain both methods for you. Take a look here Don't Steal My Images!

Hope that helps,

Sha

Ouch! Don't do that ... it hurts! (the kicking I mean)

Just 3 things that ever present significant issues that I am aware of

1. Most obvious is the time required to do it properly, which will depend how large the site is. If the page structure has changed significantly then you may need to point some redirects to a category page or something else relevant. I set up a simple excel file for the site with Old URL, Content, Category, Redirect URL, Redirect date and Check date. Once I've added the old URL and content info I then assign it to a category and Redirect URL, then use the list to set up the redirects. I generally spin through and do a manual check once the 301's are in place and use the check date column if there are a lot of pages and I need to come back and finish checking later.

2. I would also add a 404 catch-all just in case - all 404's go to home page or another appropriate page to make sure no old links are lost.

3. When choosing your redirect URL, think about the user and relevance - For example, if I click a link to buy an item which no longer exists, there is probably more chance I will look at another product if you send me to a store page full of products than send me to home.

Have fun!

Sha

Wow! Awesome work from Ryan on this one

Your duplicate content problem is caused by the fact that the blog software generates a duplicate URL for each tag, archive, rss feed etc that is related to an individual post. This is a standard problem with common blogging software such as Wordpress and normally (if you were running a standard Wordpress Blog), the fix would be to install an SEO plugin which allows you to either turn off these things, or add code which will tell the search engine that they relate to the original post.

In this case though, your site is using the blog offered through your IDX/MLS account. In order to address the duplicate issues you will need to contact your IDX/MLS provider and ask them to deal with the problem. We have clients who use the IDX, but we have installed standard wordpress blogs for those as there are no self management options with the blog supplied by that provider.

The following pages are also returning 404 not found errors on your site:

http://www.tricitiesrealestateagent.com/agents/brandon-patton/

http://www.tricitiesrealestateagent.com/buying.php

http://www.tricitiesrealestateagent.com/Homes-for-Sale-in-Richland-Washington.php

http://www.tricitiesrealestateagent.com/Richland-Real-Estate.php

http://www.tricitiesrealestateagent.com/selling.php

http://www.tricitiesrealestateagent.com/thumbs/280x186/www.tricitiesrealestateagent.com%252Fimages%252Ffeatured%252F1298323189.jpg (this is an image URL)

If you have deleted them by accident, then you will need to go back to your last backup and restore them, otherwise you will need to create 301 redirects to send any traffic to relevant pages on the site.

In addition to following Ryan's suggestion of reading the Beginner's Guide to SEO, I would suggest taking some time to read through as many of the posts in the SEOmoz Blog as you can, especially watching the Whiteboard Friday videos. Most of those provide quick, easy to understand explanations of many basic concepts of SEO.

Hope that helps,

Sha

I copied this from your home page:

Autodesk, Inc., announced that Energizer Holdings, Inc. (Energizer) — a company whose portfolio includes such globally recognized and trusted brands as Energizer batteries and Eveready flashlights — has adopted Autodesk Vault data management s is oftware to more efficiently manage its product design and manufacturing

Paste it in to Google and check the results. You will see that the same article appears on many other sites.

Sha

Hi Ralzaider,

Some great recommendations & info here already, especially from Kane, but just wanted to add:

When I hear "online ecommerce sales" I start worrying about duplicated product descriptions fed from manufacturers.

So, if this is an issue for your site, I would put your person to work on writing interesting unique product descriptions for every item in your online catalog. Since you are lucky enough to be paying a tiny hourly rate for their services, I would even consider an investment in product to give to them as samples so that they can actually see, touch and feel the products, try them out etc before writing about them. If you have hundreds or thousands of products, perhaps just identify the most important ones to provide as samples.

If unique content isn't an issue for your site, then I would go with the other recommendations in this thread first.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Vince,

Just to clarify, I'm thinking that perhaps the list of links may be 404 (or similar) errors that you want to fix?

If I am correct, and you have found the list of broken links in the SEOmoz Pro App, then you can locate the source URL's by exporting the error report as a csv, then looking at the information in Excel. If you locate the error in the list (by searching), then go to the very last column "Referrer" to find the source page.

Below is a screenshot of the Pro Tip from the help file, which is located on the Crawl Diagnostics help page

Of course, if my assumption is incorrect, then we just need you to be a little more specific about where the list came from and what you are wanting to achieve.

Hope that helps,

Sha

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