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I just put a few of the URLs that were already on the page(s) into linkscape and saw what came back, then did a full report once I found one that was pretty much ONLY using that link to rank.

The link I picked was a deep link (not homepage) and only had this link going to it (according to linkscape), checking out the site the domain wasn't hugely powerful with only a dozen unique domains pointing in (none as impressive), but the page linked to had PR 4.

So, while it's a bit of supposition, I would imagine that the link is accounting for most of the 'juice' passing to the page (and indeed the site).

If I understand correctly I'm going to say no (with a low degree of certainty :D).

So /store/product-old1 you are assuming already goes through /store/index.php?id=product-old1 (or similar) to produce that first url?

So to get to /store/product-new1 from a link to /store/product-old1 you're wondering how many steps your .htaccess puts it through?

I'll have to let somebody with better .htaccess skills than mine confirm, but I think it's all resolved as one, in sequence, if it's on the same server (and set up correctly). I'm maybe talking nonsense though.

However if it was a chain then, for example, somebody going to my WordPress site using mysite.com/page1 would end up at www.mysite.com/redirected-page1/ and after hitting about 4 redirects (www, permalinks, redirect and trailing slash) and I've not seen anything to suggest that it's a problem.

Hi Joel,

you might want to consider reading questions more carefully before you reply.

This has nothing to do with removing links but building an distributing a theme with links in it!

The link limit is 100 suggested by matt cutts.

No it's not The 100 link limit suggestion was removed a while ago, though it's is indeed best not to go wild with it.

But the more pages that you link from your home page and back to your home pge the better the home page will rank.

This isn't really true either. If that were the case I could just make a site with 1,000,000 pages all linking back to the homepage and expect to rank. Whereas actually the only way I'll get value to flow back up to the homepage is to attract links to these 1,000,000 pages from external sites.

Right having a quick look, put this page - http://www.print.dor2dor.com/leaflets.html - into this - http://www.yellowpipe.com/yis/tools/lynx/lynxview.cgi - and you'll see what your page looks like to search engines.

Not pretty, right Basically because all your content is in an iFrame the search engines don't include that content as being on page.

Assuming there's no way to just replicate the content on your site instead of just having it in an iFrame you're going to have to put some more content on the page. Maybe make a div at the bottom for content with a reasonably lengthy explanation of what the page is about.

Also, if you're trying to rank for 'cheap flyers' then change your title tag for that page to 'Cheap leaflets and cheap flyers - D2D Print' or similar. Get your keywords in the <title>tag anyway.</p> <p>But yeah, your main problem is no content on the page :|</p></title>

Hiring a company to build links doesn't count as paying for links. However they will probably discuss a link buying budget with you and it's up to you whether to go with that or spend the money on other link baiting strategies.

Paying for links on good sites with relevent content is hard to detect, though not impossible. It's still against the guidelines and I wouldn't recommend it (well, in general but) unless you already have a strong link profile and were accumulating natural links at the same time.

Paying for links on low quality sites with irrelevant content will eventually get you penalised (or at least the links penalised).

Links for goods (such as giving a product for review) is a bit of a grey area and sponsored links (those given in an advertisment) should be marked nofollow.

Whichever company you work with should make you fully aware of their strategies and the dangers though.

Talk me through it again then, please.

You're trying to get to /store/product-new1 and you're getting a 310?

Did I get the redirect thing mixed up and actually there's another redirect because the real URL would be /store/product-new1/index.php?

On page is only about 30% of ranking, however without it you're going to have a very tough time with the off page (link building) stuff.

Your on page needs to let bots crawl your site effectively and index your content and your content then needs to be targeted to your keywords.

The beginners guide that Craig has linked to is a great place to start and don't forget to take advantage of all the tools that being a pro member gives you - http://www.seomoz.org/tools

To drive leads via SEO basically means that you need to have the site put in front of people making relevant searches who then go on to use the service (plumbing in this case).

For this (and assuming you're working on getting certain areas of London to use your plumbing services) you can do several things.

First, read this beginners guide to SEO from SEOmoz. Then re-read it. Then read it again. Now you have a basic grasp of what you need to do in order to get in front of people that might use your service. Effective site structure and good content help.

The other big part of your SEO efforts will be around local search (which isn't something I have a huge amount of experience with).

Again, watch this Whiteboard Friday on local search, you're going to focus on becoming listed and getting reviews on relevant sites.

In order to quantify what leads are coming from SEO I would recommend a web only phone number (involves setting up a second line) and you can maybe try data capture on the site asking people if they would like to be contacted about a quote.

Good luck

You have to go to the 'Report Card' section of On Page and assign a URL to the keyword.

If I understand you correctly

I outsource some link building TO an agency (or 3) primarily in other language territories so we get somebody with a bit of local knowledge and can respond to webmasters in a timely fashion.

I don't think it's wise to just fire and forget when doing it this way though (obviously) and always check what's being done, strategise which words are going to be targeted and if there's any other promotions or content you can build links round as well then keep the agencies informed and use them to bolster and seed some social media stuff.

In some countries it is a bit cheaper than running it all in house and I know some of the people we work with offer a white label deal of sort to other agencies, so seems to be quite common.

I might bow out gracefully before I get you in any more trouble But I'll see what I can replicate and test What would be the raw URL of the electronics pages?

Is it actually rewriting from something like /store/index.php?id=electronics or is it /store/electronics.php (or even /store/electronics/index.php)? Or are you on a CMS that make it hard to tell?

Almost definitely agency work, medium sized team, probably with a paid link strategy and some degree of automation.

For the sort of sites you're saying they have, it'd probably run you about £80-90k for the 6 months, at a conservative guess (probably top end it at £150k depending on what industry you're in).

There would have been a lot of hard work put into it, but almost certainly some paid stuff in there. Hard to compete as a solitary in house SEO.

Sounds like the guys know what they're doing, would be good to find out who they are

Well, you basically just described Basecamp but you need something like FreshBooks - http://www.freshbooks.com/ - for the invoicing part.

Nothing I know of that does both parts though.

EDIT: Maybe you try something you host yourself with a wiki software or something like - http://www.activecollab.com/ - or - http://collab.ws/.

Basecamp alternatives - https://company.podio.com/ - http://www.zoho.com/projects/ - http://lighthouseapp.com/ - http://goplanapp.com/

Hmm, I've not tested conclusively but I can't think how a comma would adversely effect you. However, anecdotally, I've seen lots of sites move away from commas and pipes in titles so I'd have to assume that something was up.

I don't think stop words are being treated the same as the used to be with Google trying to figure out intent more and more, plus I'm not a huge fan of special characters (not that a comma is that special) in the title so unless it looked ridiculous I'd consider not using it.

I've been looking into this but don't have the technical chops to give you a definitive answer.

@Guillaume How can you say conclusively that it passes link juice when you don't know what redirect.php does? Unless you were able to see what it does.

For a straight php redirect to count as a 301 I believe it'd need to look like

header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
header( "Location: http://www.new-url.com" );
?>

However I assume that you can't do these sort of header redirects as you have multiple ids going into the same redirect.php file?

Do you put cookies on people before redirecting them (I assume there's some sort of affiliation reason to redirect this way)?

Without understanding how it works I'm not sure if it does or doesn't pass value, but please make sure you're happy with the information given to you.

Are you using Magento's funny built in redirect tool? I've never really understood how that worked

Do you mean that you'll be paying for sponsored listings, that these directories require payment for submission or that these directories require payment for review of the site?

If a sponsored listing, I'm pretty sure they should be nofollowed as it's technically an ad.

If they require payment for submission (ie, no cleverly worded terms of acceptance) then you shouldn't really be buying them.

If payment for review of your site, technically that's fine (though in reality very few sites will ever reject a paying site).

Ultimately, unless you're on some very shady directories, Google's not going to be able to tell what you've paid for and what you haven't.

Are you sure any of these directories actually get any sort of traffic anyway? I know as SEOs we all use them, but as a web user I've not looked at a directory since 1990.

First, bringing these pages under the same hosting account should not be an issue as this is simply a copy and paste of folders. Unless the functionality is strictly limited to the hosting company.

If the functionality is proprietary and can't be hosted with the partentcharity, I would leave things as they are until you can afford to re-build the site and just cross link as needed.

Yeah, this was the tl;dr for mine I should have put in Sums it up perfectly.

I see.

Well, I certainly used to put a few keywords in titles using commas assuming it acted as a separator, however (and again anecdotally) I now write (as does everybody I'm comparing myself to) titles in the format "Cheap Books and Free Books".

Stick 'poker' into Google and look at everybody's titles. A few years back that would have looked like 'Poker, Online Poker, Texas Holdem | PokerSite" where as now it's "Poker and Online Poker including Texas Holdem at PokerSite".

However, stick 'travel' into Google and you'll see everybody still using commas.

So, as I say, I can't think how it would adversely effect you but I think with Google trying to extract meaning from people's searches that, in the long term, more natural sentences over a list of keywords would serve you better.